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COGNITIVE MOVEMENT IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THOUGHT OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Unit 4. COGNITIVISM

Text A Cognitive movement in psychological thought of the 20th century

Text В Déjà vu

COGNITIVE MOVEMENT IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THOUGHT OF THE 20TH CENTURY

In the second half of the twentieth century, the invention of the com­puter and the way of thinking associated with it led to a new approach or orientation to psychology called the cognitive movement. The roots of the cognitive movement are extremely varied: they include, behavior­ism, humanism, etc. They include thinkers from linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and engineering; and it especially involves specialists in computer technology and the field of artificial intelligence.

Cognition means «knowing» and cognitive processes refer to the ways in which knowledge is gained, used and retained. Cognitivists be­lieve that the study of internal processes is important in understanding behaviour because humans do not passively respond to the environ­ment. Cognitive processes actively organize and manipulate the infor­mation we receive. Therefore, cognitive psychologists study perception, attention, memory, thinking, language and problem solving. They also attempted to explain artificial intelligence and abnormality.

Cognitive psychology developed as a separate area within the disci­pline since the late 1950s and early 1960s (though there are examples of cognitive thinking from earlier researchers). The term came into use with the publication of the book "Cognitive psychology" by Ulrich Neisser in 1967. However, the cognitive approach was brought to prom­inence by Donald Broadbent's book "Perception and Communication" in 1958. Since that time, the dominant paradigm in the area has been the information processing model of cognition that Broadbent put for­ward. This is a way of thinking and reasoning about mental processes, imagining them like software running on the computer that is the brain. Theories commonly refer to forms of input, representation, com­putation or processing, and outputs. Interest in mental processes ap­peared in the works of Tolman and Piaget, but it was the computer that introduced the terminology and metaphor necessary to investigate the human mind. Cognitive psychology compares the human mind to a computer and suggests that we are information processors. From the per­spective of the cognitive psychology it is possible to study the internal mental processes that lie between the stimuli we receive and the re­sponses we make.

Cognitive psychologists use a number of experimental techniques, including laboratory-based research with normal and brain-damaged subjects, as well as computer and mathematical models to test and vali­date theories.

This way of conceiving mental processes has pervaded psychology more generally over the past few decades, and it is not uncommon to find cognitive theories within social psychology, personality, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology. The application of cognitive theories in comparative psychology has led to many recent studies in an­imal cognition.

The information processing approach to cognitive functioning is cur­rently being questioned by new approaches in psychology.

Many are hoping that cognitive psychology will prove to be the par­adigm we have been waiting for. It is still early to tell, but the signifi­cance of cognitive psychology is impossible to deny.