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HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY archivo del portal de recursos
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compiled by the Cognitive Processes Classes, Fall, 1997 -
18th CENTURY: THE BRITISH EMPIRICISTS
George Berkeley
Berkeley's most
influential essay is A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. It
was this that earned Berkeley the title of "subjective idealist,' imaterialist,"
"Spiritualist," and these are what helped to make his small book one of the more
misunderstood essays in philosophy. What Berkeley set out to achieve was the
removing of validity from materialism and to do this by refuting the latent or
explicitly materialistic content both in Locke's Essay and in Descartes' and
Hobbes' "geometric " theories" of man and society.
David Hume (1711-1776)
Hume published a
Treatise of Human Nature. He emphasized Locke's notion of the compounding of
simple ideas into complex ideas, developing and making more explicit the notion
of association. He abolished mind as a substance and said that it is a secondary
quality like matter. The mind is observable only through perception. More
importantly, is the distinction he drew between two kinds of mental contents:
impressions and ideas. Impressions are the basic elements of mental life.
Impressions are kin to sensation and perception. Ideas are the mental
experiences that we have in the absence of any stimulating element. The modern
equivalent is image. Hume did not define these two concepts in psychological
terms or in reference to any external stimulating object. These mental contents
differ not in terms of their source or point of origin, but in terms of their
relative strength and vivacity. Impressions are strong and vivid, whereas ideas
are but weak copies of impressions. He proposed two theories about association:
1) resemblance or similarity, and 2) contiguity in time and place. His work fits
into the categories of empiricism and associationism. He believed that just like
the astronomers determine the laws of the universe through which the planets
function, it is also possible to determine the laws of mental universes
James Mill (1773-1836)
James Mill
believed that the human mind was totally passive. He felt that the mind was a
machine functioning in the same way as a clock, acting upon external stimuli.
His most important work and contribution to psychology is his book, Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind, written in 1829. Mill states that the mind must
be studied through its reduction or analysis into elementary components. Mill
believed that ideas and sensations are only certain kinds of mental processes.
He felt that ideas result as a process of sensations that have occurred at the
same time in a certain order. Thus, James Mill was considered a British
empiricist, focusing on the primary role of sensation processes and the
relationship between conscious processes and association. John Stuart Mill, who
believed in Mental Chemistry, was the son of James Mill.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
John
Stuart Mill was a British empiricist who was concerned with Associationism.
Associationism studies how ideas can be hooked together and how many laws of
association there should be. Mill believed the mind to be active, which is
opposition to his father's belief that the mind was passive. He developed the
idea of mental chemistry in which he believed the sum of two ideas compounded
together is greater than the sum of the individual ideas. Along with Mill's
research, he wrote several books which also influenced the work of James,
Gestalt, and Wundt.
19th CENTURY
Psychology broke away from philosophy and began to form its own discipline based upon empirical results rather than on speculation. "Only in the last 100 years has it been realized that human cognition could be the subject of scientific study rather than philosophical speculation" (Anderson, 1995).
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
Wilhelm Wundt
was born on Aug. 16, 1832 in Neckarau Baden, Germany. Wundt established the
first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in 1879 and published the first
journal, Philosophische Studien, that contained a report of experimental
results. Wundt taught at the University at Leipzig from 1875 to 1917. Wundt
founded the psychological institute at the University of Leipzig. Wundt is
regarded as the founder of psychology as a formal academic discipline and the
first person in history to be designated as a psychologist. Wundt believed that
psychology is based on the observation of experience. Wundt taught many
psychologists, such as Tichener. His method of inquiry was largely introspection
(having highly trained observers report on the contents of their consciousness
under carefully controlled conditions according to Anderson, 1995).
Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Hermann
Helmholtz was born it 1821 in Potsdam, Germany. Helmholtz was know for his
research in physics and physiology and he is regarded as one of the greatest
scientists of the nineteenth century. Helmholtz is known for his theory of
unconscious inference, for example visual perception of space. Helmholtz was an
advocate of the natural sciences. He had a particular interest in the speed of
neural impulses. His research was one of the first to demonstrate that it is
possible to experiment on and measure a psychophysiological process. Helmholtz
developed the Young-Helmholtz theory of color vision.
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
Hermann
Ebbinghaus was educated at the University of Bonn. As a young doctor of
philosophy, he was determined to study higher mental processes and examine these
processes that were neglected by Wundt. The experiment began in 1879 with
Ebbinghaus as his only subject. The result was Memory in 1885. Memory utilized
the first use of nonsense syllables to discover the fundamental laws of
learning. The nonsense syllables were meaningless, therefore uninfluenced by
previous learning. He also used nonsense syllables because any one nonsense
syllable is not easier to learn than another. Ebbinghaus also studied
forgetfulness. He would memorize lists of nonsense syllables, 13 in each list,
and measure how long it took him to forget the syllables. His results have been
summarized in the forgetting curve.
Sir Frances Galton (1822-1911)
Galton
is considered the founder of eugenics which is controlled breeding to improve
the condition of mankind. Galton did not believe the environment determined
human character. He believed there existed innate social worth. He was
interested in a small portion of the population, the exceptional. Galton
published Hereditary Genius which "proposed to show that a man's natural
abilities are derived by inheritance". Galton's statistical methods made
possible the comparisons of individuals. He devised a number of important
methods used today. He was the first to systematically apply statistics to
psychological data, and he invented the correlation coefficient. He also did
substantial research about the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, and invented the
free-association technique.
Edward Titchener (1867-1927)
Born in
1867, Edward Titchener was a follower of the psychological teachings of Wilhelm
Wundt. He attended school at Malvern College and Oxford on scholarships because
his family was very poor. He spent most of his career teaching at Cornell
University in New York state. Titchener's view was based on his belief that all
consciousness was capable of being reduced to three states: sensations, which
are the basic elements of perception; images, which are the pictures formed in
our minds to characterize what is perceived; and affections, which are the
constituents of emotions. By 1915 Titchener had formulated his context theory of
meaning. According to his theory, core referred to raw experiences such as
sensations of light, sound, touch, and smell; context consisted of associations
brought on by raw experiences. Context is what gives meaning to the core.
Titchener also believed that emotions are intensified feelings arising from
sensations inside the body. Titchener died in 1927.
William James (1842-1910)
William James
wrote the first psychology textbook, Principles of Psychology, which was the
central work of his career. The concept of functionalism is expressed in James'
psychology which he treats as a natural science. Functionalism is the adaption
of living persons to their environment. James also contributed to the
James-Lange theory. This theory states that we feel an emotion because of the
action in which we choose to engage. For example, we infer are afraid because we
run.
EARLY 20TH CENTURY
Edward Tolman
Edward Tolman was known
for "his work that centered around demonstrating that animals had both
expectations and internal representations that guided their behavior." (Galotti,
1994) He believed that rats used a cognitive map in order to complete the maze
instead of memorization. He showed this by putting rats in different places on
the maze than ones where they had been trained. The rats reached the goal point
without going to the learned place. This supported the notion that they had
created a cognitive map.
Wolfgang Kohler
Wolfgang Kohler was
known for his early criticism of the characterization of problem solving. His
famous study involved an ape in a cage, Sultan, that was given two hollow bamboo
sticks. A banana was placed outside the cage out of range for the sticks to
reach it. For a certain amount of time the ape tried to reach the banana with
the sticks, failing each time. At a certain point Sultan was observed to sit
quietly for a time, after which he put the two sticks together. Kohler called
the sudden solution that followed the quiet time "insight" and concluded that it
was a typical property of problem solving.
Sir Frederick Bartlett
Sir Frederick
Bartlett was known for his study of memory. He placed his emphasis on studies
under natural conditions. Therefore, he rejected laboratory research. He felt
that past experiences helped reconstruct the material able to be retrieved. He
used a method called serial reproduction. This method allowed subjects to recall
stories on more than one occasion with varying retention intervals. He focused
on information that was remembered and " misremembered". His results showed that
overtime the subjects' recall was progressively more distorted. Therefore "He
rejected that the idea of long term memory where material is stored unchanged
until retrieval". He saw memory as an active and often inaccurate process. The
famous story he used was "The War of the Ghosts."
Skinner, B. F. (1904-1995)
Born in
Subsequenna PA, Skinner is famous for his theory of operant conditioning. He
believed that behaviors and language were learned through reinforcement (Solso,
317-318). He invented the Skinner box, which was used to control and measure
learned animal behavior. He believed that behavioral changes resulted from
responses of the individual to environmental stimuli. He believed that the
cognitive revolution was a backward, rather than a forward, step in the history
of psychology (Murray, 415). Among his main scientific works were The
Behavior of Organisms (1938) and Verbal Behavior (1957). Behaviorism
caused the study of mental events to be put aside. In many ways it was a
reaction against introspection. There was a behavioral revolution in America.
Behaviorists believed that psychology should be only concerned with external
behavior and "should not try to analyze the workings of the mind that underlay
this behavior" (Anderson, 1995). Watson (1930) said that "Behaviorism claims
that consciouness is neither a definite nor a usable concept." " The behaviorist
program and the issues it spawned all but eliminated any serious research in
cognitive psychology for 40 years....Perhaps the most important lasting
contribution of behaviorism is a set of sophisticated and rigorous techniques
and principles for experimental study in all fields of psychology, including
cognitive psychology." (Anderson, 1995)
REEMERGENCE OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
According to Anderson (1995), cognitive psychology
first emerged in the two decades between 1950 and 1970. The modern development
of cognitive psychology was due to the WWII focuss on research on human
performance and attention, developments in computer science, especially those in
artificial intelligence, and the renewal of interest in the field of
linguistics.
Noam Chomsky (1928-)
Noam Chomsky's
review of Skinner's book on language (Verbal Behavior) in the 1959
journal Language is considered the famous turning point for Cognitive
psychology. Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
argued that language cannot be explained through a stimulus response process as
Skinner explained, because this does not account for some of the common facts
about language. The creative use of language can be better explained as a
central process than a peripheral process. Language is a way to express ideas,
and the way that these ideas are turned into language is a cognitive process.
Chomsky's critique stimulated much more interest in the cognitive processes of
all types of human activity (Benjafield, p.41). He showed that language was much
more complex than anyone previously believed and that behavioral explanations
could not reasonably explain the complexities of language. Chomsky's language
model included two types of structures: surface structures and deep
structures.
David Rumelhart & James
McClelland
Rumelhart and McClelland are prime examples of
modern cognitive psychologists. Their names are associated with Parallel
Distributed Processing (PDP). This model stresses that information processing
happens simultaneously (parallel) as opposed to serially (one at a time). Their
theory suggests that many simple processing units are responsible for sending
excitatory and inhibitory signals to other units. By understanding these basic
features, they believe that the complex system can be explained. The idea that
processing involves interconnected elements and the reference to neural models,
makes up their Connectionist Theory.
George Miller
George Miller is a
professor at Princeton University. He studies information processing and focuses
his studies on the capacity of Short-term Memory (STM). His name is associated
with the "Magic Number 7." This theory suggests that most people can remember 7
plus/minus 2 bits of information using their STM. Miller also found that recall
of information is better when it is chunked together.
Allen Newell
Newell is a mathematician
who applied cognitive psychology to the design of computer systems. He spent
forty years at CMU educating cognitive psychologists on the implications of
artificial intelligence. Newell saw cognitive activities as problem solving
activities. Some of his other work focused on expert vs. novice differences in
memory. Newell and Simon worked on artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon
University.
Cognitive psychology has grown rapidly since the 1950's. A very
important event was the publication of Ulric Neisser's book, Cognitive
Psychology, in 1967. It gave a new legitimacy to the field and consisted of
six chapters on perception and attention and four chapters on language, memory,
and thought. Following Neisser's work, another important event was the beginning
of the Journal Cognitive Psychology in 1970. This journal has done much
to give definition to the field. More recently a new field, called cognitive
science, has emerged which attempts to integrate research efforts from
psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
This field can be dated from the appearance of the journal, Cognitive
Science in 1976 (Anderson, 1995).