Cognitive Psychology.

Cognitive Psychology

What is cognitive psychology?

Cognitive psychology is a general approach to psychology emphasizing the internal mental processes. To the cognitive psychologist behaviour is not specifiable simply in terms of its overt properties but requires explanations at the level of mental events, mental representations, beliefs, intentions, etc. Although the cognitive approach is often contrasted sharply with the behaviourist approach it is not necessarily the case that cognitivists are anti-behaviouristic. Rather, behaviourism is viewed as seriously incomplete as a general theory, one which fails to provide any coherent characterisation of cognitive processes like thinking, language, decision making, etc. unlike the behaviourists, the cognitive approach does not put forward a single body of theory and no single theorist has predominated the development of the approach (although Piaget and Bruner are two of the better known theorists.)

In the late 1950s, may British and American psychologists began looking to the work of computer scientists to try and understand more complex behaviours which, they felt, had been either neglects altogether or greatly oversimplified by learning theory (conditioning). These complex behaviours were what Wundt, James and other early scientific psychologist had called ‘mind’ or mental processes. They are now called cognition or cognitive processes (also mediational processes) and refer to all the ways in which we comes to know about the world around us, how we attain, retain and regain information, through the processes of perception, attention, memory, problem solving, language and thinking, reasoning and concept formation (‘higher order’ mental activities). Perception, attention, language, memory and thinking are defined below.

Perception is an active mediational process that allows us to process, organise and interpret sensory information from our outside world.

Attention is a general term referring to the selective aspects of perception which function so that at any instant an organism focuses on certain features of the environment to the (relative) exclusion of other features.

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Perception is an active mediational process that allows us to process, organise and interpret sensory information from our outside world.

Language is quite difficult to define, a language is what we speak, the set of arbitrary conventional symbols through which we convey meaning, the culturally determined pattern of vocal gestures we acquire by virtue of being raised in a particular place and time, the medium through which we code our feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences. Yet as the term is used, it may mean all of these, none of them or even things very different.

Memory is our active mediational process, which organises, stories, retrieves and helps us recognise information about our world.

Thinking as an information process is a whole-brain activity involving perception, attention, memory and language. All of which contribute towards problem solving, creativity and intellectual functioning.

‘Cognitive psychologists see people as information processors, and cognitive psychology has been heavily influenced by computer science, with human cognition processes being compared with the operation of computer programs’.

Gross et al, Psychology a new introduction.. 2002, pg. 2

Do you think it is a fair analogy to compare human mind to the workings of a computer?

Although mental or cognitive processes can only be inferred from what a person does (they cannot be observed literally or directly), mental processes are now accepted as being valid subject matter for psychology, provided they can be made ‘public’ (as in memory tests or problem solving skills).

Discuss the difference between cognitive psychology and introspection?

Can you think of a branch of psychology that would use cognitive tests to assess a patient?

The Cognitive School

Rather like the original Behaviourist movement, the voices of dissent raised against Behaviourism and the stimulus response theory of learning have some of the features of a revolution. Such revolutions occur when an established body of theory is shown to be inadequate and a ‘better thing’ is available. By a better theory, we mean one that explains a wider set of data, and can account for results that the old theory found difficult to explain. However, bits of behaviourism were retained in the shift to the cognitive school.

There is definitely some validity in the experimentation that people like Pavlov did. It is easy to classically condition a rat or dog. These experiments have been repeated by generations of psychologists with the same results. Controversy concerns only the validity of and usefulness of S-R.

Hard nose theorists want to keep a distance from speculative theorising
Experimentation on animals is not always useful with regard to higher functioning animals like humans.

Do you think that there needed to be a move away from behaviourism?

Justify your answer.

The man who started the’ Cognitive School’, E.C. Tolman (1886-1959) had been a behaviourist. He used the word cognitive to describe his approach because it refers to the storage of a particular kind of information in the brain.

Tolman suggested that yes, animals will react to certain things in certain ways if taught this, but that humans are able to make decisions, and these decisions are made in the brain. If one ignores this, hen one ignores the free will a person has to respond to a stimulus. Therefore Tolman argued that our behaviour is ‘purposeful’ and we should be studying this.