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History of Cognitive Psychology (Psychology in America: Behaviorism…
History of Cognitive Psychology
Early history
ancient Greeks: Plato, Aristotle
discussions of the nature and origin of knowledge, speculated about memory and thought
philosophical arguments -> psychological speculations about human cognition
empiricism vs. nativism debate (17th, 18th, 19th)
less than 150 years: human cognition could be the subject of scientific study, rather than philosophical speculation.
first 100 years was spent freeing ourselves of the misconceptions
end of 19th: scientific method was applied to the understanding of human cognition
Gall (1835)
Problem with phrenology: construct validity (e.g. "consciousness") is it a valid construct?
first modern, scientific attempts to develop a systematic understanding of the neural basis of congnitive functions
no technical or conceptual barriers
suffered because of our egocentric, mystical, and confused attitudes about ourselves and our own nature
inconceivable that the workings of the human mind could be subjected to scientific analysis
Psychology in Germany: Introspectionism
Introspectionism: study of conscious mental events
Me-seach: can't generalize
problems
variability
verification
reliance on consciousness
naive believe of self-observation
method
20th century
Wundt
beginning of psychology
first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany
cognitive psychology
Introspection
highly trained observers reported the contents of their own consciousness under carefully controlled conditions
assumption: workings of the mind should be open to self-observation
Mayer and Orth (1901)
reported rather indescribable conscious experiences
devoid of concrete content
Psychology in America: Behaviorism
Behaviorism
stimulus -> box -> response
first half of 20th century
basic principles (3)
goal
predict and control behavior
psychology was to be entirely concerned with external behavior and was not to try to analyze the workings of the mind (superstition and magic) that underlay this behavior
no sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion
so afraid of falling prey to subjective fallacies that they refused to let themselves think about mental processes
truly objective, observable data
only know response, don't know how it works
Gestalt psychology
from Germany (Nazi turmoil), immigrated to USA
animal learning
activity of the brain and the mind was more than the sum of its parts
criticized by behaviorists
self-inspection: casual and reflective
pragmatism and functionalism
“action-oriented” psychology
ignore mental structures and processes
Edward Thorndike
reward and punishment
animal experiments (not introvert)
John Watson: against behaviorists in 1920
pushed research on cognition into the background of American psychology - rats no human
contribution
a set of sophisticated and rigorous techniques and principles for experimental study
Cognitive Approach
Cognitive Revolution: 1950 - 1970
origins
computer science, AI
get computers to behave intelligently
concepts have been taken from computer science and used in psychological theories
observing how we can analyze the intelligent behavior of a machine has largely liberated us from our inhibitions and misconceptions about analyzing our own intelligence
linguistics: structure of language
very complex, behaviorists cannot explain
enabling cognitive psychologists to fight off the prevailing behaviorist conceptions
research on human performance (WW2)
combined with information theory
abstract way of analyzing the processing of information
perception and attention
grow rapidly since 1950s
1970s, cognitive science emerged
integrate psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and AI
logical analysis and the computer simulation of cognitive processes
milestone: publication of Ulric Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology in 1967
give legitimacy
cognitive psychology
experimental techniques for studying behavior that grew out of the behaviorist era
Infer what is going inside the box
growing emphasis on higher mental processes
Information-processing analyses
dominant approach in cognitive psychology
analyze cognition as a set of steps for information-processing an abstract entity called “information.”
1966, Saul Sternberg
Sternberg paradigm
discovery
linear relationship between judgment time and the size of the memory set
exemplified what an abstract information-processing theory is like
exemplifies classic abstract information-processing account (4)
narrowness
Cognitive Neuroscience
possible relationship between mind and body
dualism
mind and body are separate
brain activity too obscure to provide a basis for understanding human cognition
gradually understand the mind by studying brain (instead of behaviors)
how cognition is realized in the brain
developing methods that enable us to understand the neural basis of cognition