Cognitive Structures

Cognitive structures refers to distinct subprocesses or mechanisms identifiable in mental information processing that mediate consumers' reactions to external stimuli. Cognitive structures is the generic term for a huge variety of different aspects related to the way humans process, store, retrieve, and use information for decision making. Cognitive mechanisms often lead to characteristic biases or simplification in information processing. An analysis of these basic processes in human information processing is essential for understanding consumer behavior: What information people attend to, which aspects of a product description they remember, which characteristics of a product they use in decision making, and how they alter given information during storage in or retrieval from memory are all influenced by these mechanisms. Information people perceive, process, store, recall, and use for decisions about their behavior is never objective but constantly altered and fitted to the cognitive structures a person already holds.

In psychology, the analysis of cognitive structures responsible for people's behavior is one of the most important research fields and is called cognitive psychology. The overarching analogy of cognitive psychology is that the human mind processes information like a digital computer. It assumes that most cognitions consist of a limited number of distinct processing stages, which usually follow each other in a linear fashion. The diversity of cognitive psychology is high and includes research topics such as attention, perception, language comprehension, learning, memory, emotions, concept formation, thinking, and reasoning (see Eysenck and Keane 2005). Within each of those topics countless cognitive mechanisms have been identified in the last decades. Only some of them can be presented in this entry.