Basic Psychological Processes

While studying behaviour, it is one of the most important tasks for psychologists to understand the processes which collectively influence a particular behaviour. These psychological processes are:

  1. Sensation: It refers to our awareness about various stimuli which we encounter in different modalities such as vision, hearing, touch and taste.

  2. Attention: During attention we selectively focus on a particular stimulus among many stimuli available to us. For instance while listening to a lecture in the classroom we attend to the words pronounced by the teacher and, try to ignore the other stimuli present in the classroom, such as noise made by the fan.

  3. Perception: In the case of perception we process information and make out the meaning of the stimuli available to us. For example, we look at a pen and recognize it as an object used for writing.

  4. Learning: It helps us acquiring new knowledge and skills through experience and practice. The acquired knowledge and skills further bring a relative change in our behavior and facilitate our adjustment in varied settings. For example, we learn language, riding a bicycle and applying mathematical skills to solve various problems.

  5. Memory: The information we process and learn is registered and stored in the memory system. Memory also helps us to easily retrieve the stored information when it is required for use. For example, writing the answers in the examination after studying for the paper.

  6. Thinking: In the case of thinking we use our stored knowledge to solve various tasks. We logically establish the relationships among various objects in our mind and take rational decision for a given problem. We also evaluate different events of the environment and accordingly form an opinion.