INTRODUCTION:Historical Background

THE INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH >>

Cognitive Psychology PSY 504

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

Cognitive Psychology PSY 504

to create what Ulric Neisser called Cognitive Psychology in a book entitled "Cognitive

Psychology.

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