The History of

Cognitive Psychology
Presented by:
Dr Yashpal Azad
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Eternal University, Baru Sahib
  Philosophically, the starting thoughts about the human mind and
its processes have been thought to sown around since the times of
the ancient Greeks.
 In 387 BCE, Plato is known to have suggested that the brain was
the seat of the mental processes.
 In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans are born with innate
ideas, and forwarded the idea of mind-body dualism, which would
History come to be known as substance dualism (essentially the idea that
the mind and the body are two separate substances).
 From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century
regarding whether human thought was solely experiential (
empiricism), or included innate knowledge (rationalism).
 Some of those involved in this debate included George Berkeley
and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on
the side of nativism.
  With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid to late 19th
century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a
scientific discipline.
 Two discoveries that would later play substantial roles in cognitive
psychology were Paul Broca's discovery of the area of the brain
History largely responsible for language production, and Carl Wernicke's
discovery of an area thought to be mostly responsible for
Continue…. comprehension of language.
 Both areas were subsequently formally named for their founders
and disruptions of an individual's language production or
comprehension due to trauma or malformation in these areas
have come to commonly be known as Broca's
aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia.
  From the 1920s to the 1950s, the main approach to psychology
was Behaviourism. Initially, its adherents viewed mental events
such as thoughts, ideas, attention, and consciousness as
unobservable.
 One pioneer of cognitive psychology, who worked outside the
History boundaries (both intellectual and geographical) of behaviourism
was Jean Piaget.
Continue….  From 1926 to the 1950s and into the 1980s, he studied the
thoughts, language, and intelligence of children and adults.
  In the mid-20th century, three main influences arose that shaped
the Cognitive Psychology as a formal school of thought:
 1. With the development of new warfare technology during World
War-II, the need for a greater understanding of human
performance came to prominence. Problems such as how to best
History train soldiers to use new technology and how to deal with matters
Continue…. of attention while under duress became areas of need for military
personnel. Behaviourism provided little if any insight into these
matters and it was the work of Donald Broadbent, integrating
concepts from human performance research and the recently
developed information theory, that forged the way in this area.
  2. Developments in computer science lead to parallels being
drawn between human thought and the computational
functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas
of Psychological thought.

History  Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the
concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and later worked with
Continue…. cognitive psychologists regarding the implications of AI.
 This encouraged a conceptualization of mental functions
patterned on the way that computers handled such things as
memory storage and retrieval, and it opened an important
doorway for cognitivism.
 3. Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of behaviourism, and empiricism
more generally, initiated what would come to be known as the
"cognitive revolution". Inside psychology, in criticism of
behaviorism, J. S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow & G. A. Austin wrote "a
History study of thinking" in 1956. In 1960, G. A. Miller, E. Galanter and K.
Pribram wrote their famous "Plans and the Structure of Behavior".
Continue…. The same year, Bruner and Miller founded the Harvard Center for
Cognitive Studies, which institutionalized the revolution and
launched the field of cognitive science.
  Formal recognition of the field involved the establishment of
research institutions such as George Mandler's Center for Human
Information Processing in 1964. Mandler described the origins of
cognitive psychology in a 2002 article in the Journal of the History
of the Behavioral Sciences.
 Ulric Neisser put the term "cognitive psychology" into common
use through his book Cognitive Psychology, published in
1967. Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates the then-
History progressive concept of cognitive processes:

Continue….  The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory
input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and
used.
 It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in
the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images
and hallucinations.
  Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is
involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every
psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon.
 But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human
activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a
particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and
necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather
than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a
History man's actions and experiences result from what he saw,
Continue…. remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they
follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.
 The cognitive approach does not always recognize physical
(re: biological psychology) and environmental (re: Behaviorism)
factors in determining behaviour.
 Cognitive psychology has influenced and integrated with many other
approaches and areas of study to produce, for example, social
learning theory, cognitive neuropsychology and artificial intelligence
(AI).