Cognitive perspective is the approach that focuses on how people think, understand and know about the world.
Efforts to understand behavior lead some psychologists straight into the mind. Evolving in part from structuralism and in part as a reaction to behaviorism, which focused so heavily on observable behavior and the environment, the cognitive perspective focuses on how people think, understand and know about the world. The emphasis is on learning how people comprehend and represent the outside world within them selves and how our ways of thinking about the world influence our behavior.
Many psychologists who adhere to the cognitive perspective compare human thinking to the workings of a computer, which takes in information and transforms, stores and retrieves it. In their view, thinking is information processing.