UNIT I – HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that explores the operation of mental processes
related to perceiving, attending, thinking, language, and memory, mainly through inferences from
behavior. The cognitive approach, which developed in the 1940s and 1950s, diverged sharply from
contemporary behaviorism in (a) emphasizing unseen knowledge processes instead of directly
observable behaviors and (b) arguing that the relationship between stimulus and response was
complex and mediated rather than simple and direct. Its concentration on the higher mental processes
also contrasted with the focus on instincts and other unconscious forces typical of psychoanalysis.
More recently, cognitive psychology has been influenced by approaches to information processing
and information theory developed in computer science and artificial intelligence.

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS

Rationalism: the notion that new knowledge is acquired through thinking and logical analysis, i.e.,
validating knowledge through internal processes of reasoning as opposed to finding external evidence
to support its validity. The rationalist perspective is important in the process of theory development in
psychology.

Empiricism: the notion that knowledge is acquired through empirical evidence, i.e., knowledge is
validated by obtaining evidence from experience and observation as opposed to relying on just sound
reasoning. The empiricist perspective leads directly to empirical investigations of psychology, driving
data collection and analysis.

Nativism: the notion that constitutional factors such as heredity determine the acquisition of abilities
and tendencies rather that from experience or reasoning. Nativists often suggest that some cognitive
functions come built in. Functions such as short-term memory, for example, are attributed to innate
structures of the human mind that are present in at least rudimentary form at birth and are not learned,
formed, or created as a result of experience.

COMPONENTS

Perception: the process or result of becoming aware of objects, relationships, and events by means of
the senses, which includes such activities as recognizing, observing, and discriminating. These
activities enable organisms to organize and interpret the stimuli received into meaningful knowledge
and to act in a coordinated manner.

Attention: a state in which cognitive resources are focused on certain aspects of the environment
rather than on others and the central nervous system is in a state of readiness to respond to stimuli. 

Memory: the ability to retain information or a representation of past experience, based on the mental
processes of learning or encoding, retention across some interval of time, and retrieval or reactivation
of the memory.

Language: a system for expressing or communicating thoughts and feelings through speech sounds or
written symbols. The specific communicative system used by a particular group of speakers, with its
distinctive vocabulary, grammar, and phonological system. Any comparable nonverbal means of
communication, such as sign language or the languages used in computer programming
Problem solving: the process by which individuals attempt to overcome difficulties, achieve plans that
move them from a starting situation to a desired goal, or reach conclusions through the use of higher
mental functions, such as reasoning and creative thinking.

Creativity: the mental processes leading to a new invention, solution, or synthesis in any area. A
creative solution may use pre-existing elements (e.g., objects, ideas) but creates a new relationship
between them. Products of creative thinking include, for example, new machines, social ideas,
scientific theories, and artistic works.

Decision making: the cognitive process of choosing between two or more alternatives, ranging from
the relatively clear cut (e.g., ordering a meal at a restaurant) to the complex (e.g., selecting a mate).

Reasoning: thinking in which logical processes of an inductive or deductive character are used to
draw conclusions from facts or premises

APPLICATIONS

Abnormal psychology: Aaron T. Beck was the man who first used the cognitive psychology in the
field of therapy and he was well known as the father of cognitive therapy as well. According to his
research works, cognitive psychology can be widely used in this field as he showed only 60% to 65%
people all over the world who are suffering from depressions used antidepressants. He also showed
the adverse effects of taking different types of drugs. Not only had these, Beck also showed hoe these
drugs break down different physiological mechanisms of our body. For these reasons, Beck tried to
motivate patients to use the cognitive therapy as a remedy for their depressive diseases.

Social psychology: Social cognition is a sub division of social psychology. It is mainly applied to
human interactions in the society. Social cognition can be defined as the scientific study of the human
minds those are involved in different functions like perceiving, remembering, memory or making
senses about the people of the social world.

Development psychology: The field of the development psychology is mostly based upon the
developments on cognitive models. This helps mainly the children of ages 4 to 6 to develop their
understanding, mental capability, ideas, thoughts, feelings and other mental criteria as well. It helps
the children to recognize their thoughts and individual mental states. It also helps to develop them.

Educational psychology: The study of cognitive psychology helps the people in a wide range for their
purposes of education and gathering knowledge. We know metacognition, which is a wide concept of
the cognitive study helps to focus on the self-monitoring. Thus, it helps the students to evaluate their
knowledge and experiences, which helps them to improve their areas of knowledge. The study of
cognitive psychology also helps the students to integrate their specific knowledge with the particular
tasks which suit perfectly for the knowledge. It helps to develop the students’ skills and abilities. It
also helps the students to be more efficient on their tasks for which they are assigned to. Cognitive
psychology works on the understanding of how the brain holds the knowledge, memory, skills and
other abilities in an organized way. This mapping of the brain is also hugely beneficial for the
students on their field of education.

Personality psychology: Cognitive psychology and cognitive therapy is widely used for the treatment
of the different personality disorders in the recent years with the immense development of this side.
STRUCTURALISM
INTRODUCTION

Structuralism was the first major school of thought in psychology. It seeks to understand the structure,
i.e., the configuration of elements, of the mind and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into
their constituent components, i.e., affection, attention, memory, sensation, etc. Structuralists would
analyze perception in terms of its constituent colors, geometric forms, size relations, and so on. In
terms of the human mind, structuralists sought to deconstruct the mind into its elementary
components; they were also interested in how those elementary components work together to create
the mind.

Wilhelm Wundt was a German psychologist who is often considered the founder of structuralism.
Wundt wanted to identify the simplest essential units of the mind. In essence, he wanted to create a
table of “mental elements,” much like a chemist’s periodic chart. Once the set of elements was
identified, Wundt believed, psychologists could determine how these units combine to produce
complex mental phenomena. Wundt foresaw an entire field devoted to the study of how
systematically varying stimuli would affect or produce different mental states.

The primary method of investigation used by structuralists involved a technique called introspection,
which is the process of attempting to directly access one’s own internal psychological processes,
judgments, perceptions, or states. It consisted of presenting highly trained observers with various
stimuli and asking them to describe their conscious experiences.

THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS

The basic assumption of structuralism is that its particular object of cognition can be viewed as a
structure - a whole, the parts of which are significantly interrelated and which, as a whole, has a
significant function in the larger social setting. The cognitive elements of structuralism are thus two
orders of entities - the whole and the parts, and two orders of relations - the function of the whole and
the relations between the parts. Structuralist analysis seeks to delimit the entities and to describe the
functions, raising the boundary problem and the problem of function as crucial analytic
objectives. The analysis is possible because some of the cognitive elements are given by direct
observation or may be posted on the basis of a common-sense interpretation of consistent informal
observations. These can serve as the starting points for a controlled inferential method to ascertain the
remaining elements, the unknown. Structuralist analysis can thus be applied to any object of
cognition which may legitimately be viewed as a structure and for which appropriate analytic starting
points can be found.

Wundt assumed that the raw materials of consciousness were sensory and thus “below” the level of
meaning. In particular, Wundt thought any conscious thought or idea resulted from a combination of
sensations that could be defined in terms of exactly four properties: mode (for example, visual,
auditory, tactile, olfactory), quality (such as color, shape, texture), intensity, and duration.

EVALUATION

Structuralism is important because it is the first major school of thought in psychology. The
structuralist school also influenced the development of experimental psychology. While Wundt's work
helped to establish psychology as a separate science and contributed methods to experimental
psychology, Titchener's development of structuralism helped establish the very first "school" of
psychology.

Structuralism has faced a large amount of criticism, particularly from the functionalist school of
thought. Critics argue that self-analysis was not feasible, since introspective students cannot
appreciate the processes or mechanisms of their own mental processes. Introspection, therefore,
yielded different results depending on who was using it and what they were seeking. Some critics also
pointed out that introspective techniques actually resulted in retrospection – the memory of a
sensation rather than the sensation itself.

Behaviorists, specifically methodological behaviorists, fully rejected the idea of the conscious
experience as a worthy topic in psychology, since they believed that the subject matter of scientific
psychology should be strictly operationalized in an objective and measurable way. Because the notion
of a mind could not be objectively measured, it was not worth further inquiry.

Structuralism also believes that the mind could be dissected into its individual parts, which then
formed conscious experience. This also received criticism from the Gestalt school of psychology,
which argues that the mind cannot be broken down into individual elements.

Structuralism was further criticized for excluding and ignoring important developments happening
outside of structuralism. For instance, structuralism did not concern itself with the study of animal
behavior, and personality.

FUNCTIONALISM
INTRODUCTION

Functionalism suggested that psychologists should focus on the processes of thought rather than on its
contents. Functionalism seeks to understand what people do and why they do it. This principal
question about processes was in contrast to that of the structuralists, who had asked what the
elementary contents (structures) of the human mind are. Functionalists held that the key to
understanding the human mind and behavior was to study the processes of how and why the mind
works as it does, rather than to study the structural contents and elements of the mind. They were
particularly interested in the practical applications of their research.

Functionalists were unified by the kinds of questions they asked but not necessarily by the answers
they found or by the methods they used for finding those answers. Because functionalists believed in
using whichever methods best answered a given researcher’s questions, it seems natural for
functionalism to have led to pragmatism. Pragmatists believe that knowledge is validated by its
usefulness. Pragmatists are concerned not only with knowing what people do; they also want to know
what we can do with our knowledge of what people do.

A leader in guiding functionalism toward pragmatism was William James (1842–1910). His chief
functional contribution to the field of psychology was a single book: his landmark Principles of
Psychology (1890/1970). Even today, cognitive psychologists frequently point to the writings of
James in discussions of core topics in the field, such as attention, consciousness, and perception. John
Dewey (1859–1952) was another early pragmatist who profoundly influenced contemporary thinking
in cognitive psychology. Dewey is remembered primarily for his pragmatic approach to thinking and
schooling.

THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS
Utilizing the Darwinian ideology, the mind was considered to perform a diverse biological function on
its own and can evolve and adapt to varying circumstances. Also, the physiological functioning of the
organism results in the development of the consciousness.

James Angell laid out three major ideas regarding functionalism. The first of his ideas being that
functional psychology is focused on mental operations and their relationship with biology and these
mental operations were a way of dealing with the conditions of the environment. Second, mental
operations contribute to the relationship between an organism's needs and the environment in which it
lives. Its mental functions aid in the survival of the organism in unfamiliar situations. Lastly,
functionalism does not abide by the rules of dualism because it is the study of how mental functions
relate to behavior.

William James’ main contribution to functionalism was his theory of the subconscious. He said there
were three ways of looking at the subconscious in which it may be related to the conscious. First, the
subconscious is identical in nature with states of consciousness. Second, it's the same as conscious but
impersonal. Lastly, he said that the subconscious is a simple brain state but with no mental
counterpart.

EVALUATION

It influenced the development of behaviorism and applied psychology.1 Functionalism also influenced
the educational system, especially with regards to John Dewey’s belief that children should learn at
the level for which they are developmentally prepared. Functionalism is sometimes considered the
bridge between early structuralist-based ideas, and modern behaviorism.

At first, structuralists argued that functionalism did not fully define or attempt to understand the
mental processes they were dealing with. Instead of trying to explain mental states and behaviors in
the context of environmental stimuli, structuralists believed that psychologists should focus on
introspection and understanding these aspects of consciousness for what they are. They also argued
against the applied nature of functional psychology, believing that it distracted from the core goal of
identifying the structures of consciousness.

Behaviorists in the mid-late 20th century would also take issue with some aspects of functionalism.
While functionalists believed it was important to accept the role of consciousness and internal
cognitions such as pre-existing beliefs, behaviorists were only concerned with the study of human
behavior, and rejected any idea that did not view mental states as directly influenced by external
stimuli.

Also, even though functionalists were interested in how people learn, they did not really specify a
mechanism by which learning takes place.

BEHAVIORISM
INTRODUCTION

Behaviorism focuses only on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events or
stimuli. The idea was to make physical whatever others might have called mental. Some researchers
studied responses that were voluntary. Other researchers studied responses that were involuntarily
triggered in response to what appear to be unrelated external events.

Ivan Pavlov studied involuntary learning behavior of this sort. He began with the observation that
dogs salivated in response to the sight of the lab technician who fed them. This response occurred
before the dogs even saw whether the technician had food. To Pavlov, this response indicated a form
of learning - classically conditioned learning, over which the dogs had no conscious control. In the
dogs’ minds, some type of involuntary learning linked the technician to the food. Pavlov’s landmark
work paved the way for the development of behaviorism.

The father of radical behaviorism is John Watson. Watson had no use for internal mental contents or
mechanisms. He believed that psychologists should concentrate only on the study of observable
behavior. He dismissed thinking as nothing more than subvocalized speech. Behaviorism also differed
from previous movements in psychology by shifting the emphasis of experimental research from
human to animal participants. Historically, much behaviorist work has been conducted with laboratory
animals, such as rats or pigeons, because these animals allow for much greater behavioral control of
relationships between the environment and the behavior emitted in reaction to it.

THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS

It focuses entirely on the association between the environment and an observable behavior. According
to strict, extreme or radical behaviorists, any hypotheses about internal thoughts and ways of thinking
are nothing more than speculation.

Classical conditioning involves more than just an association based on temporal contiguity (e.g., the
food and the conditioned stimulus occurring at about the same time). Effective conditioning requires
contingency (e.g., the presentation of food being contingent on the presentation of the conditioned
stimulus, or in the form of reward and punishment).

B. F. Skinner, a radical behaviorist, believed that virtually all forms of human behavior, not just
learning, could be explained by behavior emitted in reaction to the environment. Skinner conducted
research primarily with nonhuman animals. He rejected mental mechanisms. He believed instead that
operant conditioning—involving the strengthening or weakening of behavior, contingent on the
presence or absence of reinforcement or punishments—could explain all forms of human behavior.

EVALUATION

Behaviorism was challenged on many fronts like language acquisition, production, and
comprehension. First, although it seemed to work well to account for certain kinds of learning,
behaviorism did not account as well for complex mental activities such as language learning and
problem solving. Second, more than understanding people’s behavior, some psychologists wanted to
know what went on inside the head. Third, it often proved easier to use the techniques of behaviorism
in studying nonhuman animals than in studying human ones. Nonetheless, behaviorism continues as a
school of psychology, although not one that is particularly sympathetic to the cognitive approach,
which involves metaphorically and sometimes literally peering inside people’s heads to understand
how they learn, remember, think, and reason.

Behaviorists regarded the mind as a black box that is best understood in terms of its input and output,
but whose internal processes cannot be accurately described because they are not observable. For
example, a critic, Edward Tolman thought that understanding behavior required taking into account
the purpose of, and the plan for, the behavior. Tolman believed that all behavior is directed toward a
goal. For example, the goal of a rat in a maze may be to try to find food in that maze. Tolman is
sometimes viewed as a forefather of modern cognitive psychology.

Bandura noted that learning appears to result not merely from direct rewards for behavior, but it also
can be social, resulting from observations of the rewards or punishments given to others. The ability
to learn through observation is well documented and can be seen in humans, monkeys, dogs, birds,
and even fish.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION

The school of Gestalt psychology began in 1911 in Frankfurt, Germany, at a meeting of three
psychologists: Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler.

Wertheimer had been a student of Austrian philosopher, Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), a
member of the School of Brentano. Von Ehrenfels introduced the concept of Gestalt to philosophy and
psychology in 1890, before the advent of Gestalt psychology as such. Through a series of
experiments, Wertheimer discovered that a person observing a pair of alternating bars of light can,
under the right conditions, experience the illusion of movement between one location and the other.
He noted that this was a perception of motion absent any moving object. That is, it was pure
phenomenal motion. He dubbed it phi ("phenomenal") motion.[14][16] Wertheimer's publication of
these results in 1912[17] marks the beginning of Gestalt psychology.[16] In comparison to von
Ehrenfels and others who had used the term "gestalt" earlier in various ways, Wertheimer's unique
contribution was to insist that the "gestalt" is perceptually primary.

The two men who served as Wertheimer's subjects in the phi experiments were Köhler and Koffka.
Köhler was an expert in physical acoustics, having studied under physicist Max Planck (1858–1947),
but had taken his degree in psychology under Carl Stumpf (1848–1936). Koffka was also a student of
Stumpf's, having studied movement phenomena and psychological aspects of rhythm. In 1917, Köhler
(1917/1925) published the results of four years of research on learning in chimpanzees. Köhler
showed, contrary to the claims of most other learning theorists, that animals can learn by "sudden
insight" into the "structure" of a problem, over and above the associative and incremental manner of
learning that Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) and Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949) had demonstrated
with dogs and cats, respectively.

THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS

Stimuli were said to have a certain structure, to be organized in a certain way, and that it is to this
structural organization, rather than to individual sensory elements, that the organism responds. When
an animal is conditioned, it does not simply respond to the absolute properties of a stimulus, but to its
properties relative to its surroundings. I.e., these psychologists’ central assumption was that
psychological phenomena could not be reduced to simple elements but rather had to be analyzed and
studied in their entirety.

The Gestalt psychologists practiced a set of theoretical and methodological principles that attempted
to redefine the approach to psychological research. This is in contrast to investigations developed at
the beginning of the 20th century, based on traditional scientific methodology, which divided the
object of study into a set of elements that could be analyzed separately with the objective of reducing
the complexity of this object.

The theoretical principles are the following:

Principle of totality—Conscious experience must be considered globally (by taking into account all
the physical and mental aspects of the individual simultaneously) because the nature of the mind
demands that each component be considered as part of a system of dynamic relationships. Wertheimer
described holism as fundamental to Gestalt psychology. According to this principle, the perceptual
whole is different from what one would predict based on only its individual parts. Moreover, the
nature of a part depends upon the whole in which it is embedded.

Principle of psychophysical isomorphism – Köhler hypothesized that there is a correlation between

conscious experience and cerebral activity.

Based on the principles above the following methodological principles are defined:

Phenomenon experimental analysis—In relation to the Totality Principle any psychological research
should take phenomena as a starting point and not be solely focused on sensory qualities.

Biotic experiment—The Gestalt psychologists established a need to conduct real experiments that
sharply contrasted with and opposed classic laboratory experiments. This signified experimenting in
natural situations, developed in real conditions, in which it would be possible to reproduce, with
higher fidelity, what would be habitual for a subject.

EVALUATION

The Gestalt psychologists rejected structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism as offering

incomplete accounts of psychological and, in particular, cognitive experiences. They chose to study
people’s subjective experience of stimuli and to focus on how people use or impose structure and
order on their experiences. They believed that the mind imposes its own structure and organization on
stimuli and, in particular, organizes perceptions into wholes rather than discrete parts, thus adding an
important perspective that was not previously considered. This led to greater insight about the nature
of perception.

While the gestalt perspective provided a system of perceptual processes that fueled many studies in
attempts to test their assumptions, the gestaltists themselves did not base their assumptions on
scientific study but accepted them as fact.

Further, the basic concepts and terms are not defined with sufficient rigor and their quality of work
was inferior to that of the behaviorists to provide a substantial counter. Their research lacked adequate
controls, its unquantified data elude statistical analyses and insight learning is not replicable.

CURRENT TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF COGNITION

During the 1970s, researchers in different fields started to notice they were investigating common
questions: the nature of mind and of cognition; how information is acquired, processed, stored, and
transmitted; and how knowledge is represented. Scholars from fields such as cognitive psychology,
computer science, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and anthropology, recognizing their mutual
interests, came together to found an interdisciplinary field known as cognitive science. Gardner
(1985) even gave this field a birth date— September 11, 1956—when several founders of the field
attended a symposium on information theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Gardner (1985) pointed out that the field of cognitive science rests on certain common assumptions.
Most important among these is the assumption that cognition must be analyzed at what is called the
level of representation. This means cognitive scientists agree that cognitive theories incorporate such
constructs as symbols, rules, images, or ideas. Thus, cognitive scientists focus on representations of
information rather than on how nerve cells in the brain work or on historical or cultural influences.

Another approach to studying cognitive issues comes from clinical work. Practitioners of cognitive
neuropsychology study cognitive deficits in certain brain-damaged individuals. Ellis and Young
described P.H., a 19-year-old who lost his right arm in a motorcycle accident and sustained a severe
head injury that left him in a coma for almost two weeks. Four years after his accident, P.H. appeared
to have normal language abilities, including reading, and he tested normal in many short- and long-
term memory tests. His IQ (91) also seemed normal. His head injury seemed to have caused at least
one cognitive deficit, however: One of P.H.’s problems was most resistant to rehabilitation; he could
not recognize people’s faces. As soon as a familiar person spoke, he would know who it was but, to
P.H., all faces seemed unfamiliar. He could tell if a face belonged to a man or a woman, an old or a
young person, and he could describe the general appearance and facial features reasonably accurately.
But P.H. had no sense of recognizing people who had previously been very familiar to him. In
neuropsychological terms, his accident had left P.H. prosopagnosic—able to see, but unable to
recognize once familiar faces. Cognitive neuropsychologists proceed by identifying people with
certain patterns of brain damage and examining their cognitive performance. What cognitive
processes can these individuals no longer perform? What cognitive activities have been spared? By
finding answers to such questions, cognitive neuropsychologists not only might help certain people
but might better understand how everyone’s cognitive processes operate.