Cognitive Psychology Historical Background Modus Operandi Take Home Points

• From the very start, cognitive psychology was greatly influenced by other disciplines.
• Explanation in cognitive psychology is always in terms of internal mental representations and processes.
• Cognitive Psychology is different from neuroscience because its domain of study is information processing described at the software level.

What is Cognitive Psychology?

• Empirical science of the mind and human behavior
• Subject matter is human information processing without necessarily being concerned with how processes are implemented in the brain
• Primary methodology: Experimentation on human subjects
• Developed in the 1950s and 1960s
• Ground-breaking text written by Ulric Neisser 1967

The Experimental Method

• Observatations of the world
• Development of theories
• Broad in their coverage
• Parsimonious
• Consistent with known data
• Falsifiable
• Theories lead to predictions.  "If the theory is true what would I expect to happen?" These predictions are called hypotheses.
• Experiments are conducted to test these hypotheses.
• If the hypothesis is confirmed it tends to strengthen the theory from which it was derived.
• If the hypothesis is disconfirmed it tends to weaken the theory from which it was derived.

The Influence of Philosophy on the Emergence of Psychology

• The Mind-Body problem
• Descartes: Dualism
• Hobbes: Materialism
• Hegel: Idealism
• The Origin of Knowledge
• Locke: Empiricism
• Kant: Nativism

The Emergence of Psychology

• Physiological Psychology: Hermann von Helmholtz
• Wilhelm Wundt: Structuralism; Introspection (Representation)
• William James: Functionalism; Stream of consciousness (Process)
• Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis; mental representations; processes; the unconscious

John Watson: Behaviorism

Development of Cognitive Psychology: The Influence of Computer Science

• Alan Turing: Universal Turning Machines; The Turing Test
• Newell and Simon: The General Problem Solver
• Roger Schank: Conceptual Dependency Theory; Scripts

Development of Cognitive Psychology: The Influence of Linguistics

• Noam Chomsky: Transformational grammar; Deep structure; Surface structure

The Birth of Cognitive Psychology

• Birth of Cognitive Psychology often dated back to George Miller’s (1956) “The Magical Number 7 Plus or Minus 2”
• Newell and Simon’s development of the General Problem Solver
• Ulric Neisser (1967) publishes “Cognitive Psychology”
• Process models of memory Atkinson & Shiffrin’s (1969) Multistore Model.
• Cognitive approach highly influential(dominant)  in all areas of psychology

Explanation in Cognitive Psychology

• In Cognitive Psychology explanations are always in terms of internal mental representations and processes that store, retrieve, and make use of those representations.

The Nature of Representation

• Target Domain
• Modeling Domain
• Systematic relationship between target domain and modeling domain
• Representations don’t have to look like the thing they are representing
• More than one representation for a particular target domain
• Implicit vs. Explicit representation

The Hardware/Software Distinction

• Hardware: The brain
• Software: The steps the brain carries out
• Cognitive Psychology is about information processing not necessarily about how its implemented in the brain