Wilhelm Wundt was the original founder of the first proper psychology 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 theory 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 shows 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 told 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 forward 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 recall 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.
