Cognition (psychology)

Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology based on the idea that human actions and behavior grow out of thought processes. It stands in direct contrast to behavioral psychology, which suggests that human actions often occur because of internal chemistry. Cognitive psychology is thought to have originated in the 1950s in reaction to the behavioral work of the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Such treatments as cognitive behavioral therapy are direct results of the work of early cognitive psychologists.

History

The branch of psychology known as cognitive psychology came about during the 1950s. At that time, there was a development in the psychology field called the cognitive revolution. Many scholars consider cognitive psychology to have started almost a century earlier, with the work, for instance, of Dutch physiologist Franciscus Donders (1818–89). Donders executed a series of experiments designed to show that, on some level, people think through all of their actions, regardless of whether they seem to be merely reacting to a stimulus.

Such scientists as Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchner attempted to find the crucial elements of what they called conscious experience—that is, stimuli received by the senses and processed by the mind. They did this through rigorous examination of the data available to them in subjects’ actions, rather than forming theories based on heredity or other genetic aspects of the subjects’ makeup.

The work of Hermann von Helmholtz also proved to be significant. Helmholtz claimed that as humans move through the world, the way in which they progress is very much aided and facilitated by a set of assumptions they make about the world. The process of decision-making and evaluation, therefore, becomes bound up with the action of inference.

Later, the work of Ivan Pavlov and Edward Thorndike became important, most notably through Pavlov’s famous experiment in which a dog drooled every time it saw food, without needing to be trained to do so.

The last major predecessors of cognitive psychology were B. F. Skinner and John Broadus Watson, whose work focused on observation of behavior and what could be gleaned from simply watching the behavior, not attempting to reach too far toward inference about a subject’s intellectual processes. The reaction to this behaviorist thinking was led by Noam Chomsky, a linguist. Chomsky believed that humans know some things innately—things that cannot be taught, and the ability to use and generate language is one of them.

In the 1950s, the cognitive revolution occurred in psychology. This revolution intertwined with the developments in computer technology that were taking place at the time. Just as computers were developing from crude machines that did simple calculations into complex objects that made decisions based on a flow-chart theory of cognition, psychologists were becoming increasingly interested in the extent to which the human mind affected the decisions the psyche was said to make.

The theory of human behavior that the early cognitive psychologists arrived at was a combination of two distinct paths of investigation: One could observe human behavior and make inferences based on it, and one could also try to determine what effect the internal makeup of a person had on their actions. In a sense, the cognitive approach was a compromise between older schools of thought on how people behaved and more forward-looking attitudes.

Methodology

In its most contemporary form, cognitive psychology focuses on several things: language, memory, and the neural "glue" that holds these things together. One idea that is central to this branch of psychology is that humans remember things hierarchically, and that hierarchy is inevitably linked to language. A person’s knowledge of the meaning of a word is never far from their knowledge of the terms that are associated with it. For instance, if one thinks of the word snake, one might automatically think of the word reptile and then of the word invertebrate; therefore, the words reptile and invertebrate would be linked to the word snake.

Some psychologists then introduced another idea: A person’s conception of a term is linked to the mental images they form. For example, the word chair calls up an image in a person’s mind of a certain chair, which is placed there subsequent to the experiences that person has had throughout life of chairs of different shapes and sizes. These mental images then gel in the mind into a sort of ideal form of an object, somewhat akin to the Greek philosopher Plato’s concept of forms. This thinking would eventually give way to what was called the connectionist model, in which human understanding of a word is linked to the various neural activities—sensory and otherwise—that take place in response to that term. This development in cognitive psychology would be most applicable to similar developments in computer science, looking toward the progress of artificial intelligence.

Lastly, cognitive psychologists began to use imaging technology to deepen their understanding of human thought. Through sensors that track neural activity, cognitive psychologists have been able to map, after a fashion, the path of human decisions, examining the ways that neural exchanges within body chemistry can be tied directly to actions in the real world. This sort of exploration begins on a more local level, with experiments that examine the neural response to individual words or phrases, and then graduates toward more complex mappings, covering a wide range of emotions and reactions. Cognitive behavioral therapy, which grew gradually out of these lines of study, is generally based on the idea that one can think one’s way out of a psychological dilemma.

Bibliography

Cherry, Kendra. "What Does 'Cognitive' Mean in Psychology?" Verywell Mind, 21 Apr. 2024, www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognition-2794982. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

Dawson, Michael R. What Is Cognitive Psychology? AU Press, 2022.

McLeod, Saul. "Cognitive Approach in Psychology." Simply Psychology, 27 Mar. 2024, www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive.html. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

O’Donohue, William T. Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Core Principles for Practice. Wiley, 2012.

Radvansky, Gabriel A., and Mark H. Ashcraft. Cognition. 7th ed., Pearson, 2018.

Smith, E. E. "Cognitive Psychology: History." International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, Elsevier, 2001, pp. 2140–47.