COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

UNIT 1
The term cognition is a much richer term. In Neisser’s landmark book Cognitive
Psychology ( 1967 ), he stated that cognition “refers to all the processes by which the
sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used . . .
[including] such terms as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem
solving, and thinking”. For the present, we use the following definition: Cognition is the
collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking,
and understanding, as well as the act of using those processes.
Cognitive psychology is largely, though not exclusively, interested in what might be
everyday, ordinary mental processes. These processes are entirely common place - not
simple, by any means, but certainly routine. Our definition should not include only
“normal” mental activities. Although cognitive psychology generally does not deal with
psychologically “abnormal” states, such as schizophrenia, such “non-normal” processes,
although unusual or rare, may enrich our science.
Cognition thus refers to the processes through which information coming from the
senses is transformed, reduced, elaborated, recovered and used. The term information
refers to sensory input from the environment that informs us about what is happening
there. Cognitive processes, thus are the processes involved in knowing about the world.
They are importantly, attention, perception, learning, memory, and higher order processes
like thinking, language, decision making and problem solving. The branch of memory that
deals with cognitive process is called cognitive psychology.
HISTORY
Philosophical Antecedents of Psychology
Historians of psychology usually trace the earliest roots of psychology to two
approaches to understanding the human mind:
• Philosophy seeks to understand the general nature of many aspects of the world, in part
through introspection, the examination of inner ideas and experiences

1
• Physiology seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining functions in living matter, primarily
through empirical (observation-based) methods.
Two Greek philosophers, Plato (ca. 428–348 B.C.) and his student Aristotle (384–
322 B.C.), have profoundly affected modern thinking in psychology and many other
fields. Plato and Aristotle disagreed regarding how to investigate ideas. Plato was a
rationalist. A rationalist believes that the route to knowledge is through thinking and
logical analysis. That is, a rationalist does not need any experiments to develop new
knowledge. A rationalist who is interested in cognitive processes would appeal to reason
as a source of knowledge or justification.
In contrast, Aristotle (a naturalist and biologist as well as a philosopher) was an
empiricist. An empiricist believes that we acquire knowledge via empirical evidence -
that is, we obtain evidence through experience and observation. In order to explore how
the human mind works, empiricists would design experiments and conduct studies in
which they could observe the behavior and processes of interest to them. Empiricism
therefore leads directly to empirical investigations of psychology.
Most psychologists today seek a synthesis of the two approaches. They base
empirical observations on theory in order to explain what they have observed in their
experiments. In turn, they use these observations to revise their theories when they find
that the theories cannot account for their real-world observations. The contrasting ideas of
rationalism and empiricism became prominent with the French rationalist René Descartes
(1596–1650) and the British empiricist John Locke (1632–1704). Descartes viewed the
introspective, reflective method as being superior to empirical methods for finding truth.
He maintained that the only proof of his existence is that he was thinking and doubting.
Descartes felt that one could not rely on one’s senses because those very senses have often
proven to be deceptive (think of optical illusions, for example). Locke, in contrast, had
more enthusiasm for empirical observation. Locke believed that humans are born without
knowledge and therefore must seek knowledge through empirical observation. Locke’s
term for this view was tabula rasa (meaning “blank slate” in Latin). The idea is that life

2
and experience “write” knowledge on us. For Locke, then, the study of learning was the
key to understanding the human mind. He believed that there are no innate ideas.
Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology has roots in many different ideas and approaches.
- Structuralism seeks to understand the structure (configuration of elements) of the mind
and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into their constituent components
(affection, attention, memory, sensation, etc.). The introduction of introspection as an
experimental method was an important change in the field because the main emphasis in
the study of the mind shifted from a rationalist approach to the empiricist approach of
trying to observe behavior in order to draw conclusions about the subject of study.
Consider, for example, the perception of a flower. Structuralists would analyze this
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.
- Functionalism 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. 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. For example, pragmatists believe in the
importance of the psychology of learning and memory. Because it can help us improve the
performance of children in school. A leader in guiding functionalism toward pragmatism
was William James. 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.

3
- 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.
- Although functionalists were interested in how people learn, they did not really specify a
mechanism by which learning takes place. This task was taken up by another group,
associationists. Associationism examines how elements of the mind, like events or ideas,
can become associated with one another in the mind to result in a form of learning. For
example, associations may result from: contiguity (associating things that tend to occur
together at about the same time); similarity (associating things with similar features or
properties); or contrast (associating things that show polarities, such as hot/cold,
light/dark, day/night).
- Associationist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) was the first experimenter to apply
associationist principles systematically. Specifically, Ebbinghaus studied his own mental
processes. Through his self-observations, Ebbinghaus studied how people learn and
remember material through rehearsal, the conscious repetition of material to be learned.
Among other things, he found that frequent repetition can fix mental associations more
firmly in memory. Thus, repetition aids in learning.
- Another influential associationist, Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), held that the
role of “satisfaction” is the key to forming associations. Thorndike termed this principle
the law of effect (1905): A stimulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if an
organism is rewarded for that response. Thorndike believed that an organism learns to
respond in a given way (the effect) in a given situation if it is rewarded repeatedly for
doing so (the satisfaction, which serves as a stimulus to future actions). These ideas were
the predecessors of the development of behaviorism.
- Behaviorism may be considered an extreme version of associationism. It focuses
entirely on the association between the environment and an observable behavior.
According to strict, extreme (“radical”) behaviorists, any hypotheses about internal
thoughts and ways of thinking are nothing more than speculation. B. F. Skinner (1904–

4
1990), 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. He
rejected mental mechanisms. He believed instead that operant conditioning could explain
all forms of human behavior. Skinner applied his experimental analysis of behavior to
many psychological phenomena, such as learning, language acquisition, and problem
solving.
- Gestalt psychology states that we best understand psychological phenomena when we
view them as organized, structured wholes. According to this view, we cannot fully
understand behavior when we only break phenomena down into smaller parts. The maxim
“the whole is more than the sum of its parts” aptly sums up the Gestalt perspective. To
understand the perception of a flower, for example, we would have to take into account
the whole of the experience. We could not understand such a perception merely in terms
of a description of forms, colors, sizes, and so on.
Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
In the early 1950s, a movement called the “cognitive revolution” took place in
response to behaviorism. Cognitivism is the belief that much of human behavior can be
understood in terms of how people think. It rejects the notion that psychologists should
avoid studying mental processes because they are unobservable. Cognitivism is, in part, a
synthesis of earlier forms of analysis, such as behaviorism and Gestaltism. Like
behaviorism, it adopts precise quantitative analysis to study how people learn and think;
like Gestaltism, it emphasizes internal mental processes.
Preceding events to the emergence of Cognitive Psychology
Psychobiology
One of Watson’s former students, Karl Spencer Lashley (1890–1958), brashly
challenged the behaviorist view that the human brain is a passive organ merely responding
to environmental contingencies outside the individual. Instead, Lashley considered the
brain to be an active, dynamic organizer of behavior. Lashley sought to understand how
the macro-organization of the human brain made possible such complex, planned

5
activities as musical performance, game playing, and using language. None of these
activities were, in his view, readily explicable in terms of simple conditioning.
Donald Hebb (1949) proposed the concept of cell assemblies as the basis for
learning in the brain. Cell assemblies are coordinated neural structures that develop
through frequent stimulation. Linguist Noam Chomsky stressed both the biological basis
and the creative potential of language. He pointed out the infinite numbers of sentences
we can produce with ease. He thereby defied behaviorist notions that we learn language
by reinforcement. Even young children continually are producing novel sentences for
which they could not have been reinforced in the past.
Technological Underpinnings
By the end of the 1950s, some psychologists were intrigued by the tantalizing
notion that machines could be programmed to demonstrate the intelligent processing of
information. By 1956 a new phrase had entered our vocabulary. Artificial intelligence
(AI) is the attempt by humans to construct systems that show intelligence and,
particularly, the intelligent processing of information. Chess-playing programs, which
now can beat most humans, are examples of artificial intelligence Ulric Neisser’s book
Cognitive Psychology (Neisser, 1967) was especially critical in bringing cognitivism to
prominence by informing undergraduates, graduate students, and academics about the
newly developing field. Neisser defined cognitive psychology as the study of how people
learn, structure, store, and use knowledge.
Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (1972) proposed detailed models of human
thinking and problem solving from the most basic levels to the most complex. By the
1970s cognitive psychology was recognized widely as a major field of psychological
study with a distinctive set of research methods.

----------------------------------------------