Cognitive Psychology emerged as an extension to the school of
thought behaviorism because of criticism that behaviorism is just one way of
understanding human behavior and that behavioral theories does not account for
free will and internal influences on behavior such as moods, thoughts and
feelings. The development of cognitive psychology was referred to as a time
period called the cognitive revolution where researchers began to focus on
attention, memory and problem solving.
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies
mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive
science this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including
neuroscience, philosophy and linguistics (Cherry, 2013). The main focus of cognitive psychology is on
how people obtain, process and store information. There are many useful functions for cognitive
research, such as improving memory, increasing decision-making and providing
structure for educational curriculum to enhance learning.
The Gale encyclopedia of psychology states that “some cognitive psychologists may study how
internal cognitive operations can transform symbols of the external world
others on the interplay between genetics and environment in determining
individual cognitive development and capabilities. Still other cognitive psychologists may focus
their studies on how the mind detects, selects, recognizes, and verbally
represents features of a particular stimulus (Strickland, 2001).” Cognitive psychologists focus on many topics
such as language acquisition, visual and auditory perception; information
storage and retrieval; altered states of consciousness; cognitive restructuring
(how the mind mediates between conflicting, or dissonant, information); and
individual styles of thought and perception (Strickland, 2001).
A key milestone in the development of cognitive psychology as a
discipline was when American psychologist Jerome Bruner began research on the
study of sensation and perception as being active, rather than passive
processes (Brunner & Postman, 1949).
Bruner
published his classic study Value
and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception in which poor and rich children were
asked to estimate the size of coins or wooden disks the size of American
pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and half-dollars. The results showed that the
value and need the poor and rich children associated with coins caused them to
significantly overestimate the size of the coins, especially when compared to
their more accurate estimations of the same size disks (Brunner & Goodman,
1947). Bruner and Leo Postman conducted
another study that showed slower reaction times and less accurate answers when
a deck of playing cards reversed the color of the suit symbol for some cards,
an example of that would be black spades and red hearts.
These series of experiments issued in what some called the 'New
Look' psychology, which challenged psychologists to study not just an
organism's response to a stimulus, but also its internal interpretation
(Bourgoin, 1997). After Brunner conducted these
experiments on perception he then focused his attention to the actual
cognitions that he had indirectly studied in his perception studies.
The classic theory of cognitive dissonance developed by Leon
Festinger was another key milestone in the development of cognitive psychology
as a discipline. Cognitive dissonance
describes how people manage conflicting cognitions about themselves, their
behavior, or their environment (Strickland, 2001). In this theory Festinger suggested that
conflict among such cognitions (which he termed dissonance) will make people
uncomfortable enough to actually modify one of the conflicting beliefs to bring
it into line with the other belief. An
example of conflicting cognitions used was “I smoke” and “smoking is bad” will lead
a smoker either to alter the first statement by quitting, or the second one by
telling himself or herself that smoking is not bad (Strickland, 2001).
Another key milestone in the development of cognitive psychology
as a discipline was when Noam Chomsky reviewed B.F. Skinner’s book on language
(Verbal Behavior). Chomsky,
a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argued that language
cannot be explained through a stimulus response process as Skinner explained,
because this does not account for some of the common facts about language. The
creative use of language can be better explained as a central process than a
peripheral process. Language is a way to express ideas, and the way that these
ideas are turned into language is a cognitive process. Chomsky showed that
language was much more complex than anyone previously believed and that
behavioral explanations could not reasonably explain the complexities of
language. Chomsky's language model included two types of structures: surface
structures and deep structures (muskingum.edu, 1997).
The development of engineering and computer science
have been a key milestone in the development of cognitive psychology as a
discipline, including computer simulation of cognitive processes for research
purposes and the creation of information-processing models. Herbert Simon and Allen Newell created the
first computer simulation of human thought, called Logic Theorist, at
Carnegie-Mellon University in 1956, followed by General Problem Solver (GPS)
the next year (Strickland, 2001).
Behavioral observation in cognitive psychology
allows psychologists evaluate theories and inferences and test their
predictions about behavior (Willingham, 2007).
Observing an individual’s behavior can suggest that there are different
ways that a problem can be solved. Since there is no direct way to observe an
individual’s mental processes, cognitive psychologists have to assume their
existence based on observing behavior.
Willingham states in “The thinking animal” “that it is essential in cognitive psychology to use unobservable
abstracts constructs and determine how they affect observable behavior
(Willingham, 2007)” Three types of
behavioral research that serve cognitive psychology include descriptive,
relational, and experimental research (Willingham, 2007).
Bourgoin, M. S.
(1997). Encyclopedia of World Biography. Gale,
1(1), 1-2.
Brunner, J. S., & Postman, L. (1949). On the
Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm. Journal
of Personality, 18(1), 206-223.
Brunner, J., & Goodman, C. (1947). Value and Need as
Organizing Factors in Perception. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42(1), 33-44.
Cherry, K. (2013). What is Cognitive Psychology. about.com. Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/f/cogpsych.htm
Strickland, B. (2001). Cognitive Psychology. The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2nd ed(1),
133-134.
Willingham, D. T. (2007). The thinking animal (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Allyn
& Bacon.
No comments:
Post a Comment