history

• Cognitive psychology


  The branch of psychology dedicated to studying how people think
• Cognitive psychology


  The psychology of mental processes
• Term 'cognitive psychology' coined

  1967
• Cognitive psychology


  The study of the way in which the brain processes information
• Cognitive psychology


  Concerns the way we take in information from the outside world, how we make sense of that information and what use we make of it
• Ulric Neisser


  The "father of cognitive psychology"
• Ulric Neisser's lifespan


  December 8, 1928 - February 17, 2012
• Ulric Neisser helped launch the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology
• Ulric Neisser died at the age of 83 from complications of Parkinson's disease
• Main stages of cognitive processing

  1. Perception

  2. Learning and memory storage

  3. Retrieval

  4. Thinking
• The different stages of cognitive processing merge and overlap with one another
• Philosophical antecedents of cognitive psychology

  • Rationalism
  • Empiricism
• Rationalism


  The path to knowledge is through thinking and logical analysis
• Empiricism


  We get knowledge via empirical evidence: through experience and observation (our senses)
• Psychological antecedents of cognitive psychology

  • Structuralism
  • Behaviorism
• Early work in cognitive psychology showed that in the 1800s it was considered impossible to study the mind
• Pioneering experiments in cognitive psychology

  • Donders (1868) - questioned how long it takes to make a decision
  • Ebbinghaus (1885-1913) - experimented on the time-course of forgetting
• Structuralism considered experience to be determined by combining elements of experience called sensations
• Introspection was considered impossible to test objectively and collect data for
• Behaviorism abandoned the study of the mind and focused on the relation between observable behavior and environmental stimuli
• Edward Tolman, although calling himself a behaviorist, was one of the early cognitive psychologists who used behavior to infer mental processes
• The introduction of the digital computer in 1954 led to a new way of thinking about the mind as an information processor
• The operation of the mind could be described as occurring in a number of stages, like a flow diagram
• Developments in computer science led to a link between human thought and the computational functionality of computers
• Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence (AI)
• Ulric Neisser (1967) emphasized the information-processing approach to studying the mind and identified top-down and bottom-up processing
• Sub-disciplines of cognitive psychology

  • Social psychology
  • Clinical psychology
  • Developmental psychology
  • Neuropsychology
  • Organizational psychology