Cognitivism is born from the desire to explore mental content and, above all, its processes, such as processing information, making decisions, solving problems, understanding a text, planning behavior, etc. and it is possible to study them scientifically by formalizing them through the computer, that is, by guessing the algorithms followed by the brain and preparing simulations that can test and verify them. Thanks to this Psychology-Online article we will be able to better understand What is cognitive psychology, its history and its most important authors.
Definition of cognitive psychology
The cognitive psychologyalso called cognitivism or cognitive psychology or cognitivism, is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes: perception, memory, learning, attention, language, logical reasoning…
If behaviorism attempts to study observable behaviors, cognitivism speculates and formalizes unobservable mental processes, exalting the active role of the subject in the elaboration of the surrounding reality, giving greater emphasis to the internal processes of coding and representation. Cognitive psychologists maintain that it is possible to understand cognitive activity only by observing people’s performance when faced with cognitive tasks.
History of cognitive psychology
The crisis that occurred in psychology in the 1930s and 1940s substantially led to the end of the old great schools – behaviorism and -, laying the foundations for the birth of a new movement, much longer and more durable: cognitivism. , the psychology of cognitive processes.
Cognitivism, far from the 19th century mentalism of the associationists and the early Watson, is not a unitary school or a single theory, but rather a particular type of approach to the study of the psyche, endowed with a high degree of abstraction and with the tendency to privilege the study of people’s abilities to acquire, organize, remember and make concrete use of knowledge to guide their actions.
He birth of cognitivism owes much to the importation of ideas taken from studies on artificial intelligence (computer science and cybernetics), started around the fifties of the last century, but it was the psychologist George Miller who proposed a precise date of birth of cognitive psychology: September 11, 1956, the day on which a seminar on information theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologywhich included three conferences:
- Chomsky’s on language.
- That of Newell and Simon about a “theoretical logical machine.”
- Miller’s on short-term memory.
In 1960 and Miller founded the first center for cognitive studies at Harvard, while in 1971 the first Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California (San Diego). Bruner mainly dealt with categorization processes, highlighting that activities such as perception and memorization are partly the result of individual strategies of the active subject; Miller and colleagues, instead, proposed a new theory of behavior closely related to research on artificial intelligence, concluding that Behind every behavior there is a “plan” equivalent to a computer program.
Finally, in the development of cognitive sciences, the rediscovery of studies on the genesis of intelligence initiated by and developed in that period thanks to Bruner. In 1967, the book Cognitive psychology by the American psychologist Ulric Neisser was published, which synthesized the research carried out in the previous ten years according to the perspective that, precisely after this book, was definitively called cognitivist.
Characteristics of cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a movement based on a conception that constitutes a synthesis of the contributions made by the theories of psychologists such as Donald O. Hebb, artificial intelligence and information theory, and can be briefly described as follows:
- Psychology must focus its attention on the peculiarities of mediation processes that the organism introduces between stimulus and responsewhich are not attributable to descriptions in terms exclusively of observable magnitudes, but can be studied by formulating operating models, which allow predictions to be made about observable behavior (comparing them with the results of laboratory experiments).
- Knowledge processing processes coincide with those of information processing: knowledge, that is, information, can be measured in bits, and the processes of acquisition, retrieval and use of knowledge are equivalent to those of a computer.
- Knowledge is represented in the form of sequences of symbols, and cognitive processing processes are calculation programs based on algorithms that allow these symbols to be processed, as in Software.
Therefore, the main task of cognitive scientists is to develop computational models in order to understand the human cognitive activity.
Books and authors of cognitivism in psychology
Cognitive science comprises several disciplines: cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, neurosciences, linguistics, philosophy and anthropology; all those disciplines whose common purpose is to understand the functioning of the mind.
Between 1956 and 1960, the following basic books or articles for the “cognitive revolution” were published, relating to these different disciplines:
- 1956: A study of thinking by Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Goodnow and George A. Austin.
- 1956: article by George A. Miller about (“the magical number seven”)
- 1957: Syntactic structures of Noam Chomsky.
- 1958: Perception and communication of Donald E. Broadbent.
- 1958: The computer and the brain by John von Neumann.
- 1958: article by Allen Newell, John C. Shaw and Herbert A. Simon about him problem solving.
- 1959: article by David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel son the receptive fields of the cat’s striate cortex.
- 1959: article by Jerome Y. Lettvin, Humberto R. Maturana, Warren S. Mcculloch and Walter H. Pitts about “what the frog’s eye says to the frog’s brain.”
- 1960: essay by the philosopher Hilary Putnam in Minds and machines.
- 1960: Plans and the structure of behavior George A. Miller, Karl H. Pribram and Eugene Galanter.
- 1960: article by George Sperling about iconic memory.
Examples of cognitive psychology
Miller, Galater and Pribram, starting from the stimulus-response model of behaviorism, developed the TOTE model (Test, Operate, Test, Exit; i.e. check, execute, verify, finish) based on the assumption that when you display a certain behavior you have a goal in mind. The purpose of your behavior is to get as close as possible to the desired result, and to evaluate whether you have achieved your goal, you check the strategy: if the goal has been achieved, you interrupt your behavior and end the strategy; If the goal has not been achieved, you change your behavior and start again, according to a simple feedback and response cycle.
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Bibliography
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- Canestrari, R., Godino, A. (2002). Introduction to general psychology. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
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- De Cesare, G., De Cesare, G. (2013). Vipassanā meditation and cognitive psychology. East and west in confrontation. Cambridge: Green Books.
- Mecacci, L. (2019). History of psychology. Dal novecento ad oggi. Bari: Laterza.
- Pessa, E., Pietronilla Penna, M. (2000). The rappresentation of knowledge. Introduction to the psychology of cognitive processes. Rome: Armando.