Cognitivism (psychology)
Cognitivism, or cognitive psychology, is a branch of psychology that emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a response to behaviorism, emphasizing the study of mental processes such as thinking, memory, perception, and language. Unlike behaviorism, which focuses solely on observable behaviors, cognitivism posits that mental states can be studied and understood. It conceptualizes the mind as an information processor, akin to a computer, where knowledge is organized in complex forms known as mental representations.
Key figures in the development of cognitivism include George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Noam Chomsky. The field has led to significant advancements in understanding human cognition through experimental methods that range from brain imaging techniques like PET and fMRI to traditional psychological assessments. Cognitivism has also influenced various related disciplines, including linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cultural anthropology, contributing to a broader interdisciplinary field known as cognitive science.
While cognitivism has provided valuable insights into the workings of the mind, critics argue that it may overlook the impact of emotions, consciousness, and the social environment on cognitive processes. Nonetheless, the integration of neurobiology into cognitive psychology continues to enhance our understanding of cognition in contemporary research.
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Cognitivism (psychology)
Developed in the late twentieth century, cognitivism, or cognitive psychology, is a school of psychology that aims to understand cognition (thinking) as a phenomenon that is the cause of, rather than caused by, behaviors. The mind as information processor is the theoretical foundation of cognitivism, and this framework has led to numerous studies of mental processes such as perception, attention, recognition, recall, decision making, and language. Several related fields, including linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology, have benefited from cognitive psychology research.
Overview
Behaviorism, the study of human behaviors, was the predominant school of psychology for much of the early to mid-twentieth century in the United States. Behaviorists believe that internal mental states can never truly be known; they therefore limit their research to external, observable stimuli and human behaviors as conditioned responses based on previous associations.
Cognitive psychology arose roughly between 1950 and 1970 in opposition to behaviorism, positing that mental states both can and should be studied. Among the major early proponents of cognitivism were George Miller, Donald Broadbent, Jerome Bruner, Ulric Neisser, and Noam Chomsky. Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology (1967) is seen as the cognitivism’s seminal text, as it was the first to aggregate the field’s findings to date.
Cognitivism asserts that humans acquire and maintain bodies of knowledge that contain how-to procedures as well as perceived facts. Cognitivists generally see the mind as an information processor like a computer, receiving, transmitting, and storing inputs. Bodies of knowledge consist of complex symbols known as “mental representations”—including rules and logic, concepts, analogies, and images—and are analogous to the data structures in a computer. Mental processes, such as retrieval, pattern recognition, and categorization, are seen as akin to the sequential algorithms that run computer software, while the brain itself is considered analogous to the computer hardware.
Computational models are often used to describe the processes required for thought. Traditional cognitivist models postulate that mental processes are sequential. Connectionist models, on the other hand, propose that interconnected networks of mental representations allow for parallel processing of information. Over time, connectionism has come to the fore in cognitive psychology, as it accounts for several real-world phenomena, such as the gradual impairment of functioning seen in neurological conditions.
Experimental methods in cognitive psychology include introspection, naturalistic observation, controlled observation, clinical interviews, experiments, and brain imaging using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques. Cognitivist experiments have investigated the nature and structure of short-term and long-term memory, mental chronometry (the length of time required to complete a mental task), pattern and object recognition, and hierarchies of semantics (word meanings), among other subjects.
Critics point out that cognitive psychology fails to address fully the roles of emotion, consciousness, and physical and social environments in cognition. Moreover, they note that the mind is unlike a computational system, in that it is ever changing and not computational in a traditional mathematical sense. However, interdisciplinary research involving neurobiology is better informing twenty-first-century cognitive psychology theories and models.
Over the decades, cognitivism has given rise to a number of subfields, including mathematical psychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence, as well as to the broader, interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. Cognitive science encompasses cognitive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and philosophy of mind.
Bibliography
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