A BRIEF HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY | DR. GEETANJALI PAREEK

Till now we have learned, that cognitive psychology mostly deals with how knowledge is represented in the mind. In this segment on the history of cognitive psychology we will review three major periods.

· Firstly, we will deal with traditional ideas from a very early period.

· Secondly, the way knowledge and thinking were conceptualised by Renaissance scholars.

· Finally, we will deal with the modern period with emphasis on current ideas and methods.

1. Early Thoughts on Thinking

The fundamental question to cognitive psychology through the ages of mankind had been: Where did knowledge come from, and how is it represented in the mind? Basically, two answers have been proposed. The empiricists maintain that knowledge comes from experience, and the nativists suggest that knowledge is based on innate characteristics of the brain. From a scientific perspective, neither case can be proved definitively, so the argument continues without clear resolution.

The fascination with knowledge can be traced to the earliest writings. Early theories were concerned with the seat of thought and memory. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics suggest their authors believed that knowledge was localised in the heart—a view shared by the early Greek philosopher Aristotle but not by Plato, who held that the brain was the locus of knowledge.

2. Cognition in the Renaissance and Beyond

Renaissance philosophers and theologians seemed generally satisfied that knowledge was located in the brain. They considered that knowledge was acquired not only through the physical senses (mundus sensibilis – touch, taste, smell, vision, and hearing) but also from divine sources (mundus intellectualis—Deus).

During the eighteenth century, when philosophic psychology was brought to the point where, scientific psychology could assume a role, the British empiricists, George Berkeley, David Hume, and, later, James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill suggested that internal representation is of three types:

(1) direct sensory events,

(2) faint copies of percepts, or those that are stored in memory; and

(3) transformation of these faint copies, as in associated thought.

These notions are the basis of much current research in cognitive psychology. During the nineteenth century, the early psychologists like Gustav Fechner, Franz Brentano, Hermann Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, G; E. Muller, Oswald Kulpe, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Sir Francis Galton, Edward Titchener, and William James and others started to break away from philosophy to form a discipline based on empirical results rather than on speculation. By the last half of the nineteenth century, theories of the representation of knowledge were clearly dichotomous: that emphasised the structure of mental representation (Wundt, Titchner); and the processes or acts (Brentano). About the same time in America, James critically analysed the new psychology that was developing in Germany. He established the first’ psychological laboratory in America, wrote the definitive work in psychology in 1890 (Principles of Psychology), and developed a well-reasoned model of the mind. Perhaps James’s most direct link with modem cognitive psychology is in his view of memory, in which both structure and process play an important role. F. C. Donders and James Cattell, contemporaries of James’s, performed experiments using the perception of brief visual displays as a means of determining the time required for mental operations. The technique, subject matter, procedures, and even the interpretation of results of these early scientists seem to have anticipated the emergence of the cognitive psychology a half-century later.

3. Cognitive Psychology in Early Twentieth Century

The representation of knowledge took a radical turn with the advent of twentieth century behaviourism and Gestalt psychology. The behaviourist views of human and animal psychology were cast in a framework of stimulus-response (S-R) psychology, and Gestalt theorists built elaborate conceptualisations of internal representation within the context of isomorphism – one-to-one relationship between representation and reality.

Psychological studies of mental processes as conceptualised in the late nineteenth century suddenly became unfashionable, displaced by behaviourism. Studies of internal mental operations and structures such as attention, consciousness, memory, and thinking were laid to rest and remained so for about fifty years. To the behaviourists, internal states were subsumed under the label of “intervening variable,” that mediated the effects of stimuli on responses and were neglected in favour of making observations on behaviour rather than on the mental processes. In 1932, some years before the cognitive revolution swept across psychology, learning psychologist Edward Tolman from the University of California at Berkeley published Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men. In this seminal work, Tolman observed that what rats learn in a maze is the layout of the land rather than simply a series of S-R connections. The animal, according to Tolman’s interpretation, gradually developed a “picture” of his environment that was later used to find the goal. This picture was called a cognitive map. Tolman’s postulate about cognitive maps in animals did anticipate the contemporary preoccupation with how knowledge is represented in a cognitive structure.

Also, in 1932 Sir Frederick Bartlett from Cambridge University wrote Remembering in which he rejected the then popular view that memory and forgetting can be studied by means of nonsense syllables, as had been advocated by Ebbinghaus in Germany during the previous century. In the study of human memory, Bartlett argued, the use of rich and meaningful material under naturalistic conditions would yield far more significant conclusions. Bartlett introduced the concept of schema as a unifying theme that describes the essence of an experience. Schema theory plays a central role in modern theories of memory. The prolific ideas of Tolman in America and Bartlett in England highly influenced the thinking of future cognitive psychologists.

4. Cognitive Psychology—As it is Today

In the 1950s interest again began to focus on attention, memory, pattern recognition, images, semantic organisation, language processes, thinking, and even consciousness, as well as other “cognitive” topics once considered outside the boundary of experimental psychology (vis-à-vis. behaviourism). New journals and professional groups were founded as psychologists began more and more to turn to cognitive psychology. As cognitive psychology became established with even greater clarity, it was plain that this was a brand of psychology different from that in vogue during the 1930s and 1940s.

Among the most important forces accounting for this neo cognitive revolution were the following:

a) The “failure” of behaviourism: Behaviorism, which generally studied overt responses to stimuli, failed to account for the diversity of human behaviour as in the case of language. Furthermore, there were some topics ignored by the behaviourists that seemed to be profoundly related to human psychology. These included: memory, attention, consciousness, thinking, and imagery. It was apparent that internal mental processes were very real parts of psychology and required investigation.

b) The emergence of communication theory: Communication theory prompted experiments in signal detection, attention, cybernetics, and information theory – areas of significance to cognitive psychology.

c) Modem linguistics: New ways of viewing language and grammatical structure became incorporated into attitudes concerning cognitions.

d) Memory research: Research in verbal learning and semantic organisation provided a sturdy empirical base for theories of memory, which led to the development of models of memory systems and the appearance of testable models of other cognitive processes.

e) Computer science and other technological advances: Computer science, and especially a subdivision of it—artificial intelligence—caused re-examination of basic postulates of problem solving and memory processing and storage, as well as of language processing and acquisition. Research capabilities were greatly expanded by new experimental devices.

f) Cognitive development: Psychologists interested in development psychology discovered an orderly unfolding of abilities with maturation. Notable among developmental psychologists during this period was Jean Piaget, who described how children develop an appreciation for concepts from infancy to adolescence. Such progress of abilities seems to be natural.

From the earliest concepts of representational knowledge to recent research, knowledge has been thought to rely heavily on sensory inputs. That theme runs from the Greek philosophers, through Renaissance scholars, to contemporary cognitive psychologists. But are internal representations of the world identical to the physical properties of the world? Evidence is increasing that many internal representations of reality are not the same as the external reality—that is, they are not isomorphic. Tolman’s work with laboratory animals and Bartlett’s work with human subjects suggest that information from the senses is stored as an abstract representation. Furthermore, studies of neurology clearly show that information from the outside world is sensed and stored as in a neurochemical code.

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