Cognitive psychology emerged through the cognitive revolution in the mid-20th century. This revolution contained a number of changes that provided a completely new view of psychology. The way of experimenting has changed and so has the view on what is and is not important for studying cognition. What then caused this revolution and what did cognitive psychology look like before?
The cognitive revolution
Cognitive psychology was created, among other things, by the cognitive revolution. Around the 1950s and 1960s, many changes took place in psychology. These changes are central to the cognitive revolution. The revolution involved a new style of research, specifically focused on questions about cognition. Such questions are usually about memory and problem solving. Cognitive psychology mainly asks how information is processed. This information concerns, for example, what we see, hear and feel. For example, why is it that we are always alert when we hear our name in someone else’s conversation? And yet we paid no attention to this at all. Two ideas were central to the cognitive revolution. The first is that mental processes must be studied to understand the behavior of people and animals. the second is that mental processes can only be studied indirectly. These two ideas arose under the influence of introspection and behaviorism.
Introspection
Introspection is observing one’s own feelings. In psychology, introspection was used as a research method to study the mind. This technique was first used at the end of the 19th century by Wilhelm Wundt and his student Edward Bradford Titchener. They believed that the focus should be on studying conscious mental events such as feelings, thoughts and memories. Wundt and Titchener came up with the idea of introspection because you are the only person who can experience your own thoughts. However, introspection could not be done by everyone. One had to be trained for it. In addition, a specific vocabulary had to be used to describe the findings. Also, as little as possible should be described about one’s own interpretation. With introspection, mental processes that a person is aware of were described as objectively and specifically as possible.
Problems with introspection
Introspection also received a lot of criticism. With introspection it is not possible to describe unconscious thought processes, while these types of processes are crucial for the train of thought. Consider, for example, how someone arrives at the answer to the question ‘What is your first name?’. Another problem is that every person’s experiences are subjective. This can be seen, for example, in how pain is experienced. A needle prick may not hurt at all for one person, while for another it may hurt a lot. This means that introspection is not testable, and so psychology could not be a science as long as this technique was used to build theories. It is very important in science that the results of a study are testable.
Behaviorism
Behaviorism emerged in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All data had to be objective and testable. This meant that data had to be observable. What happened internally could only be observed through introspection, but this research technique had been labeled as problematic. As a result, it was believed that mental processes could not be studied and so they should be ignored. This can also be described as the ‘black box’ theory. In behaviorism, experiments are carefully explained and conducted. Terms such as ‘stimuli’ stem from this movement. Stimuli are stimuli. In an experiment, the stimulus is the stimulus being tested on, this is called the independent variable. Behaviorists mainly investigated how behavior changed in response to certain stimuli. The observations were noted step by step, making the results of experiments testable.
Away from behaviorism
Researchers soon realized that behavior could not be explained by observations alone. This is because people’s behavior is driven by the individual interpretation of the situation. For example, consider the example of the needle stick. When a lot of pain is experienced, the reaction is different than when less pain is experienced. To understand behavior, mental processes must also be examined. To study these mental processes, a commonly used concept from physics was used: events that cannot be observed have effects that can be observed and measured. By conducting experiments that work in this way, hypotheses can be tested and the experiments themselves are also repeatable. For example, the behavior of an animal or human was examined in an experiment and based on this behavior, theories were drawn up about the origins of this behavior.
Influences from computer science
Around 1950 there were rapid developments in technology. Computers could store and retrieve information efficiently and they demonstrated behavior similar to decision making and problem solving, topics that are also of great interest in cognitive psychology. As a result, psychologists took inspiration from this and a new perspective on describing mental processes emerged. These processes were then depicted as a series of consecutive events in which information is processed that causes the observed behavior. These changes spawned new theories about how memory might work. Computers have a memory card in which information is stored and from which information can be retrieved. This would also work the same way in people’s brains. This new perspective led to new discoveries and was of great influence in the cognitive revolution.