Psychology History of Psychology Max Essay

Tolman's objective was to comprehend human mental processes by using experimental methods. Even though he used rats in mazes as his method, and was a behaviorist in his approach, he also included major ideas from Gestalt psychology. Cognitive maps are a kind of mental processing, or cognition, that is made up of a series of psychological transformations by which a person can obtain code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomenon in their everyday or figurative spatial environment. Cognitive maps are a way that people use to arrange and store spatial knowledge, allowing the mind's eye to visualize images in order to reduce cognitive load, and enhance recall and learning of information.

Donald Hebb (Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory)

Donald Hebb attempted to combine present day knowledge of physiology and psychology into a comprehensive theory of thought and emotion to explain the nature of consciousness in physicobiologic terms. The theory is founded in substantial part on the variable effect and oftentimes obvious lack of effect which major brain operations have on intelligence and behavior. The concept of the author is that any frequently repeated particular stimulation leads to a slow development of a cell-assembly in the cortex and diencephalon and perhaps in the basal ganglions of the brain capable of acting briefly as a closed system which can deliver facilitation to other such systems and having, usually, a specific motor facilitation. A succession of such events constitutes a phase sequence comparable to thought process. The process portrayed is considered essential to adult waking behavior.

Brenda Milner, Larry R. Squire, and Eric R. Kandel (Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory).

Cognitive neuroscience started off in two disciplines: in psychology, in the development of rigorous methods for analyzing behavior and cognition, and in systems neurobiology, in the effort to understand the structure and function of neuronal circuits of the sensory and motor systems of the brain. The synthesis of these two disciplines was made possible as well by the appearance of a coherent neuroscience, an interdisciplinary approach to the nervous system that encouraged the idea that the techniques and concepts of neurobiology and systems neuroscience might be usefully applied to the analysis of cognition. When looking at memory Brenda Milner, Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel focused on two key concepts. The first concept was analyzing what memory is, where it is stored, and what brain systems are involved. The second concept was concerned with analyzing how memory is stored.

References

Gentile, Barbara F. And Miller, Benjamin O. (2008). Foundations of psychological thought: A

history of psychology. Thousand Oaks: Sage…