EMERGENCE & RESEARCH METHODS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

[Pages:20]EMERGENCE & RESEARCH METHODS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY:

(COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY- PYB 201)

By

Dr. Shivani Tomar

Assistant Professor Deptt. Of Psychology, SLA

NIU

Emergence of Cognitive Psychology

? William James (1890) in his classic book The Principles of Psychology, defined the whole of psychology as the "Science of Mental Life, both its phenomena and their conditions".

? More than a century later, the field of cognitive psychology has fulfilled James's vision.

? The cognitive approach to psychology pervades all areas of psychology today, and even some neighbor sciences.

? He included discussion of the pioneering work of Ebbinghaus, who systematically studied his own ability to learn lists of nonsense syllables.

? The early history of psychology was dominated by two major schools of thought: Structuralism and Functionalism.

? Structuralism aimed to describe the elemental components of consciousness, specifically sensations, images and feelings.

? Based on Introspection, pioneered by Wundt and developed by Titchener. Limitation-

? Limitation- different observers often give different explanation or introspective report.

? Also cognition does not necessarily register in consciousness.

? Functionalism arose as an alternative school of thought to deal with this problem and studied the mental processes that mediate between the environment and the organism.

? Functionalism addressed what the mind is for, rather than its structural components.

? Today's cognitive psychologist are concerned with both the structural architecture of the mind and the mental operations that mediate between stimuli and responses.

? Behaviorism was a reaction to several schools of thought in psychology that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as psychologists selected the study of behavior over the study of cognition.

? Watson introduced Behaviorism which tried to make psychology objective, like physics and chemistry.

? It eliminated the discussion of consciousness and introspective reports, also inferences about the cognitive operations that intervened between the stimulus and the response were regarded as unscientific.

? Pavlov pioneered what became known as classical conditioning, whereby a reflexive action became a learned response.

? Skinner greatly expanded the power of behaviorism by developing the concept of operant conditioning.

? This began with Thorndyke's "Law of effect", whereby a behavior followed by a reward increases in frequency.

? In operant conditioning, a response comes under the control of a stimulus.

? For Skinner, this history of reinforcement and punishment determined one's present behavior.

? By the mid- 1950s, the concept of information processing had entered in psychology and reinvigorated an interest in the unobservable mental processes that mediate between a stimulus and response.

? Miller and Bruner founded the Center for Cognitive Studies, while Broadbend pioneered the study of attention and memory from the perspective of information processing.

? Chomsky led the revolution in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of language, rejecting Skinner's behaviorism.

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