Chapter 15 – The future of cognitive psychology

In this chapter, we will start by putting cognitive psychology into its current context. Over the past few years, the discipline of psychology has been in the grip of what many people have called ‘a replication crisis’. The positive lessons emerging from the crisis are helping researchers to devise ways to ensure that future research is well-designed, well-conducted and robust and to stamp out questionable research practices. Having outlined where we are, we will talk about the general approach to research followed by cognitive psychologists, the hypothetico-deductive approach. Under each step of this approach, we will briefly describe what is involved, present some recent developments, often around technological advances, and what the relevant questionable research practice is so that you can learn to spot them and to avoid them! Research frequently leads to publication of findings in a journal article. Since journal articles form the repository of knowledge about cognitive psychology, it is important that you know how to read them and how to critically evaluate them, so we spend some time discussing how to approach this. We then bring together elements of research from across the topics presented in this book to give you the opportunity to apply cognitive psychology to yourself to help you study and learn more effectively. Finally, having started this chapter with where cognitive psychology is, we’ll end with a few thoughts about where it’s going.