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![]() Cognitive
Psychology PSY 504
VU
Lesson
01
INTRODUCTION
Cognitive
Psychology deals with
cognition. Cognition can be
understood as "thinking" or
"knowing."
We can say, in other words,
that cognitive psychology
deals with the
processes
involved
in thinking, acquisition and
storage of knowledge. For
this purpose it adopts
an
information
processing approach.
Historical
Background
Plato,
the great Greek philosopher,
was the first person to
present a coherent theory of
how
knowledge
is acquired and retained. He
proposed that ideas are
created in the human mind
and
that
these ideas are then
projected out in the world.
These projections serve as
images that we
see
through our senses. In other
words, the outside world is
an illusion made up of projections
of
ideas
and the true reality
lies inside of us.
Therefore, Plato concluded
that perception is an
internal
process and we can learn
everything by looking
inwards.
When
psychology was first taught
in European universities, it was
subsumed under the title
of
mental
philosophy. Philosophers throughout
the history have been
concerned with concepts
of
perception
and knowledge, as to how
these interact with reality.
Similarly the field of
epistemology
within
philosophy has been
concerned with the nature of
knowledge. Thus cognitive
psychology
has
been present as an undercurrent in
the field of ontology and
epistemology throughout the
last
two
millennia.
More
recently, in 1875 Wilhelm
Wundt set up the first
psychological laboratory to study
perception
and
cognition. A lot of the
perceptual experiments and
studies conducted were
included in the
field
he called psychophysics. An example of
psychophysics is the relationship of
sensation and
intensity
of the stimulus.
A
major problem with most
psychological studies of this
time was over-reliance on
introspective
reports.
In these reports, information
was acquired by asking
subjects what they felt,
thought or
saw,
heard etc. and these
reports were then used
for deriving psychological
principles. This was
around
the same time that
Freud proposed the idea of
unconscious processing. We now
know for
sure
that most cognitive
processing takes place at an
unconscious level.
The
criticism of the introspective
technique soon led
psychology to its opposite
extreme and the
behaviorist
school took over. The
behaviorists argued that
anything that we could not
observe
could
not form part of the
science of psychology. They
coined and exclusively used
terms like
stimulus,
response, reinforcement, conditioning
etc. All of these had to do
with phenomena that
could
be converted into some kind
of numerical representation. Hunger,
for example, was
called
"number
of hours of food
deprivation."
Behaviorists
relied only on things that
could see and rejected
phenomena such as memory
and
imagery
as unscientific just because
they couldn't think of a way
of observing and
measuring
them.
During
the 2nd world war, human
factors research and
information theory combined to
generate
the
information processing approach.
This approach along with
several other factors led to
the
creation
of a new field called
cognitive psychology. Among
these factors was Noam
Chomsky's
critique
of Skinner's book Verbal
Behavior. Chomsky in his
groundbreaking paper "On
verbal
behavior"
shattered the simple minded
behaviorist model of language
designed by Skinner. He
argued
that language was far
too complex to be explained by
stimulus response alone.
Around
the
same time, computers had
emerged as thinking machines,
where a lot of similarities
with
human
information processing were
coming to the fore. The
field o artificial intelligence
had also
emerged
which sought to make
computers that thought like
humans and solved problems
and
learned
new things.
Donald
Broadbent was working at the
same time on attention and
visual perception. A lot
of
experimental
work during that time
along with Bartlett's
classic experiments on memory
combined
1
![]() Cognitive
Psychology PSY 504
VU
to
create what Ulric Neisser
called Cognitive Psychology in a
book entitled
"Cognitive
Psychology.
2
Table of Contents:
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