Cognitive Psychology - from Hergenhahn Introduction to the History of Psychology, 2000.pdf - psC - DarkDream

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Cognitive Psycholog y

Cognitive psychology includes such topics as mem-

ory, concept formation, attention, reasoning, prob-

lem solving, judgment, and language. Clearly cogni-

tive psychology is very popular within contemporary

psychology. However, in psychology’s long history

some form of cognition has almost always been em-

phasized. The few exceptions included the material-

istic philosophies or psychologies of Democritus,

Hobbes, Gassendi, La Mettrie, Watson, and Skinner,

which denied the existence of mental events. The

schools of voluntarism and structuralism concen-

trated on the experimental study of cognition, and

the school of functionalism studied both cognition

and behavior. The supposed sterility of the research

on cognition performed by members of these schools

prompted Watson to create the school of behavior-

ism. Thus to say, as is common, that psychology is be-

coming more cognitively oriented is inaccurate, be-

cause with only a few exceptions it has always been

cognitively oriented. But there was a period from

about 1930 to about 1950 when radical behaviorism

was highly inﬂuential, and when it was widely be-

lieved that cognitive events either did not exist or, if

they did, were simply by-products (epiphenomena)

of brain activity and could be ignored. As long as

these beliefs were dominant, the study of cognitive

processes was inhibited.

We mention here only a few of the people and

events that helped loosen the grip of radical behav-

iorism, thus allowing cognitive psychology to gain its

current popularity. For more see, for example, Ma-

honey, 1991, pp. 69–75.

Developments before 1950

Throughout most of psychology’s history human

attributes were studied philosophically. J. S. Mill

(1843/1988) set the stage for psychology as an exper-

imental science and encouraged the development of

such a science. Fechner (1860/1966) took Mill’s lead

and studied cognitive events (sensations) experimen-

tally. Ebbinghaus (1885/1964), under the inﬂuence

of Fechner, studied learning and memory experimen-

tally. William James’s The Principles of Psychology

(1890) cited considerable research on cognition and

suggested many additional research possibilities. Sir

Frederick Charles Bartlett (1886–1969), in Remem-

bering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology

(1932), demonstrated how memory is inﬂuenced

more by personal, cognitive themes or schema than

by the mechanical laws of association. In other

words, he found that information is always encoded,

stored, and recalled in terms of an individual’s pre-

conceptions and attitudes.

As early as 1926 Jean Piaget (1896–1980) began

publishing research on intellectual development.

During his long life Piaget published more than 50

books and monographs on genetic epistemology or

developmental intelligence. In general, Piaget dem-

onstrated that a child’s interactions with the en-

vironment become more complex and adaptive as

its cognitive structure becomes more articulated

through maturation and experience. According to

Piaget, the cognitive structure comprises schemata

that determine the quality of one’s interactions with

537

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538 Chapter 18

the environment. For the young child, these sche-

mata are sensory motor reﬂexes that allow only the

most rudimentary interactions with the environ-

ment. With maturation and experience, however,

the schemata become more cognitive and allow in-

creasingly complex (intelligent) interactions with

the environment. For Piaget, it was always the

schemata contained within the cognitive structure

that determine what kinds of interactions with the

environment are possible. Piaget’s theory followed

the rationalistic rather than empiricistic tradition.

More particularly, because it stressed the importance

of schemata for determining a person’s reality, it fol-

lowed the Kantian tradition. Piaget wrote books

about the child’s conceptions of causality, reality,

time, morality, and space, all showing the inﬂuence

of Kant’s proposed categories of thought. It is inter-

esting to note that Piaget was an even more proliﬁc

writer than Wundt. In chapter 9 we noted that

Wundt published 53,735 pages in his lifetime, or

2.20 pages a day; Zusne and Blakely (1985) report

that Piaget published 62,935 pages in his lifetime, or

2.46 pages a day.

As we have seen, Gestalt psychology and radical

behaviorism were created about the same time (1912

and 1913, respectively), and the cognitively oriented

Gestalters were a constant thorn in the side of the

behaviorists. Also, during the 1930s and 1940s,

methodological behaviorists such as Hull and Tol-

man were willing to postulate events that intervene

between stimuli (S) and responses (R). For Hull,

these intervening variables are mainly physiological,

but for Tolman they are mainly cognitive.

In 1942 Carl Rogers (1902–1987) published

Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in

Practice that challenged both radical behaviorism

and psychoanalysis by emphasizing the importance

of conscious experience in the therapeutic situation.

In 1943 Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) ﬁrst pro-

posed his theory of human motivation based on the

hierarchy of needs. In spite of the efforts of individu-

als such as Rogers and the popularity of behaviorism

during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, psychoanalysis

remained very inﬂuential, especially among clinical

psychologists and psychiatrists. Donald Hebb (1904–

1985) was an early critic of radical behaviorism and

did much to reduce its inﬂuence. In his book The Or-

ganization of Behavior (1949), Hebb not only sought

biological explanations of behavior but also urged

the study of cognitive processes. As we shall see in

chapter 19, Hebb continued to encourage the devel-

opment of both physiological and cognitive psychol-

ogy in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949 Harry Harlow

(1905–1981) published “The Formation of Learning

Sets,” which provided evidence that monkeys em-

ploy mental strategies in their solving of discrimina-

tion problems. This ﬁnding was clearly in conﬂict

with the behavioristic psychology of the time.

In 1948 Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) deﬁned

cybernetics as the study of the structure and function

of information-processing systems. Of particular in-

terest to Wiener was how mechanical or biological

systems can achieve a goal or maintain a balance by

automatically utilizing feedback from their activi-

ties. The automatic pilots on airplanes and ther-

mostats are examples of such systems. Soon it was re-

alized that purposive human behavior could also be

explained in such mechanistic terms, thus overcom-

ing the argument that the study of purposive (goal-

directed) behavior must necessarily be subjective. In

1949 Claude E. Shannon, working for the Bell Tele-

phone Laboratories, and Warren Weaver, working

for the Rockefeller Foundation, were seeking ways of

improving the purity of messages between the time

they are sent and the time they are received. The

work of Shannon and Weaver began what came to

be called information theory. Information theory

notes the various transformations information un-

dergoes as it enters a communication system, as it

operates within the system, and as it leaves the sys-

tem. As we will see later in this chapter, informa-

tion-processing psychology, like information theory,

attempts to understand those structures, processes,

and mechanisms that determine what happens to in-

formation from the time it is received to the time it

is acted on.

Developments during the 1950s

According to Bernard Baars (1986), “There is little

doubt that George A. Miller... has been the single

most effective leader in the emergence of cognitive

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Cognitive Psychology 539

George A. Miller

In 1951 Karl Lashley (1890–1958) argued that

the explanation of serial or chained behavior, offered

by the behaviorists, that stressed the importance of

external stimulation was insufﬁcient. Rather, he said,

such organized behavior could emanate only from

within the organism. In an inﬂuential publication,

“Drives and the C.N.S. (Conceptual Nervous Sys-

tem)” (1955), Hebb continued to show his willing-

ness to “physiologize” about cognitive processes and

thus to engage in battle with the behaviorists. Leon

Festinger (1919–1989) noted that the ideas one en-

tertains may be compatible with or incompatible

with one another. Incompatibility exists, for exam-

ple, if one is engaged in an obviously boring task but

is encouraged to describe it as exciting, or if one

smokes cigarettes and yet believes that smoking

causes cancer. When ideas are incompatible, a state

of dissonance exists that motivates a person to

change beliefs or behavior. In the cases above, for ex-

ample, a person could reduce cognitive dissonance

by telling the truth about the task being boring or be-

come convinced that the task is actually exciting.

With the smoker, cognitive dissonance could be re-

duced by quitting the habit or by believing there re-

ally is no proven relationship between smoking and

cancer. Festinger’s inﬂuential book A Theory of Cog-

nitive Dissonance (1957) made no reference to behav-

ioristic ideas. In the early 1950s Jerome Bruner be-

came interested in thinking and concept formation

and in 1955 he assisted Sir Frederic Bartlett in ar-

ranging, at Cambridge, one of the ﬁrst conferences

on cognitive psychology (Bruner, 1980). In 1956

Bruner, along with Jacqueline Goodnow and George

Austin, published A Study in Thinking, which em-

phasized concept learning. Although concept learn-

ing had been studied earlier by Hull and Thorndike,

their explanations of such learning were couched

in terms of passive, associationistic principles. The

explanation offered by Bruner and his colleagues

stressed the active utilization of cognitive strategies

in such learning. In 1959 Tracy and Howard Kendler

analyzed childrens’ discrimination learning in terms

of concept utilization rather than in terms of behav-

ioristic principles. Also in 1959 Chomsky published

his inﬂuential review of Skinner’s book Verbal Learn-

ing (1957). We will have more to say about Chom-

psychology” (p. 198). Miller remembers that, during

the 1950s, “‘cognition’ was a dirty word because cog-

nitive psychologists were seen as fuzzy, hand-waving,

imprecise people who really never did anything that

was testable” (p. 254). Miller argued that modern

cognitive psychology began during a symposium on

information theory sponsored by the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology on September 10–12, 1956.

During the symposium, Allen Newell and Herbert

Simon presented papers on computer logic, Noam

Chomsky presented his views on language as an in-

herited, rule-governed system, and Miller described

his research demonstrating that people can discrimi-

nate only seven different aspects of something—for

example, hues of color or pitches of sound. Also,

people can only retain about seven meaningful units

of experience (chunks) such as numbers, words, or

short sentences. Miller summarized his research in

his inﬂuential article “The Magical Number Seven,

Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for

Processing Information” (1956). Participants in the

MIT symposium did much to bring the terminology

and concepts of information theory and cybernetics

into psychology. At about the same time, the English

psychologist Donald Broadbent (1957, 1958) was

doing the same thing. Crowther-Heyck (1999) dis-

cusses the importance of Miller’s work in the early

development of cognitive psychology.

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540 Chapter 18

sky’s review in chapter 19 when we discuss behav-

ioral genetics.

Also during the 1950s, humanistic theorists such

as Maslow, Kelly, Rogers, and May continued devel-

oping their ideas, as did the Gestalt psychologists

and the psychoanalysts.

ioristic phase and it produced precise, factual knowl-

edge and scientiﬁc rigor that had not previously ex-

isted in psychology. However, in their effort to be

entirely objective the behaviorists had minimized or

banished such topics as thought, imagery, volition,

and attention. Hebb urged that the second phase

of psychology’s revolution use the scientiﬁc rigor

promoted by the behaviorists to study the long-

neglected cognitive processes. Concerning the sec-

ond phase of the revolution, Hebb (1960) said, “The

camel already has his nose inside the tent” (p. 741).

He noted the works of Festinger, Broadbent, Kendler

and Kendler, Miller, Galanter, and Pribram as good

starts toward a rigorous cognitive psychology. He was

especially impressed by the possibility of the com-

puter acting as a model for studying cognitive pro-

cesses. He prophesized that such a model will be-

come “a powerful contender for the center of the

stage” (1960, p. 741). Hebb’s preferred approach to

studying cognitive processes was to speculate about

their biological foundations. We will have more to

say about Hebb when we consider psychobiology in

chapter 19.

In 1962 and 1963 M. D. Egger and Neal Miller

demonstrated that, contrary to tradition, classical

conditioning phenomena could not be explained in

terms of associative principles alone. Rather the in-

formation conveyed by the stimuli involved had to

be taken into consideration. In 1967 Ulric Neisser,

who studied with George Miller, published his inﬂu-

ential book Cognitive Psychology, in which Neisser

deﬁned the term cognition as, “All the processes by

which... sensory input is transformed, reduced,

elaborated, stored, recovered and used” (p. 4). Also

in this book, Neisser attempted to integrate research

on such topics as perception, concept formation,

meaning, language, and thinking, using a few con-

cepts adopted primarily from information theory.

Once the grip of behaviorism—especially radical

behaviorism—had been loosened many earlier ef-

forts in experimental cognitive psychology were ap-

preciated. About the inﬂuence of Ebbinghaus,

Michael Wertheimer (1987) said, “His seminal ex-

periments can . . . be viewed as the start of what was

to become the currently popular ﬁeld of cognitive

Developments after the 1950s

In 1960 Miller and his colleagues Eugene Galanter

and Karl Pribram published Plans and the Structure of

Behavior, in which it was argued that cybernetic con-

cepts (such as information feedback) explain human

goal-directed behavior better than S–R concepts do,

and at least as objectively. Also in 1960 Miller and

Jerome Bruner founded the Center for Cognitive

Studies at Harvard. In addition to promoting re-

search on cognitive processes, the center did much

to popularize the ideas of Piaget among U.S. psychol-

ogists. In 1962 Miller published an article entitled

“Some Psychological Studies of Grammar” (1962a),

which introduced Chomsky’s nativistic analysis of

language into psychology. In 1890 William James

had deﬁned psychology as “the science of mental

life”; in 1962 Miller purposefully used James’s deﬁni-

tion as the title of his text Psychology: The Science of

Mental Life (1962b).

In 1963 as evidence of how far cognitive psychol-

ogy had progressed and in recognition of Miller’s role

in that progress, Miller was presented a Distin-

guished Scientiﬁc Contribution Award by the APA.

Miller served as president of the APA in 1969, re-

ceived the Gold Medal for Life Achievement in Psy-

chological Science from the American Psychological

Foundation (APF) in 1990, and was Awarded a Na-

tional Medal of Science by President George Bush in

1991. Miller is currently professor emeritus and se-

nior research psychologist at Princeton University.

In 1959 Donald Hebb served as president of the

APA, and his presidential address “The American

Revolution” was published in 1960. In this address,

Hebb was referring not to America’s political revolu-

tion but to its psychological revolution. According

to Hebb, only one phase of the American revolution

in psychology had taken place. This was the behav-

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Cognitive Psychology 541

psychology” (p. 78). Concerning the inﬂuence of

Gestalt psychology, Hearst (1979) said, “Present-day

cognitive psychology—with its emphasis on organi-

zation, structure, relationships, the active role of the

subject, and the important part played by perception

in learning and memory—reﬂects the inﬂuence of its

Gestalt antecedents” (p. 32). In an interview with

Baars, Neisser describes how Gestalt psychology in-

ﬂuenced him:

but will act on that information only when one is

thirsty. For Tolman, this distinction between learn-

ing and performance was extremely important, and

it is also important in Bandura’s theory. (Hergen-

hahn & Olson, 2001, pp. 319–320)

(See Bandura, 1986, for an excellent summary of his

extensive research in Social Cognitive Theory. )

The journal Cognitive Psychology was founded in

1969, and within the next two decades 15 additional

journals were established featuring research articles

on such topics as attention, problem solving, mem-

ory, perception, language, and concept formation.

Interest in experimental cognitive psychology had

become so extensive that many believe a revolution,

or paradigm shift, had occurred in psychology (for

example Baars, 1986; Gardner, 1985; Sperry, 1993).

Others, however, suggest that contemporary cogni-

tive psychology represents a return to a kind of psy-

chology that existed before the domination of be-

haviorism. If anything, then, there occurred a

counterrevolution rather than a revolution (see Her-

genhahn, 1994b). Even George Miller, who, as we

have seen, was as responsible as anyone for the cur-

rent popularity of cognitive psychology, rejects the

idea that a revolution took place:

What seems to have happened is that many experi-

mental psychologists who were studying human

learning, perception, or thinking began to call

themselves cognitive psychologists without chang-

ing in any obvious way what they had always been

thinking and doing—as if they suddenly discovered

they had been speaking cognitive psychology all

their lives. So our victory may have been more

modest than the written record would have led you

to believe. ( Bruner, 1983, p. 126)

Robins, Gosling, and Craik (1999) note that the

popularity of cognitive psychology has increased dra-

matically over the last three decades. They agree

with Miller, however, that it is incorrect to refer to

this increased popularity as a “cognitive revolution.”

In any case, from the many forms of cognitive

psychology that existed prior to the 1970s, informa-

tion-processing psychology emerged as the dominant

form. Information-processing psychology is the kind

of cognitive psychology that took the computer

I . . . became particularly interested in Gestalt psy-

chology. It had an idealistic quality that appealed to

me. To the Gestalt psychologists human nature was

something wonderful, worth exploring, worth

knowing about. They were constantly doing battle

with the behaviorists, who seemed to see human

nature as a mere collection of conditioned re-

sponses or blind associations. From the Gestalt

viewpoint, the mind is something beautiful, well-

structured, in harmony with the universe. (Baars,

1986, p. 274)

And, regarding Piaget’s inﬂuence, Jerome Kagan

(1980) said, “With Freud, Piaget has been a seminal

ﬁgure in the sciences of human development”

(p. 246).

One of the most popular cognitive theories in

contemporary psychology is Albert Bandura’s social

cognitive theory. In several ways, Bandura’s theory

can be understood as a direct descendent of Tol-

man’s theory.

If one had to choose a theory of learning that is

closest to Bandura’s, it would be Tolman’s theory.

Although Tolman was a behaviorist, he used men-

talistic concepts to explain behavioral phenom-

ena... and Bandura does the same thing. Also,

Tolman believed learning to be a constant process

that does not require reinforcement, and Bandura

believes the same thing. Both Tolman’s theory and

Bandura’s theory are cognitive in nature, and nei-

ther are reinforcement theories. A ﬁnal point of

agreement between Tolman and Bandura concerns

the concept of motivation. Although Tolman be-

lieved that learning was constant, he believed fur-

ther that the information gained through learning

was only acted on when there was reason for doing

so, such as when a need arose. For example, one

may know full well where a drinking fountain is

Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Hergenhahn: Introduction to the History of Psychology, 4/e

CHAPTER 18 / BOOK PAGE 541

THIRD PROOF

Typecast, Inc. / Job #0981 / July 2000

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