Cognitive Psychology

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Cognitive Psychology Chapter 1.2 Introduction
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11/17/2009

• Outline
• Where did Cognitive Psychology come from?
• Psychological Antecedents
• Two Revolutions
• Precursors from other disciplines

Study Questions. Why might we consider
cognitive psychology to be a scientific
revolution? Why might we consider it to not be a
revolution?
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History of Cognitive Psychology

• The Death of Mentalism

• John B. Watson (1913). Psychology as the
  behaviourist views it.

Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a
purely objective experimental branch of natural
science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction
and control of behavior. Introspection forms no
essential part of its methods, nor is the
scientific value of its data dependent upon the
readiness with which they lend themselves to
interpretation in terms of consciousness. The
behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary
scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing
line between man and brute. The behavior of man,
with all of its refinement and complexity, forms
only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of
investigation.
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History of Cognitive Psychology

• The Death of Mentalism

• On Structuralism

I do not wish unduly to criticize psychology. It
has failed signally, I believe, during the
fifty-odd years of its existence as an
experimental discipline to make its place in the
world as an undisputed natural science.
Psychology, as it is generally thought of, has
something esoteric in its methods. If you fail to
reproduce my findings, it is not due to some
fault in your apparatus or in the control of your
stimulus, but it is due to the fact that your
introspection is untrained. The attack is made
upon the observer and not upon the experimental
setting. In physics and in chemistry the attack
is made upon the experimental conditions. The
apparatus was not sensitive enough, impure
chemicals were used, etc. In these sciences a
better technique will give reproducible results.
Psychology is otherwise. if you can't observe 3-9
states of clearness in attention, your
introspection is poor. If, on the other hand, a
feeling seems reasonably clear to you, your
introspection is again faulty. You are seeing too
much. Feelings are never clear..
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History of Cognitive Psychology

• The Death of Mentalism

• On Functionalism

My psychological quarrel is not with the
systematic and structural psychologist alone. The
last fifteen years have seen the growth of what
is called functional psychology. This type of
psychology decries the use of elements in the
static sense of the structuralists. It throws
emphasis upon the biological significance of
conscious processes instead of upon the analysis
of conscious states into introspectively isolable
elements. I have done my best to understand the
difference between functional psychology and
structural psychology. Instead of clarity,
confusion grows upon me. The terms sensation,
perception, affection, emotion, volition are used
as much by the functionalist as by the
structuralist. The addition of the word 'process'
('mental act as a whole', and like terms are
frequently met) after each serves in some way to
remove the corpse of content' and to leave
'function' in its stead. Surely if these concepts
are elusive when looked at from a content
standpoint, they are still more deceptive when
viewed from the angle of function, and especially
so when function is obtained by the introspection
method...
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History of Cognitive Psychology

• The Death of Mentalism

• On Studying conscious or unconscious processes

This leads me to the point where I should like to
make the argument constructive. I believe we can
write a psychology, define it as the science of
behaviour, and never go back upon our
definition never use the terms consciousness,
mental states, mind, content, introspectively
verifiable, imagery, and the like. I believe that
we can do it in a few years. It can be done in
terms of stimulus and response, in terms of habit
formation, habit integrations and the like.
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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Two Revolutions
• Scientific Revolutions
• Thomas Kuhn
• Normal science
• Accumulation of anomalies
• Scientific Revolutions
• E.g.s, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein.
• Behaviourism and the Cognitive revolutions

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Two Revolutions
• Radical Behaviourism
• The Hull - Spence model
• B. F. Skinner
• Antimentalism
• On Consciousness
• On Cognitive Psychology

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Two Revolutions
• The Cognitive Revolution
• Noam Chomsky
• Rebuttal of Skinners Verbal Behaviour
• Verbal Learning
• The problem with human subjects
• Neobehaviourists
• Spence and cognitive contamination

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• A scientific revolution or a renaissance
• The Gestaltist Movement
• Rejection of structuralism
• Phi
• Psychophysics
• Relating psychological experience to physical
  stimuli

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• A revolution or behaviourism mentalism?
• From behaviourism, the cognitive approach
  rejected
• Extrapolation from a small set of premises
• Animal experimentation
• Learning a central problem
• Logical positivism
• Stimulus control over all behaviour
• Antimentalism

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• A revolution or behaviourism mentalism?
• From behaviourism, the cognitive approach took
• Nomothetic explanation as a goal
• Empiricism as a method of proof
• Laboratory control
• Rational canons of science
• The Law of Parsimony

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• The Birth of Cognitive Psychology
• WW II
• Human engineering
• Brain-damaged soldiers
• Advances in Communications
• Information theory and the human information
  processor
• Development of servo-mechanical devices
• Tackling teleology (purposeful behaviour)
• The development of the computer
• AI / Simulations