What is cognitive psychology primarily focused on?

Cognitive psychology primarily focuses on mental processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving. This field is dedicated to understanding how individuals acquire, process, and store information. Researchers in cognitive psychology explore the internal mechanisms that influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, examining how these mental processes operate and interact.

By studying elements like perception, cognitive psychologists seek to understand how we interpret sensory information from the environment, while investigations into memory involve exploring how we encode, store, and retrieve information. This discipline plays a critical role in uncovering the nuances of how our cognitive functions affect our actions and decision-making.

The other options, although they touch on important aspects of human behavior, do not align with the core focus of cognitive psychology. Subconscious processes pertain more to psychoanalytic theory, social interaction is more relevant to social psychology, and physiological responses are studied in fields like behavioral neuroscience and physiology rather than in cognitive psychology. Therefore, the correct answer emphasizes the central theme of cognitive psychology: the study of intellectual functions and processes that underlie human thought and behavior.