The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was the pioneer of cognitive psychology, which has a long past with a very short history. The human thinking part has always been a key element of interest. Even an ancient philosopher like Aristotle was interested in understanding the mechanisms of how our mind works. Psychology can be generally defined as the study of mental processing and behavior. Cognitive psychology is defined the same way, but without behavior. This is why behaviorism is a study in its own right, which can be compared and contrasted with cognitive psychology. While cognitive psychology looks at some behaviors, it is only like a segway to understanding the mental processing that happens “under the hood.” These complex processes include attention, memory, language understanding, and even problem solving. Even though these processes require a complex amount of thinking, we rarely stop to “think” about what we actually think. Psychologist John B. Watson suggested separating psychology from consciousness so we can focus exclusively on the behavioral perspective. Many experimental methods seek measurement, observation, and repeatability, which cognitive psychology cannot utilize. These methods are among the most instrumental in developing research conclusions that have led to some of the most important discoveries in history. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Watson's approach was later called behaviorism, this ignored the scientific aspects of psychology while emphasizing the study of observable stimuli with observable responses. This has led to behaviorism also being called SR psychology. In many cases, it is not possible to observe the same experimental methods and arrive at the same conclusions that one might obtain with cognitive psychology, even though cognitive psychology observes few behaviors that explain why the brain processes in a certain way. Behaviorists do not discount the need for consciousness, however they reject the idea of ​​it being studied in any meaningful way. In both psychologists, their intent is to fully understand the mind and all that it inhabits. The cognitive psychologist simply believes that studying the actual processing of the mind is the way to get to the answer. Behaviorists believe that human behavior is the key to fully understanding how our brain works and functions. Both agree, however, that without consciousness or behaviors their research would stop. Most of our research conducted regarding attention is characterized by the terms pre-attentive and post-attentive processing. Pre-attentive processing is generally characterized as a fairly rapid process, mostly before attention has focused on the stimuli. You might say it refers to coming to a conclusion before you start thinking. Thoughts that occur in the pre-attentive phase are also considered synesthetic experiences. Pre-attentive and post-attentive processes contrast in how we think about objects. With post-attentive processing, we might actually count objects if there are more than a small amount of them, or focus on something longer than if we thought about it pre-attentively. In the pre-attentive sheep counting example, if you see two, chances are you didn't mentally count one and two. You just automatically saw the two sheep and your brain processed them as the number two. After attention)