Cognitive Psychology: History Background of cognitive psychology

                   

   Cognitive Psychology: History

Since the beginning of experimental psychology in the nineteenth century, there had been interest in the study of higher mental processes. But something discontinuous happened in the late 1950s, something so dramatic that it is now referred to as the ‘cognitive revolution,’ and the view of mental processes that it spawned is called ‘cognitive psychology.’ What happened was that American psychologists rejected behaviorism and adopted a model of mind based on the computer. The brief history that follows (adapted in part from Hilgard (1987) and Kessel and Bevan (1985)) chronicles mainstream cognitive psychology from the onset of the cognitive revolution to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

1. Beginnings:

From roughly the 1920s through the 1950s, American psychology was dominated by behaviorism. Behaviorism was concerned primarily with the learning of associations, particularly in nonhuman species, and it constrained theorizing to stimulus–response notions. The overthrow of behaviorism came not so much from ideas within psychology as from three research approaches external to the field.

 A) Communications Research and the Information Processing Approach:

During World War II, new concepts and theories were developed about signal processing and communication, and these ideas had a profound impact on psychologists active during the war years. One important work was Shannon’s 1948 paper about Information Theory. It proposed that information was communicated by sending a signal through a sequence of stages or transformations. This suggested that human perception and memory might be conceptualized in a similar way: sensory information enters the receptors, then is fed into perceptual analyzers, whose outputs in turn are input to memory systems. This was the start of the ‘information processing’ approach—the idea that cognition could be understood as a flow of information within the organism, an idea that continues to dominate cognitive psychology. 

Perhaps the first major theoretical effort in information processing psychology was Donald Broadbent’s Perception and Communication (Broadbent 1958). According to Broadbent’s model, information output from the perceptual system encountered a filter, which passed only information to which people were attending. Although this notion of an all-or-none filter would prove too strong (Treisman 1960).

B) The Computer Modeling Approach:

Technical developments during World War II also led to the development of digital computers. Questions soon arose about the comparability of computer and human intelligence (Turing 1950). By 1957, Alan Newell, J. C. Shaw, and Herb Simon had designed a computer program that could solve difficult logic problems, a domain previously thought to be the unique province of humans. Newell and Simon soon followed with programs that displayed general problem-solving skills much like those of humans, and argued that these programs offered detailed models of human problem solving (a classic summary is contained in Newell and Simon (1972)). This work would also help establish the field of artificial intelligence.

Early on, cross-talk developed between the computer modeling and information-processing approaches, which crystallized in the 1960 book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (Miller et al. 1960). The book showed that information-processing psychology could use the theoretical language of computer modeling even if it did not actually lead to computer programs.

C) The Generative Linguistics Approach:

A third external influence that lead to the rise of modern cognitive psychology was the development of generative grammar in linguistics by Noam Chomsky. Two of Chomsky’s publications in the late 1950s had a profound effect on the nascent cognitive psychology. The first was his 1957 book Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957). It focused on the mental structures needed to represent the kind of linguistic knowledge that any competent speaker of a language must have. Chomsky argued that associations per se, and even phrase structure grammars, could not fully represent our knowledge of syntax (how words are organized into phrases and sentences). What had to be added was a component capable of transforming one syntactic structure into another. These proposals about transnational grammar would change the intellectual landscape of linguistics, and usher in a new psycho linguistics. Chomsky’s second publication (1959) was a review of Verbal Behavior, a book about language learning by the then most respected behaviorist alive, B. F. Skinner (Skinner 1957). Chomsky’s review is arguably one of the most significant documents in the history of cognitive psychology. It aimed not merely to devastate Skinner’s proposals about language, but to undermine behaviorism as a serious scientific approach to psychology. To some extent, it succeeded on both counts.

D) An Approach Intrinsic to Psychology:

At least one source of modern cognitive psychology came from within the field. This approach had its roots in Gestalt psychology, and maintained its focus on the higher mental processes. A signal event in this tradition was the 1956 book A Study of Thinking, by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (Bruner et al. 1956). The work investigated how people learn new concepts and categories, and it emphasized strategies of learning rather than just associative relations. The proposals fit perfectly with the information-processing approach— indeed, they were information processing proposals— and offered still another reason to break from behaviorism.

2. The Growth of Cognitive Psychology:

The 1960s brought progress in many of the above mentioned topic areas, some of which are highlighted below:

A) Pattern Recognition:

 One of the first areas to benefit from the cognitive revolution was pattern recognition, the study of how people perceive and recognize objects. The cognitive approach provided a general two-stage view of object recognition: (a) describing the input object in terms of relatively primitive features (e.g., ‘it has two diagonal lines and one horizontal line connecting them’); and (b) matching this object description to stored object descriptions in visual memory, and selecting the best match as the identity of the input object (‘this description best matches the letter A’). This two Stages view was not entirely new to psychology, but expressing it in information-processing terms allowed one to connect empirical studies of object perception to computer models of the process. The psychologist Ulrich Neisser (1964) used a computer model of pattern recognition (Selfridge 1959) to direct his empirical studies and provided dramatic evidence that an object could be matched to multiple visual memories in parallel.

B) Memory Models and Findings:

Broadbent’s model of attention and memory stimulated the formulation of rival models in the 1960s. These models assumed that short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) were qualitatively different structures, with information first entering STM and then being transferred to LTM (e.g., Waugh and Norman 1965). The Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) model proved particularly influential. With its emphases on information flowing between memory stores, control processes regulating that flow, and mathematical descriptions of these processes, the model was a quintessential example of the information-processing approach. The model was related to various findings about memory. For example, when people have to recall a long list of words they do best on the first words presented, a ‘primacy’ effect, and on the last few words presented, a ‘recency’ effect. Various experiments indicated that the recency effect reflected retrieval from STM, whereas the primacy effect reflected enhanced retrieval from LTM due to greater rehearsal for the first items presented (e.g., Murdock 1962, Glanzer and Cunitz 1966). At the time these results were seen as very supportive of dual-memory models (although alternative interpretations would soon be proposed—particularly by Craik and Lockhart 1972). ly determining the characteristics of encoding, storage, and retrieval processes in STM and LTM. The results indicated that verbal material was encoded and stored in a phonologic code for STM, but a more meaning-based code for LTM (Conrad 1964, Kintsch and Buschke 1969).

C) The New Psycho linguistics: 

Beginning in the early 1960s there was great interest in determining the psychological reality of Chomsky’s theories of language (these theories had been formulated with ideal listeners and speakers in mind). Some of these linguistically inspired experiments presented sentences in perception and memory paradigms, and showed that sentences deemed more syntactically complex by transnational grammar were harder to perceive or store (Miller 1962). Subtler experiments tried to show that syntactic units, like phrases, functioned as units in perception, STM, and LTM (Fodor et al. (1974) is the classic review). While many of these results are no longer seen as critical, this research effort created a new sub field of cognitive psychology, a psycho linguistics that demanded sophistication in modern linguistic theory. 

Not all psycholinguistic studies focused on syntax. Some dealt with semantics, particularly the representation of the meanings of words, and a few of these studies made use of the newly developed mental chronometry. One experiment that proved seminal was reported by Collins and Quillian (1969).

3. The Rise of Cognitive Science:

A) Memory and Language:

Early in the 1970s the fields of memory and language began to intersect. In 1973 John Anderson and Gordon Bower published Human Associative Memory (Anderson and Bower 1973), which presented a model of memory for linguistic materials. The model combined information processing with recent developments in linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI), thereby linking the three major research directions that led to the cognitive revolution. The model used networks similar to that considered above to represent semantic knowledge, and used memory-search processes to interrogate these networks.

As psychologists became aware of related developments in linguistics and artificial intelligence, so researchers in the latter disciplines become aware of pertinent work in psychology. Thus evolved the interdisciplinary movement called ‘cognitive science.’ In addition to psychology, AI, and linguistics, the fields of cultural anthropology and philosophy of mind also became involved. The movement eventuated in numerous interdisciplinary collaborations (e.g., Rumelhart et al. 1986), as well as in individual psychologists becoming more interdisciplinary.

B) Representational Issues:

In the 1970s and early 1980s, cognitive science was much concerned with issues about mental representations. Whereas the memory-for-language models described earlier had assumed representations that were language-like, or propositional, other researchers argued that representations could also be imaginal, like a visual image. Shepard and Cooper (1972) provided evidence that people could mentally rotate their representations of objects, and Kosslyn (1980) surveyed numerous phenomena that further implicated visual imagery. In keeping with the interdisciplinary of cognitive science, AI researchers and philosophers entered the debate about propositional versus imaginal representations (e.g., Block 1981, Pylyshyn 1981). In addition to questions about the modality of representations, there were concerns about the structure of representations.

The cognitive science movement affected most areas of cognitive psychology, ranging from object recognition (Marr 1982) to reasoning (e.g., Johnson Laird 1983) to expertise in problem solving (e.g., Chase and Simon 1973). The movement continues to be influential and increasingly focuses on computational models of cognition. What has changed since its inception in the 1970s is the kind of computational model in favor.

4. Newer Directions: Connection-ism and Cognitive Neuroscience:

A) Connectionist Modeling:

The computer models that dominated cognitive psychology from its inception used complex symbols as representations, and processed these representations in a rule-based fashion (for example, in a model of object recognition, the representation for a frog might consist of a conjunction of complex properties, and the rule for recognition might look something like ‘If it’s green, small, and croaks, it’s a frog’). Starting in the early 1980s, an alternative kind of cognitive model started to attract interest, namely ‘connectionist’ (or ‘parallel distributed processing’) models. These proposals have the form of neural networks, consisting of nodes (representations) that are densely interconnected, with the connections varying in strength.

B) Cognitive Neuroscience:

The other major new direction in cognitive psychology is the growing interest in the neural bases of cognition, a movement referred to as ‘cognitive neuroscience.’ There had been little interest in biological work in the research that brought about the cognitive revolution. That early work was as much concerned with fighting behaviorism as it was with advancing cognitive psychology, and consequently much of the research focused on higher-level processes and was completely removed from anything going on in the neurobiology of its day. Subsequent generations of cognitive psychologists solidified their commitments to a purely cognitive level of analyses, by arguing that the distinction between cognitive and neural levels of analyses was analogous to that between computer software and hardware, and that cognitive psychology (and cognitive science) was concerned primarily with the software. Since the early 1990s, views about the importance of neural analyses have changed dramatically. There is a growing consensus that the standard information processing analyses of cognition can be substantially enlightened by knowing how cognition is implemented in the brain.

5. Conclusion:

This article has given short shrift to important contributions that tend to fall off the mainstream of cognitive psychology. One such case is the work done by Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky 1973, Tversky and Kahneman 1983) on the use of heuristics in decision making, which can result in deviations from rational behavior. Another example is the cognitively inspired study of memory and language deficits in neurological patients (Shallice (1988) provides a review). There are other cases like these which deserve a prominent place in a fuller history of cognitive psychology.