What is cognitive psychology? - Chapter 1


What does cognitive psychology entail?

When cognitive psychology just came into existence, it was known as the scientific study of acquiring, retaining and using knowledge. Cognitive psychologists answered questions such as "how do people acquire knowledge?" and "how do people use their knowledge?".

Topics such as maintaining attention (concentration) and making decisions are also important within cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology, however, does not only study our functioning as intellectuals - it is much broader because many of our actions, thoughts, and feelings depend on our cognition (knowledge). Most (and perhaps all) experiences in the world depend on the knowledge you have and use. Even when trying to understanding a simple story, you use the knowledge you have. So even activities that are not intellectual in nature are important within cognitive psychology.

However, cognition or knowledge is only useful when this knowledge is stored in memory. There is no use in learning something when you cannot remember the information later.  That is why memory is also a very important topic within cognitive psychology.

What is the cognitive revolution?

The modern form of cognitive psychology is around fifty years old. Although this is quite short, this field of psychology has had an enormous influence, which is also referred to as the "cognitive revolution". This meant that a new research method was introduced. This new research method also influenced other research areas.

There were two important ideas during the cognitive revolution. The first idea was that human psychology (mental processes) could not be studied directly. The other idea was that this human psychology múst be studied if we want to understand behavior.

Introspection

Before the emergence of the cognitive revolution, there were other traditions within the field of psychology. The first tradition was that of Wilhelm Wundt and his student Edward Bradford Titchener. They argued that researchers in the field of psychology should focus primarily on conscious mental events such as feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and memories. They also stated that no one but the individual could experience his or her mental processes. That is why Wundt and Titchener proposed the use of introspection: 'looking inside' to observe the content of the mental events of individuals.

However, not everyone could apply introspection: they had to be trained to do it. To train people in this, they would read a list with words that could be used to describe their thoughts and feelings. In addition, they were told that it is only the intention to objectively express what they felt or thought, without making any interpretations.

This way of doing research was very popular for a number of years. Nevertheless, there were a number of problems with introspection. The first problem is the fact that people are not conscious of all of their mental processes. It is therefore impossible for people to report everything that takes place in their mind. The use of introspection as a method to study mental processes is therefore limited. It was also impossible to call this research method scientific (empirical), because the self-reports could not be confirmed or rejected with the use of statistical testing. These reasons led to that introspection was eventually rejected as a valid research method.

Behaviorism

As said before, introspection as a research method was rejected. Instead, a new tradition emerged called behaviorism. In behaviorism, researchers wanted to study only objective data, that is, behavior and stimuli that are observable. This objective data consists of observable behavior and external stimuli (noise, light). This data can be used to look at how behavior changes over time and therefore it is possible to determine one's learning history with this data.

Things that cannot be directly observed, such as someone's beliefs, wishes, goals, preferences, and experiences, are not part of the field of behaviorism. The explanation for this is that these things can only be investigated with the help of introspection, which was no longer seen as a suitable method for doing scientific research.

Behaviorism was very successful and yielded a lot of knowledge, among other things about how behavior changes based on the stimuli that one gets (rewards, punishments). However, around 1950 psychologists discovered that many behaviors could not be explained with the help of stimuli and observable behavior. After all, it is important to understand how people have come to a certain behavior and what thoughts have influenced them in this process. This is because the stimuli that people are offered must be interpreted and understood by people themselves before a certain behavior is exhibited. With the help of behaviorism it became unclear what these interpretations were and therefore it was not possible to study the underlying reasons or motives of the observable behavior and so it was not possible to explain the observable behavior.

Immanuel Kant and the transcendental method

The discovery that not all behavior could be explained with the use of observable behavior and external stimuli, brought some difficulties, such as that there was another research method needed to study human psychology. However, as said before, the use of introspection was not suitable. Fortunately, Immanuel Kant came up with a solution. He suggested the use of a transcendental method. This means that researchers first observe the effects and / or consequences of processes and then ask themselves: how did these effects (behaviors) come about? In other words, what are the causes for the observable behavior? This is called the transcendental method. Physicists use this method too when they try to explain visible effects from invisible causes.

The transcendental method is a common research method in contemporary psychology. This means that mental processes are not studied directly, but indirectly. The reasoning behind this method is that mental processes are invisible, but the effects and / or consequences (behavior) are observable. Examples are accuracy measures, error measures and response times. By using these measures, hypotheses can be drawn up and tested about what the mental processes must have been that have led to specific effects (behavior).

The greatest effect that the cognitive revolution has had on psychology is that contemporary researchers are constantly re-evaluating the best way to look at data. This is different than from before the cognitive revolution, because before this revolution psychologists were mainly concerned with finding an explanation that matches their data, without looking at other possibilities (other processes) that may have yielded the same data (behavior).

From behaviorism to the cognitive revolution

There are several causes for the emergence of the cognitive revolution. The first was that of the work of the researcher Edward Tolman, a behaviorist. Before Tolman, the main idea in behaviorism was that 'learning' meant that there was an observable change in behavior. According to them, there was no such thing as learning when there was no observable change in behavior. Tolman rejected this idea. According to him, learning was something more abstract and it meant that knowledge was acquired. He demonstrated this with the use of an experiment with rats, in which he placed rats in a maze for eleven days. The first ten days they received no food and there were also no observable changes in their behavior. According to traditional behaviorists, this meant that the rats did not learn anything in these ten days. However, this was not correct, because the rats were actually learning: they learned the design of the maze. The proof for this was that when food was placed somewhere in the maze on the eleventh day, the rats immediately ran to that specific location.

What Tolman's work demonstrated was that the rats probably made a "cognitive map" of the maze. The reason why this was not visible was that before the eleventh day, the rats had no motivation to show that they knew the maze. However, when food became available, they suddenly had a goal and thus motivation to show that they had created a map of the maze. The conclusion of this experiment is that even rats have mental processes (they get to know the maze and develop a cognitive map) that can explain their behavior (they run to a specific location; the food).

Another cause of the emergence of the cognitive revolution is that of strong criticism on behaviorism. An example of this criticism was addressed at B.F. Skinner, a radical behaviorist. He said that language was taught through behavior (observable data) and rewards (external stimuli). However, this idea was strongly rejected by the linguist Noam Chomsky, who demonstrated that Skinner was incorrect and that there should be another explanation to understand how people acquire language.

European influences on the cognitive revolution

There were also European influences on the emergence of the cognitive revolution, such as that of the Gestalt psychology in Berlin. Gestalt psychologists were a group of psychologists who argued that behaviors, ideas and perceptions could not be seen as independent from each other. Instead, these elements must be viewed as a whole. This means that an individual, using a combination of these elements, forms his or her own unique experience. This idea became important within cognitive psychology.

Another important European influence on the cognitive revolution was that of the the British psychologist Frederic Bartlett. He was not a Gestalt psychologist, but he also emphasized that everyone forms their own experience. He also said that people place their experiences in a mental framework or 'schema' that ultimately determines how they interpret their experiences.

Computers and the cognitive revolution

In 1950, new perspectives on mental processes emerged. This was made possible in part by the rapid developments in the computer technology. Psychologists were impressed by the possibilities of computers and thought that computers had similar processes compared with mental processes. It was also expected during this time that computers would soon become truly intelligent, which led to the emergence of the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Donald Broadbent was one of the first researchers to use computers to explain human cognition.

How is research done within cognitive psychology?

There are various research methods that are used within cognitive psychology. First, we can look at how well people perform on a task (for example: how well does someone remember these words?) and how accurate someone is (does someone call the word banana, while this word was actually not on the list?). Second, we can look at how performance changes when input changes (instead of words, someone now has to remember a story). In addition, the effectiveness of learning strategies can be determined.

Another common way of doing research within cognitive psychology is to look at response times (RT). This is the time it takes for people to perform a certain response (such as clicking, naming, or pressing the spacebar) after viewing (or hearing) a stimuli. For example, if you see a picture, and you have to click left or right, then the time from the moment you see the picture to the moment you respond (click) is your response time. This reaction time can tell a lot about the mental processes of people, because the longer someone his or her reaction time, the longer this person had to process the stimuli (a mental process).

In addition, we can obtain information gained from research in cognitive neuroscience. This is a field that is concerned with understanding the mental functioning of people through the study of the brain and the nervous system. Observations from clinical neuropsychology can also be used. This is a field that deals with the way in which brain dysfunction can affect performance and behavior.

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