Cognitive Psychology deals with how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information. The earliest roots of this study can be traced back to two areas: philosophy and physiology.

Philosophy

There have been two early schools of thought that are still in debate today. Aristotle led one school of philosophers, the empiricists. Empiricists believe that all knowledge is gained through experience. Plato, in contrast, was a rationalist. He, and his followers, believed that knowledge can only be find through the mind, rather through the corporeal world of the body. By the 1700¹s, debates about empiricism and rationalism had reached a peak. Then, Immanuel Kant had interests in synthesizing the two schools of thought. He stated that some knowledge, a posteriori knowledge, was gained by experience, while other knowledge, a priori knowledge, was innate. Although the debates were not completely settled, Kant¹s synthesis have impacted greatly on a new discipline years later: Cognitive Psychology.

When the study of psychology began to emerge in the 1800¹s, some regarded it as a field of philosophy, while others regarded it as a field of physiology. Today, both areas of research have had important concerns in various aspects of cognitive psychology . In the following summaries, I will show a brief history of the fields of research that have made an impact on cognitive psychology today.

Structuralism was the study of the structure or configurations of perceived elements by analyzing items into their constituent components. Although it does not necessarily appear in this form in the study of cognitive psychology, it has had an imp act on it by being a systematic, empirical science. Wilhelm Wundt was a progenitor of structuralism and believed that, in order to analyze our own perceptions, there must be introspection.

Functionalism argued that people should focus on the processes of thought rather than its contents. There are three fundamental aspects of this study: 1) the study of mental processes, 2) the study of the uses of consciousness, and 3) the study of the total relationship of the organism to its environment. Functionalists believed that, if there were questions, the best thing that could happen was to answer them, whether or not the methods were the same. Thus, this led to pragmatism.

Pragmatism, a continuation of functionalism, was led by William James, one of the chief contributors of cognitive psychology today. In his Principles of Psychology, topics such as attention, consciousness, and perception were discussed in detail. Another pragmatist was John Dewey, a believer in practical education.

Associationism examines how events or ideas can become associated with one another in the mind, to result in a form of learning. This field of study can be directly rooted in the early empiricists, who believed that knowledge can only be gained by observing different items in contiguity, similarity, and contrast. Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first experimenter to apply associationist principles systematically. He rigorously studied his own thoughts, or experimentally introspected. Eventually, he found that experienced were better kept in memory by rehearsal. Edward Lee Thorndike, held that satisfaction was the key to forming associations by his law of effect.

Behaviorism came about from associationists who saw the benefits of studying S-R relationships in animals. Ivan Pavlov termed a type of involuntary learning that depended on contingency, classical conditioning. Behaviorism states that psychology should only deal with observable behavior, and not internal thoughts. John Watson is usually thought of as the father of Behaviorism, and said that thinking was just a subvocalized speech. B.F. Skinner, a radical behaviorist, operant conditioning could suffice to explain all of human behavior. Edward Tolman, in the 1930¹s, finally stated that it seemed that human beings could not be understood merely by stimulus and response events, but also by the goals and plans formed in the minds of people. Thus, Tolman can be thought of as a forefather of cognitive psychology. Other researchers, such as Bandura and Rescorla, have shown that cognitive processes do occur and can affect learning.

Karl Spencer Lashley was among the first to articulate the need for psychologists to look beyond behaviorism and see what the brain had the power to achieve on its own. He sought to understand how the organization of the human brain made possible such co mplex activities such as using language, playing music, and playing games. These ideas, and technological developments, led to the importance in studying the human mind. By the 1960¹s, the cognitive revolution had begun. Early cognitivists like Miller, Galanter, Pribram, and Neisser, were eager to express that behavioristic accounts were inadequate.

Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology

Goals in cognitive psychology include data gathering, data analysis, theory development, hypothesis formulation, hypothesis testing, and application to settings outside the research environment. All in all, the research focuses on describing particular c ognitive phenomena. Cognitive psychologists have used 6 methods of research: 1) laboratory or controlled experiments, 2)psychobiological research, 3) self-reports, 4) case studies, 5) naturalistic observation, and 6) computer simulation and artificial in telligence. Each method offers both advantages and disadvantages.

In sum, Cognitive Psychology uses ideas and methods from many different areas of research, having its roots in both philosophy and physiology. Scientists use these ideas to study how humans acquire and use knowledge. They study biological bases of cogni tion, as well as mental imagery, attention, consciousness, perception, memory, language, problem solving, creativity, decision making, reasoning, developmental changes, human intelligence, and various other aspects of human thinking.