Cognitive psychology
School · 1950s onward, United States and Britain · Psychology, stage 2: Map the schools
Cognitive psychology put mental processes back at the centre of the field after behaviourism had ruled them out of bounds, and it did so without returning to introspection. Its move was to treat the mind as an information processor whose internal operations can be inferred from behaviour, using reaction times, error patterns, and memory performance as evidence about structure that cannot be observed directly. The change is usually dated to the mid-1950s, with George Miller's paper on the limits of immediate memory, Noam Chomsky's argument that language acquisition cannot be explained by conditioning, and the arrival of the computer as a working analogy for what a mind might be. Ulric Neisser's 1967 textbook named the field, and Alan Baddeley's model of working memory and the heuristics-and-biases programme of Tversky and Kahneman are among its most durable products.
What it claims
- Mental processes are real and can be studied scientifically, by inference rather than introspection.
- The mind can be modelled as a system that receives, stores, transforms, and retrieves information.
- Behavioural measures such as reaction time and error pattern are evidence about internal structure.
- Some capacities, notably language, cannot be explained by conditioning alone.
Key ideas
People
Sources
- Cognitive psychology Wikipedia
- Cognitive Science Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Cognitive revolution Wikipedia
