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Psychology >> Psychology Terms >> Cognitive Psychology

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Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the study of human information processing, including perception, attention, memory, language, reasoning, and thinking. It is the study of how the mind operates.

Cognitive psychology in its modern form is only 40 or 50 years old.

It has a precursor in the introspectionist psychology of the 19th century (Wundt and Titchener), in which psychologists tried to determine the contents of the mind by looking inside their own minds. It was eventually decided that scientific psychology needs to avoid looking at "invisible" (subjective) internal processes and events.
As a result, introspection was concluded to be too subjective to be tested and was dropped by the behaviourist psychology.

Another precursor is found in 19th century psychologists who studied reaction time, decision making, memory, etc., using objective techniques.

During the World War II psychology as a discipline grew rapidly, as psychologists' skills were needed for solving military problems, (human engineering) e.g., to design military devices (planes, etc.) to be best suited for human use.
These tasks were clearly cognitive in nature.

An important precursor for the growth of cognitive psychology was the development of computer science.
The fact that both mind and computer process information - seem to belong to a similar kind of system - stimulated studying human mind with the help of computers

Cognitive psychology used many computer-related concepts in studying and describing human cognition, e.g, input, sensory register, database, program, etc., while using computer as a metaphor for human brain.

Cognitive psychology largely developed in direct opposition to radical behaviourism. Cognitive psychologists wanted to be able to talk about mental events, attention, and the like, which strict behaviorism excluded completely.

Another factor in development of cognitive psychology was communication engineering with its mathematically precise interpretation of information (extremely useful in designing computers, but fully inadequate for representing human knowledge).

The notion that information is a basic componenet in human cognition was created through communication engineering, and many structures and processes were suggested (encoding, decoding, information processing, etc.) After development of Shannon's general communication system flowchart, cognitive theorists started using flowcharts for analyzing cognitive activities.

One more factor, was the Noam Chomsky's linguistic theory (Syntactic Structures). -Noam Chomsky opposed Skinner's assumption that the understanding of language depends on contingencies of reinforcement. He argued that the understanding of language is part of the inborn biological structure of humans, that linguistic behaviour is a creative thing. He also opposed the idea that all forms of human behaviour were continuous with the behaviour of lower animals.