History of cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the scientific investigation of human cognition, that is, all our
mental abilities – perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, reasoning, and understanding.
The term “cognition” stems from the Latin word “cognoscere” or "to know". Fundamentally,
cognitive psychology studies how people acquire and apply knowledge or information. It is
closely related to the highly interdisciplinary cognitive science and influenced by artificial
intelligence, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, biology, physics,
and neuroscience.
History
Cognitive psychology in its modern form incorporates a remarkable set of new technologies
in psychological science. Although published inquiries of human cognition can be traced
back to Aristotle’s ‘’De Memoria’’ (Hothersall, 1984), the intellectual origins of cognitive
psychology began with cognitive approaches to psychological problems at the end of the
1800s and early 1900s in the works of Wundt, Cattell, and William James (Boring, 1950).

Cognitive psychology declined in the first half of the 20th century with the rise of
“behaviourism" –- the study of laws relating observable behaviour to objective, observable
stimulus conditions without any recourse to internal mental processes (Watson, 1913; Boring,
1950; Skinner, 1950). It was this last requirement, fundamental to cognitive psychology, that
was one of behaviourism’s undoing. For example, lack of understanding of the internal
mental processes led to no distinction between memory and performance and failed to
account for complex learning (Tinklepaugh, 1928; Chomsky, 1959). This issue led to the
decline of behaviourism as the dominant branch of scientific psychology and to the
“Cognitive Revolution”.
The Cognitive Revolution began in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to
develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures
(Miller, 1956; Broadbent, 1958; Chomsky, 1959; Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958). Cognitive
psychology became predominant in the 1960s (Tulving, 1962; Sperling, 1960). Its resurgence
is perhaps best marked by the publication of Ulric Neisser’s book, ‘’Cognitive Psychology’’,
in 1967. Since 1970, more than sixty universities in North America and Europe have
established cognitive psychology programs.
Assumptions
Cognitive psychology is based on two assumptions: (1) Human cognition can at least in
principle be fully revealed by the scientific method, that is, individual components of mental
processes can be identified and understood, and (2) Internal mental processes can be
described in terms of rules or algorithms in information processing models. There has been
much recent debate on these assumptions (Costall and Still, 1987; Dreyfus, 1979; Searle,
1990).
Approaches
Very much like physics, experiments and simulations/modelling are the major research tools
in cognitive psychology. Often, the predictions of the models are directly compared to human
behaviour. With the ease of access and wide use of brain imaging techniques, cognitive
psychology has seen increasing influence of cognitive neuroscience over the past decade.
There are currently three main approaches in cognitive psychology: experimental cognitive
psychology, computational cognitive psychology, and neural cognitive psychology.
Experimental cognitive psychology treats cognitive psychology as one of the natural sciences
and applies experimental methods to investigate human cognition. Psychophysical responses,
response time, and eye tracking are often measured in experimental cognitive psychology.
Computational cognitive psychology develops formal mathematical and computational
models of human cognition based on symbolic and subsymbolic representations,
and dynamical systems. Neural cognitive psychology uses brain imaging
(e.g., EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET, SPECT, Optical Imaging) and neurobiological methods (e.g.,
lesion patients) to understand the neural basis of human cognition. The three approaches are
often inter-linked and provide both independent and complementary insights in every sub-
domain of cognitive psychology.

Sub-domains of Cognitive Psychology

Traditionally, cognitive psychology includes
human perception, attention, learning, memory, concept
formation, reasoning, judgment and decision-making, problem solving, and language
processing. For some, social and cultural factors, emotion, consciousness, animal
cognition, evolutionary approaches have also become part of cognitive psychology.
 Perception: Those studying perception seek to understand how we construct
subjective interpretations of proximal information from the environment.
Perceptual systems are composed of separate senses (e.g., visual, auditory,
somatosensory) and processing modules (e.g., form, motion; Livingston & Hubel,
1988; Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982; Julesz, 1971) and sub-modules (e.g., Lu &
Sperling, 1995) that represent different aspects of the stimulus information.
Current research also focuses on how these separate representations and modules
interact and are integrated into coherent percepts. Cognitive psychologists have
studied these properties empirically with psychophysical methods and brain
imaging. Computational models, based on physiological principles, have been
developed for many perceptual systems (Grossberg & Mingolla, 1985; Marr,
1982; Wandell, 1995).
 Attention: Attention solves the problem of information overload in cognitive
processing systems by selecting some information for further processing, or by
managing resources applied to several sources of information simultaneously
 (Broadbent, 1957; Posner, 1980; Treisman, 1969). Empirical investigation of
attention has focused on how and why attention improves performance, or how
the lack of attention hinders performance (Posner, 1980; Weichselgartner &
Sperling, 1987; Chun & Potter, 1995; Pashler, 1999). The theoretical analysis of
attention has taken several major approaches to identify the mechanisms of
attention: the signal-detection approach (Lu & Dosher, 1998) and the similarity-
choice approach (Bundesen, 1990; Logan, 2004). Related effects of biased
competition have been studied in single cell recordings in animals (Reynolds,
Chelazzi, & Desimone, 1999). Brain imaging studies have documented effects of
attention on activation in early visual cortices, and have investigated the networks
for attention control (Kanwisher & Wojciulik, 2000).
 Learning: Learning improves the response of the organism to the environment.
Cognitive psychologists study which new information is acquired and the
conditions under which it is acquired. The study of learning begins with an
analysis of learning phenomena in animals (i.e., habituation, conditioning, and
instrumental, contingency, and associative learning) and extends to learning of
cognitive or conceptual information by humans (Kandel, 1976; Estes, 1969;
Thompson, 1986). Cognitive studies of implicit learning emphasize the largely
automatic influence of prior experience on performance, and the nature of
procedural knowledge (Roediger, 1990). Studies of conceptual learning emphasize
the nature of the processing of incoming information, the role of elaboration, and
the nature of the encoded representation (Craik, 2002). Those using computational
approaches have investigated the nature of concepts that can be more easily
learned, and the rules and algorithms for learning systems (Holland, Holyoak,
Nisbett, & Thagard, 1986). Those using lesion and imaging studies investigate the
role of specific brain systems (e.g., temporal lobe systems) for certain classes of
episodic learning, and the role of perceptual systems in implicit learning (Tulving,
Gordon Hayman, & MacDonald, 1991; Gabrieli, Fleischman, Keane, Reminger,
& Morell, 1995; Grafton, Hazeltine, & Ivry, 1995).
 Memory: The study of the capacity and fragility of human memory is one of the
most developed aspects of cognitive psychology. Memory study focuses on how
memories are acquired, stored, and retrieved. Memory domains have been
functionally divided into memory for facts, for procedures or skills, and working
and short-term memory capacity. The experimental approaches have identified
dissociable memory types (e.g., procedural and episodic; Squire & Zola, 1996) or
capacity limited processing systems such as short-term or working
memory (Cowan, 1995; Dosher, 1999). Computational approaches describe
memory as propositional networks, or as holographic or composite representations
 and retrieval processes (Anderson, 1996, Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997). Brain
imaging and lesion studies identify separable brain regions active during storage
or retrieval from distinct processing systems (Gabrieli, 1998).
 Concept Formation: Concept or category formation refers to the ability to
organize the perception and classification of experiences by the construction of
functionally relevant categories. The response to a specific stimulus (i.e., a cat) is
determined not by the specific instance but by classification into the category and
by association of knowledge with that category (Medin & Ross, 1992). The ability
to learn concepts has been shown to depend upon the complexity of the category
in representational space, and by the relationship of variations among exemplars
of concepts to fundamental and accessible dimensions of representation (Ashby,
2000). Certain concepts largely reflect similarity structures, but others may reflect
function, or conceptual theories of use (Medin, 1989). Computational models have
been developed based on aggregation of instance representations, similarity
structures and general recognition models, and by conceptual theories (Barsalou,
2003). Cognitive neuroscience has identified important brain structures for aspects
or distinct forms of category formation (Ashby, Alfonso-Reese, Turken, and
Waldron, 1998).
 Judgment and decision: Human judgment and decision making is ubiquitous –
voluntary behavior implicitly or explicitly requires judgment and choice. The
historic foundations of choice are based in normative or rational models and
optimality rules, beginning with expected utility theory (von Neumann &
Morgenstern 1944; Luce, 1959). Extensive analysis has identified widespread
failures of rational models due to differential assessment of risks
and rewards (Luce and Raiffa, 1989), the distorted assessment of probabilities
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), and the limitations in human information
processing (i.e., Russo & Dosher, 1983). New computational approaches rely on
dynamic systems analyses of judgment and choice (Busemeyer & Johnson, 2004),
and Bayesian belief networks that make choices based on multiple criteria (Fenton
& Neil, 2001) for more complex situations. The study of decision making has
become an active topic in cognitive neuroscience (Bechara, Damasio and
Damasio, 2000).
 ‘’’Reasoning:’’’ Reasoning is the process by which logical arguments are
evaluated or constructed. Original investigations of reasoning focused on the
extent to which humans correctly applied the philosophically derived rules of
inference in deduction (i.e., A implies B; If A then B), and the many ways in
which humans fail to appreciate some deductions and falsely conclude others.
These were extended to limitations in reasoning with syllogisms or quantifiers
 (Johnson-Laird, Byne and Schaeken, 1992; Rips and Marcus, 1977). Inductive
reasoning, in contrast, develops a hypothesis consistent with a set of observations
or reasons by analogy (Holyoak and Thagard, 1995). Often reasoning is affected
by heuristic judgments, fallacies, and the representativeness of evidence, and other
framing phenomena (Kahneman, Slovic, Tversky, 1982). Computational models
have been developed for inference making and analogy (Holyoak and Thagard,
1995), logical reasoning (Rips and Marcus, 1977), and Bayesian reasoning
(Sanjana and Tenenbaum, 2003).
 Problem Solving: The cognitive psychology of problem solving is the study of
how humans pursue goal directed behavior. The computational state-space
analysis and computer simulation of problem solving of Newell and Simon (1972)
and the empirical and heuristic analysis of Wickelgren (1974) together have set
the cognitive psychological approach to problem solving. Solving a problem is
conceived as finding operations to move from the initial state to a goal state in a
problem space using either algorithmic or heuristic solutions. The problem
representation is critical in finding solutions (Zhang, 1997). Expertise in
knowledge rich domains (i.e., chess) also depends on complex pattern recognition
(Gobet & Simon, 1996). Problem solving may engage perception, memory,
attention, and executive function, and so many brain areas may be engaged in
problem solving tasks, with an emphasis on pre-frontal executive functions.
 Language Processing: While linguistic approaches focus on the formal structures
of languages and language use (Chomsky, 1965), cognitive psychology has
focused on language acquisition, language comprehension, language production,
and the psychology of reading (Kintsch 1974; Pinker, 1994; Levelt, 1989).
Psycholinguistics has studied encoding and lexical access of words, sentence level
processes of parsing and representation, and general representations of concepts,
gist, inference, and semantic assumptions. Computational models have been
developed for all of these levels, including lexical systems, parsing systems,
semantic representation systems, and reading aloud (Seidenberg, 1997; Coltheart,
Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Just, Carpenter, and Woolley, 1982;
Thorne, Bratley & Dewar, 1968; Schank and Abelson, 1977; Massaro, 1998). The
neuroscience of language has a long history in the analysis of lesions (Wernicke,
1874; Broca, 1861), and has also been extensively studied with cognitive imaging
(Posner et al, 1988).
Applications
Cognitive psychology research has produced an extensive body of principles, representations,
and algorithms. Successful applications range from custom-built expert systems to mass-
produced software and consumer electronics: (1) Development of computer interfaces that
collaborate with users to meet their information needs and operate as intelligent agents, (2)
Development of a flexible information infrastructure based on knowledge representation and
reasoning methods, (3) Development of smart tools in the financial industry, (4)
Development of mobile, intelligent robots that can perform tasks usually reserved for
humans, (5) Development of bionic components of the perceptual and cognitive neural
system such as cochlear and retinal implants.

LINK: http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/cognitive-psychology/

https://www.verywellmind.com/cognitive-psychology-4157181

The primary goal of cognitive psychology is to provide an understanding of mental activity

via the use of the scientific method. Because mental activity mediates between stimuli
presented to a person and the person’s response, and is therefore not directly observable, cog-
nitive science is heavily theory laden. Theories attempt to provide an explanation of the
results from a large number of studies and to provide predictions that can be directly tested. A
good theory should reduce complex behavior to a limited set of principles that explain why
some phenomena may occur in some circumstances and may not occur in others. However,
there are some general limitations to theories that are noteworthy. For example, because most
cognitive theory is based on experimentation, in which independent variables are manipulated
and their influence is measured on dependent variables, there is always a limitation of
building the model of the structures and processes intervening between the manipulations and
behavior. In fact, Anderson (1976) has argued that behavioral data may not allow one to
distinguish between theories that assume very different representations and processes.
Theories must then be guided by other criteria such as parsimony, effectiveness, generality,
and accuracy.