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History Of Cognition
The cognitive perspective was formed in opposition to
behaviourism, as it had supposedly reached a dead end, and it was
too narrow minded and reductionist.
The main assumption of behaviourism was hat only observational
behaviour can be studied scientifi cally, and that humans are
shaped by their environment.
The cognitive perspective rejects these theories, and the main
assumptions of the cognitive perspective are;
Internal mental processes can and should be studied scientifically
Cognitive processes actively process and manipulate the information
we receive
Psychological processes like memory can be modelled and these
models can be the base of experimentation
Animals can be studied to further understand the human behaviour
The five main parts of the cognitive perspective are;
 Perception
 Attention
 Language
 Memory
 Thinking
Important parts of cognitive perspective;
Computer science and artificial intelligence
Linguistics
Studies on the development of knowledge
Philosophical Roots of the cogniti ve perspective
For more than 2000 years people have wondered where our
knowledge comes from, where it is stored, how we represent it in
our minds. Although people have wondered about it for a long
time, it has only been scientifically studied for the past 50 years or
so. Before the rise of the cognitive perspective, several theories
were made as to where knowledge comes from, is stored and how
it is represented in our minds. The ancient Egyptians and Aristotle
believed that knowledge came from the heart, Empiricists believe
knowledge is gained from experience , nativists believe that
knowledge is innate; genetically inherited, and theologians believe
that knowledge is in the brain.
Wilhelm Wundt was the original founder of the first proper psych
ology experimental lab, and made possible for psychology to be a
science in its own. In 1875, Wundt proposed the theory that mental
processes can be broken down into the basic elements; feelings,
sensation, images. Wundt's approach
to psychology was called structuralism. Wundt believed that mental
processes could be measure by introspection, this is when an
individual is experiencing an event, or an object and is asked to
report their mental processes. This structuralism approach was
rejected in 1920' s because psychologists were feeling that
psychology needed to be studied as a whole, not broken down.
This caused the rise of other perspectives, such as behaviourism.
Gestalt psychology also formed as a partial reaction to structuralism,
the gestalt th eory has to do with perception. It states that our minds
hold the innate ability to organise what we see, which allows us to
deconstruct a whole image that we initially see, into carious
components without having to actively organise it. The principle of
gestalt psychology is that the larger picture is seen before its
components. Gestalt psychology was formed around 1912 by
Wertheimer, Kohler and several other psychologists.
Even before the gestalt theory was developed, Ebbinghaus was
experimenting on memory. He studied higher levels of cognitive
processes that were rejected by Wundt. In 1879he conducted an
experiment on himself. He used nonsense syllables to study the
fundamentals of learning. In this experiment he memorised 13
nonsense syllables, and then measure how long it took him to
forget them. (nonsense syllables are words that start with a
consonant, then a vowel, and then end with a consonant, like cat,
dog, pot, etc). From his results he concluded with the "forgetting
curve". This sho ws the pattern of forgetting things over time,
where you forget the most information within an hour after
learning it, and the rest gradually is forgotten.
Wolfgang Kohler, one of the gestalt psychology psychologists,
studied memory under natural conditions, instead of using
laboratory conditions. He believed that past experiences, ideas and
schemas help us reshape information so it can be easily retrieved
from long term memory. In 1932 he conducted an experiment in
which half the participants were t old a story, and asked to recall
the story over several period of time. The rest of the participants
were asked to retell their story to another individual. The results
from this experiment showed that people tend to "misremember"
things so that they fit with our previous experience, knowledge and
mental schemas. The recall tended to be bias depending on the
individuals attitudes, interest, social standards, and so on.
During WWII (1939 -1945), there was sparked interest in computer
science, artificial technology and human attention/performance.
Military forces needed to design effective radar and
telecommunication systems. Military forces also needed high
performing people to recruit.
In 1948, Edward Tolman challenged the behaviourism. He put for
ward the idea that behaviour is more complex than just a reward
and punishment system, and the behaviourism was too
reductionist. He said that organisms had mental representations
and expectations that determine their behaviour. He experimented
on rats by putting them in a maze, and concluded that they had
cognitive maps (memory paths). Cognitive maps are the mental
processing methods we use to structure and store spatial
knowledge, allowing us to visualise images to reduce cognitive load
and enhance r ecall and learning information.
In 1965, George Miller put forward his theory on the magic
number 7, plus or minus 2. He claimed that our short term
memory can hold around 7 pieces of information, his "chunking"
theory.
The final major experiment/theory in the cognitive perspective
came in 1965 by Noam Chompsky. He concentrated on the area of
language and disagreed with Skinner's idea about language.
Chompsky believed that language and how we acquire it could not
be explained by behaviourism. He claimed that when children
reached the age of 3, they could understand syntax through a
genetic predisposition, called Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
He believed that everyone is born with one which is why llittle kids
can understand syntax, and don't have much trouble learning it
generally.