Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes. It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.

Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways.

In its early years, critics held that the empiricism of cognitive psychology was incompatible with its acceptance of internal mental states. However, the sibling field of cognitive neuroscience has provided evidence of physiological brain states that directly correlate with mental states - thus providing support for the central assumption of cognitive psychology.^{[citation needed]}

The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism. Cognitive psychology has also influenced the area of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) where the combination of cognitive and behavioral psychology are used to treat a patient.

Ulric Neisser coined the term "cognitive psychology" in his book Cognitive Psychology, published in 1967 wherein Neisser provides a definition of cognitive psychology characterizing people as dynamic information-processing systems whose mental operations might be described in computational terms. Also emphasizing that it is a "point of view" that postulates the mind as having a certain conceptual structure. Neisser's point of view endows the discipline with a scope beyond high-level concepts such as "reasoning" that other works often espouse as defining psychology. Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates this well: