AQA Approaches in Psychology Practice Test 2026 - Free Psychology Practice Questions and Study Guide

The computer (informational) processing model describes mental activity as a flow through three stages: input, processing, and output. Information from the environment is first taken in via our senses (input). It then undergoes mental operations—like perception, attention, encoding, interpretation, and decision-making (processing). Finally, a response is produced as a behavior or verbal/action output (output). This framing helps explain how we move from sensing something to deciding how to respond, and where bottlenecks or errors can occur, such as difficulties in encoding or slow processing.

The other options fit different ideas: stimulus, response, reinforcement is about learning from consequences; encoding, storage, retrieval are stages of memory; perception, thinking, acting is a broad sequence that doesn’t specifically map onto the input–processing–output architecture of the computer model.