Psychology Cognitive



Psychology Cognitive

Introduction

Cognitive psychology, contrary to popular belief did not originate in the sixties, but much earlier as a discipline of experimental psychology and evolutionary psychology.

Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with the processes through which the individual obtains knowledge of the world and takes awareness of their surroundings, and their results. The origin of cognitive psychology is closely linked to the history of psychology in general. Modern cognitive psychology has been formed under the influence of related disciplines such as management of information , the intelligence artificial and science of language.

Background

Often described as a 'revolution' (identified above all with G. A. Miller), cognitivism's emergence owed much to the previous Gestalt school and Piaget's developmental studies. Although learning theory's prominence in US Psychology had led to a relative neglect of cognition, the 'revolution' was theoretical rather than in choice of topic, lying in the rise of Norbert Weiner's cybernetics and information theory during the 1940s and the birth of the computer. These provided a clutch of concepts - 'information' (technically redefined as a quantifiable phenomenon), 'feedback' and 'programming' - for analysing psychological phenomena and broke an impasse regarding purposive and complex behaviour in which behaviourism had become stalled. Miller, Galanter and Pribram's 1960 Plans and the Structure of Behavior is generally taken as cognitivism's 'manifesto'. Britain saw a parallel development at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, where Kenneth Craik, working on military research concerned with human-machine interaction, formulated a similar position, the two meeting in D. Broadbent (1958), which introduced the 'flow-chart' diagram.

With U. Neisser's textbook Cognitive Psychology (1969), cognitivism came of age, thereafter dominating much Psychology until the present, reconceptualising humans as complex information-processing systems governed by both innate ('hard') and acquired ('soft') 'programmes'. Artificial intelligence and computer simulation flourished, reviving philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness (see s. 3). The Turing test (after A. M. Turing who proposed it in 1950) argued that an inability to differentiate between the responses to questions of a hidden human and a hidden computer meant the computer had to be considered conscious. The spirit of this 'test' (which has numerous problems) permeated much cognitivist work during the 1970s and 1980s. Rummelhart and McClelland's (eds) Parallel Distributed Processing (1986) introduced 'PDP' to a wide professional readership, further advancing cognitivist theorising.

With the forging of connections with physiologists which yielded cognitive neuropsychology, some US cognitivists split from Psychology, joining cross-disciplinary departments of cognitive neuroscience. Cognitivism's triumph, however, must be weighed against numerous criticisms e.g. neglect of the social, irrelevance to many psychological questions people consider important, reductionism and that it is exploring a computer metaphor which, computers being products of human psychology, is circular in character. Its enormous contributions to our understanding of topics from space perception to memory remain undeniable even so.

Key Milestones in the Development of Cognitive Psychology

The Crumbling of Behaviorism

Several problems have been implicated in the fall of behaviorism, especially in accounting for reasoning in language and memory . Although entrenched in a scientific method ...