Evolution of Cognitive Psychology Research Paper

Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

A discipline in the field of psychology, cognitive psychology examines the way people process information. This field achieves this goal by examining how humans treat information that they receive through stimuli and how their treatment of information contributes to certain responses. Therefore, the professionals in this field generally study people's internal processes like perception, language, attention, thinking, and memory. Cognitive psychology is based on the concept that understanding the internal process of individuals' minds is crucial to understanding their responses and actions. As a result, this discipline of psychology basically emphasizes on the person and his/her natural environment.

Cognition:

One of the foundational concepts in cognitive psychology discipline is cognition, whose literal meaning is described as knowing. Cognition refers to people's mental processes like attention, memory, thinking, decision making, solving problems, and understanding language. While the term is also used in other branches of psychology like social psychology, it normally explains a person's information processing perspective of psychological functions. In cognitive psychology, professionals in the field study cognition or the mental processes or act through which individuals acquire knowledge.

Cognition or cognitive psychology also consists of an interdisciplinary perspective, which is basically known as cognitive science. Cognitive science can be primarily described as an interdisciplinary approach to mind that consists of psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics and anthropology.

History of Cognitive Psychology:

The evolution of cognitive psychology as a discipline cannot be attributed to any particular defining moment because there are several antecedents associated with its development. However, the use of the term cognitive psychology is normally traced or linked with the publication of a book by Ulric Neisser in 1967 that is known as Cognitive Psychology (McLeod, 2007). The cognitive approach to psychology started to transform the field of psychology between 1950s and 1960s to become the prevailing approach in the field towards the end of 1970s. Some of the major works that contributed to the increased interest in examining mental processes or cognition include the work of Piaget and Tolman.

This discipline of psychology became a significant field in the mid-1950s because of various factors like the dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach to psychology. The dissatisfaction emanated from the fact that the behaviorist approach mainly emphasized on external behavior instead of internal processes. Other factors that contributed to the emergence of cognitive psychology include the development of improved experimental methods and the comparison of information processing between humans and computers. Actually, the invention of computers provided the discipline of cognitive psychology with the necessary terminology and metaphor to study human mind. This is largely because the use of computers acted as artificial systems that allowed cognitive psychologists to examine the complexities of human internal processes with synthetic systems.

Antecedents that Contributed to the Emergence of Cognitive Psychology:

As previously mentioned, the emergence and development of cognitive psychology is not attributed to a specific event but it was mainly stimulated by several antecedents such as

Introspectionism:

The contemporary experimental psychology can be traced to the various works conducted by several people like Fechner, Donders, Helmholtz, and Mach in the mid 19th Century. The first dedicated psychology laboratory was established by Wundt in 1879 in Liepzig and was used to develop the efforts of the pioneers of experimental psychology. The psychologist regarded consciousness…