The purpose of this paper is to overview the studies on critical thinking in cognitive psychology and proposes some suggestions for further research. In recent studies, the definition of critical thinking has not been standardized, and there are few studies which examined domain specific abilities and attitude toward tasks in critical thinking although they are important for critical thinking. A few studies discussing domain specific abilities examined the novices in cognitive psychology and found that their critical thinking abilities were improved when a guidance was given. In the further studies, it will be necessary to discuss the following three points; (1) to clarify the definition of critical thinking, (2) to elaborate the procedures of experiment by examining the process of rectifying misconception and the process of activating meta cognition, (3) to analyze not only quantitative data but also qualitative data when linguistic materials are used in the experiments.