The different cognitive approaches share the fact that they consider fundamental the perceptual and intellectual processes that take place at the moment in which a subject analyzes and interprets the environment in which he or she operates, as well as his or her own thoughts and behaviors. The expression active information processing It summarizes this type of approach very well. The beginning of the development of this type of approach is the work of Tolman (1932) and Lewin (1936).
According to Tolman The psychology of motivation is very similar to McDougall’s intentionalismwith the Gestalt approaches, with the Field Theory of Lewin and to a certain extent with certain psychoanalytic arguments.
It defends the importance of goals in behavior, as well as the intentionality of behavior. Starting with Tolman, the behaviorist movement began to use terms such as expectation, purpose and cognitive map. Motivated behavior has molar characteristics, is goal-directed, persistent and selective. The subject does not learn simple ER associations but the relationship between a behavior and a particular goal; To do this, he needs to develop a cognitive map of his environment, which allows him to locate each of the possible goals. Provides various reasons to explain motivated behavior:
- Primary reasons: innate. Search for food, water and sex, elimination of waste, avoidance of pain, rest, aggression, reducing curiosity and the need for contact.
- Secondary reasons: innate. Affiliation, dominance, submission and dependence.
- Tertiary reasons: learned.
Achievement of cultural goals. In his theory, the tendency to behave in a specific way is defined by a multiplicative function of three types of variables:
- Motivational variable: need or desire for some particular goal object.
- Expectation variable: belief, quantitatively fluctuating, that a particular behavior, in a particular situation, leads to a goal object.
- Incentive variable: value that the target object has for the subject.
LEWIN. Motivation in behavior is explained from homeostatic approaches. Behavior is the result of the set of forces that act on the subject. It defends active problem solving and the existence of psychological needs (quasi-needs).
The outline of his approach, generically called field theoryassumes that behavior is a function of the vital space, which consists of person (influenced by two types of needs: physiological and psychological that produce tension or motivational state) and psychological environment (contains goals that considerably influence the subject’s behavior).
Lewin thought that through topologycan explain the “locomotion” (change in psychological space) of the subject in his psychological environment. The term “conduct” in Lewin it is used to describe the structural changes in that environment. The strength of behavior (F), which has vector characteristics, is a function of the subject’s internal state of tension