Short answers, pulled from the story.
Information processing in psychology is an approach to understanding human thinking that treats cognition as essentially computational, with the mind as software and the brain as hardware. It arose in the 1940s and 1950s after World War II and is closely allied to the computational theory of mind in philosophy.
In experiments published in 1966 and 1969, Saul Sternberg showed that reaction time increased in a straight line as the number of memorized items grew, suggesting people check each item in memory one by one in a process called serial exhaustive search. This provided some of the first evidence that mental operations occur in orderly, measurable stages. Sternberg continued to defend this model as recently as 2016.
The Atkinson-Shiffrin model, also called the multi-store model, describes three stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sensory memory lasts roughly 1-3 seconds; short-term memory holds information for about 5-20 seconds with a capacity estimated at seven plus or minus two items; long-term memory has a potentially unlimited capacity and an effectively indefinite duration.
Jean Piaget identified four stages: the sensorimotor stage from birth to age 2, the preoperational stage from ages 2 to 6, the concrete operational stage from ages 6 to 11, and the formal operational stage from age 11 onward. Each stage is characterized by a distinctive type of information processing and thought.
Connectionism is a horizontally distributed approach to information processing that became popular in the mid-1980s. Knowledge is represented not in a single node but in a combination of differently activated nodes across a network, linked by a priming effect in which one node activates connected nodes.
Their 2025 research showed that when people remember and reproduce colors from memory, they display consistent personal attractor biases toward certain hues, meaning memory errors are shaped by individual perception and past experience rather than being random. This expanded the information processing framework by demonstrating that stable internal cognitive tendencies influence how visual information is stored and recalled.