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Cognitive psychology

Subdiscipline of psychology

  • 19 min read
  • 9 chapters

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History

Philosophical discussions about the human mind and behavior, as well as their processes, date back to the ancient Greeks. In 387 BCE, Plato suggested that the brain was the seat of mental processes. In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans have innate ideas and promulgated mind-body dualism, which came to be known as substance dualism (essentially the idea that the mind and the body are two separate substances). From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century about whether human thought is solely experiential (empiricism) or includes innate knowledge (nativism). Some of those involved in this debate include George Berkeley and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on the side of nativism.

With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid- to late 19th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline. Two discoveries that later played substantial roles in cognitive psychology were Paul Broca's discovery of the area of the brain largely responsible for language production and Carl Wernicke's discovery of an area thought to be mostly responsible for comprehension of language. Both areas were subsequently formally named for their founders, and disruptions of an individual's language production or comprehension due to trauma or malformation in these areas have come to commonly be known as Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, the main approach to psychology was behaviorism. Initially, its adherents viewed mental events such as thoughts, ideas, attention, and consciousness as unobservable and thus outside the realm of psychology as a science. A pioneer of cognitive psychology, whose work predated much of the behaviorist literature, was Carl Jung. Jung introduced the hypothesis of cognitive functions in his 1921 book Psychological Types. Another pioneer of cognitive psychology, who worked outside the boundaries (both intellectual and geographical) of behaviorism, was Jean Piaget. From 1926 to the 1950s and into the 1980s, he studied the thoughts, language, and intelligence of children and adults.

In the mid-20th century, four main influences arose that inspired and shaped cognitive psychology as a formal school of thought:

  • With the development of new warfare technology during World War II came a need for a greater understanding of human performance. Problems such as how best to train soldiers to use new technology and how to handle matters of attention under duress became important to military personnel. Behaviorism provided little if any insight into these matters, and the work of Donald Broadbent, integrating concepts from human performance research and the recently developed information theory, forged the way in this area.
  • Developments in computer science led to parallels being drawn between human thought and the computational functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas of psychological thought. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and later collaborated with cognitive psychologists to explore its implications. This encouraged a concept of mental functions patterned on the way computers handle memory storage and retrieval, and it opened an important doorway for cognitivism.
  • Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of behaviorism, and empiricism more generally, initiated what came to be known as the "cognitive revolution". Within psychology, in response to behaviorism, J. S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow & G. A. Austin wrote "A Study of Thinking" in 1956. In 1960, G. A. Miller, E. Galanter, and K. Pribram wrote "Plans and the Structure of Behavior". The same year, Bruner and Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, which institutionalized the revolution and launched the field of cognitive science.
  • Formal recognition of the field involved the establishment of research institutions such as George Mandler's Center for Human Information Processing in 1964. Mandler described the origins of cognitive psychology in a 2002 article in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.

Ulric Neisser put the term "cognitive psychology" into common use through his 1967 book Cognitive Psychology. Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates the then-progressive concept of cognitive processes:

The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. ... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.

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