Information processing (psychology)

In cognitive psychology, information processing is an approach to the goal of understanding human thinking that treats cognition as essentially computational in nature, with the mind being the software and the brain being the hardware (Shannon & Weaver, 1963). It arose in the 1940s and 1950s, after World War II (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2012). The information processing approach in psychology is closely allied to the computational theory of mind in philosophy; it is also related to cognitivism in psychology and functionalism in philosophy (Horst, 2011).