What is COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: history and authors

Cognitivism arises from the desire to explore mental content and, above all, its processes, such as the treatment of information, decision-making, problem solving, text comprehension, planning behavior etc. and it is possible to study them scientifically formalizing them through the computer, that is, guessing the algorithms followed by the brain and preparing simulations that can test and check. Thanks to this Psychology-Online article we will be able to better understand what is cognitive psychology, its history and its most important authors.

Index

1. Definition of cognitive psychology
2. History of cognitive psychology
3. Characteristics of cognitive psychology
4. Books and authors of cognitivism in psychology
5. Examples of cognitive psychology

The cognitive psychology, also called cognitivism or cognitive psychology or cognitivism is the side of psychology that studies mental processes: perception, memory, learning, attention, language, logical reasoning ...

If behaviorism attempts to study observable behaviors, cognitivism speculates and formalizes unobservable mental processes, exalting the active role of the subject in the elaboration of the surrounding reality, giving greater prominence to the internal processes of codification and representation. Cognitive psychologists argue that it is possible to understand cognitive activity only by observing people's performance when faced with cognitive tasks.

The crisis that occurred in psychology in the 1930s and 1940s led substantially to the end of the old great schools - behaviorism and Gestalt -, laying the foundations for the birth of a new movement, much longer and more durable: cognitivism, the psychology of cognitive processes.

Cognitivism, far from the nineteenth-century mentalism of the associationists and the first behaviorism of Watson, it is not a unitary school nor a single theory, but rather a particular kind of approach to the study of the psyche, endowed with a high degree of abstraction and with the tendency to privilege the study of people's capacities to acquire, organize, remember and make concrete use of knowledge to guide their Actions.

The birth of cognitivism owes much to the import of ideas drawn from studies on the artificial intelligence (computer science and cybernetics), started around the fifties of the last century, but it was the psychologist George Miller who proposed a precise date of birth of cognitive psychology: September 11, 1956, the day a seminar was held on Information Theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which included three lectures:

• Chomsky's on language.
• Newell and Simon's on a "theoretical logical machine".
• Miller's on short-term memory.

In 1960 Jerome bruner and Miller founded the first center for cognitive studies at Harvard, while in 1971 the 1st Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California (San Diego). Bruner dealt mainly with the categorization processes, highlighting that activities such as perception and memorization are partly the result of individual strategies of the active subject; Instead, Miller and colleagues proposed a new theory of behavior closely related to research on artificial intelligence, concluding that behind every behavior there is a "plan" equivalent to a computer program.

Finally, in the development of cognitive sciences in the 1960s, the rediscovery of studies on the genesis of intelligence started by Jean piaget and developed in that period thanks to Bruner. In 1967 the book was published Cognitive psychology of the American psychologist Ulric Neisser, in which the investigations carried out in the ten previous years according to the perspective that, precisely after this book, was definitely called cognitivist.

Cognitive psychology is a movement based on a conception that constitutes a synthesis of the contributions made by the theories of psychologists such as Donald O. Hebb, artificial intelligence and information theory, and can be briefly described as follows:

• Psychology must focus its attention on the peculiarities of mediation processes that the organism introduces between stimulus and response, which are not attributable to descriptions in terms exclusively of observable quantities, but can be studied by formulating operating models, which allow making predictions about observable behavior (comparing them with the results of experiments in laboratory).
• The knowledge processing processes coincide with those of information processing: knowledge, that is, information, can be measured in bits, and the processes for acquiring, retrieving and using knowledge are equivalent to those of a computer.
• Knowledge is represented in the form of sequences of symbols, and the processing processes Cognitive are calculation programs based on algorithms that allow to process these symbols, as well as that in the Software.

Therefore, the main task of cognitive scientists is to elaborate computational models in order to understand the human cognitive activity.

Cognitive science comprises several disciplines: cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, neurosciences, linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology; all those disciplines whose common purpose is to understand the functioning of the mind.

Between 1956 and 1960 the following basic books or articles for the "cognitive revolution" were published, relating to these different disciplines:

• 1956: A study of thinking from Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Goodnow and George A. Austin.
• 1956: article by George A. Miller on short term memory ("the magic number seven")
• 1957: Syntactic structures from Noam chomsky.
• 1958: Perception and communication from Donald E. Broadbent.
• 1958: The computer and the brain from John von Neumann.
• 1958: article by Allen Newell, John C. Shaw and Herbert A. Simon about him problem solving.
• 1959: article by David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel sworks on the receptor fields of the cat's striated cortex.
• 1959: article by Jerome Y. Lettvin, Humberto R. Maturana, Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts on "what the frog's eye says to the frog's brain."
• 1960: philosopher's essay Hilary putnam on Minds and machines.
• 1960: Plans and the structure of behaviorfrom George A. Miller, Karl H. Pribram and Eugene Galanter.
• 1960: article by George sperling about iconic memory.

Miller, Galater and Pribram, starting from the stimulus-response model of behaviorism, developed the TOTE model (Test, Operate, Test, Exit; namely, check, run, check, finish) based on the assumption that when you display a certain behavior you have a goal in mind. The purpose of your behavior is to get you as close as possible to the desired result, and to assess whether you have achieved your objective, you check the strategy: if the objective has been reached, you interrupt your behavior and end the strategy; If the goal has not been reached, you change your behavior and start over, according to a simple feedback and response cycle.

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If you want to read more articles similar to What is cognitive psychology: history and authors, we recommend that you enter our category of Cognitive psychology.

• Burton, K., Ready, R. (2015). Neuro-linguistic programming for dummies. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
• Canestrari, R., Godino, A. (2002). Introduction to general psychology. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
• Cipriano, S. (2017). Psychology of cognitive process. Padua: Primiceri Editore.
• De Cesare, G., De Cesare, G. (2013). The meditation of vipassanā and cognitive psychology. East and West in confrontation. Cambridge: Green Books.
• Mecacci, L. (2019). Storia della psicologia. Dal novecento ad oggi. Bari: Laterza.
• Pessa, E., Pietronilla Penna, M. (2000). The rappresentazione della conoscenza. Introduzione alla psicologia dei processi cognitivi. Rome: Armando.