Behaviourism and the Cognitive Revolution

• Behaviourism


  A theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study observable behavior
• Cognitive revolution


  A new approach developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, directly tied to the development of the computer, that made it seem possible to study internal mental life objectively
• The problem of a psychological science is how to measure mind and consciousness when methods of introspection have limitations
• Psychoanalysis looks at the unconscious mind
• Behaviourism was a reaction against the unobservable, as introspection was not verifiable and subjective rather than objective
• Behaviourism


  • Psychology is not about experience, but about observable OBJECTIVE behaviour
  • Used animal learning as can carefully control environment
• Pavlovian classical conditioning


  A type of learning in which a neutral stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus
• Thorndike's Law of Effect


  • Behaviour depends on consequence (reward/punishment)
  • Learning occurs when there is an increase in positive Stimulus-Response probabilities
  • Forgetting occurs when there is a decrease in positive Stimulus-Response probabilities
• Watson's behaviourism


  1. Must be completely objective - rules out any subjective interpretations
  2. Not to describe a conscious state but to predict and control overt behaviour
  3. Believed that work on animals could tell us about human behaviour
• Watson believed conditioned learning could account for all kinds of behaviour, including human emotions (except fear, rage and love which are innate responses)
• Watson believed it was the environment that was important, not nature
• Skinner's operant conditioning


  • Learning in which voluntary responses come to be controlled by their consequences: favorable consequences (reinforcers) tend to cause repetition, and unfavorable consequences (punishers) tend to discourage behaviors
• Skinner believed operant conditioning could explain all behaviour, including language
• Behaviourism wanted to remove mind, consciousness, purpose and cognition from psychology
• Behaviourism has problems explaining behaviour that shows purpose, evolutionary constraints on learning, and the unobservable nature of much human experience
• Behaviourism cannot explain natural language, as shown by Noam Chomsky's arguments
• Cognitive psychology


  Approaches seeking to explain observable behavior by investigating mental processes and structures that cannot be directly observed
• The cognitive revolution was directly tied to the development of the computer, which allowed researchers to specify the internal mechanisms that produce behavior
• Information processing


  The cognitive revolution made it seem possible that psychologists could study internal mental life objectively, by modeling storage systems, operations, rules, mental images, memory representations, and other unobservable processes
• 1956 was a critical year for the cognitive revolution, with the development of artificial intelligence, studies of thinking and cognitive strategies, and the application of signal detection theory to perception
• The cognitive revolution involved an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on AI, math, computer science, language, and neuropsychology
• Chunking


  A cognitive strategy for organizing information into meaningful units to improve memory and recall
• The cognitive revolution aimed to discover and describe the meanings that human beings create out of their encounters with the world, and to propose hypotheses about the meaning-making processes involved
• The cognitive revolution proposed five key ideas: the mind can be grounded in the physical world through information, computation, and feedback; the mind is not a blank slate; an infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs; universal mental mechanisms can underlie cultural variation; and the mind is a complex system of interacting parts
• Cognitive psychology allows us to ask questions about how children acquire concepts, how memories are stored and retrieved, how we make sense of causal associations, how cognitive processes relate to brain activity, and how the mind works in general
• The study of consciousness is enigmatic due to the problem of qualia, the subjective 'feel' of experience, which leads to the mind-body problem
• Libet's experiments on the timing of intention and brain activity raised questions about the nature of free will
• The computer metaphor and the development of artificial intelligence raised questions about whether machines can think like humans, and whether AI is potentially dangerous
• Both behaviourism and the cognitive revolution were paradigm shifts that reacted to the previous zeitgeist - behaviourism rejected the mind in favour of observable behaviour, while the cognitive revolution sought to study internal mental processes