Foundations of Cognitive Psychology

Part 2 – History of Cognitive Psychology

Contributors to the History of Psychology

Early Studies of Mental Processes

• Relating Physical Stimuli and Psychological Phenomena - mental processes that underlie intelligent behavior are unobservable

• Pythagoras (584-495 BC) - Greek mathematician – String plucking

Early Philosophical Views on the Mind

• How do people acquire knowledge and how do they maintain it over time?

• Socrates (469-399 BC) • Plato (427-347 BC) • Aristotle (384-322 BC)

British Empiricists and Associationists

• knowledge is gained through experience with the world and that experiences with the world are stored in the mind as associations.

• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

• John Locke (1623-1704)

• James Mill (1773-1836)

• John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

PSYCHOPHYSICS

• Study of the relationship between the physical properties of a stimulus and properties taken on when the stimulus is filtered through subjective experience

• Early studies of the nervous system and development of psychophysics– Johannes Mueller (1801-1858) – Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878) – Gustav Fechner (1801-1878)– Paul Broca (1824-1880) – Carl Wernicke (1848-1904)– Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)

Structuralism

• The primary goal of psychology is to specify conscious experience through introspection

• Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)• Edward Titchener (1867-

1927)

Functionalism

• Interested in the study of the functions of the mind; emphasis on cause and effect, prediction and control, and observation of  environment and behavior

• William James (1842-1910)• James Rowland Angell (1869–

1949)

Gestalt Psychology

• Emphasis on the importance of whole patterns in perception rather than perception of individual parts (the whole is different from the sum of its parts.)

• Max Wertheimer (1880-1943)

• Kurt Koffka (1886-1941)• Wolfgang Kohler (1887-

1967)

Behaviorism

• Stressed studying observable events rather than unobservable mental processes; learning consists of developing associations between stimuli and responses

• Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)

• Edward Thorndike (1874-1949)

• John B. Watson (1878-1958)

• Clark Hull (1884-1952)

• Edward C. Tolman (1886-1959)

• B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)

History of Cognitive Psychology – Love/Hate Relationships

Cognitive Psychologists and Studies

• Early memory studies– Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)

– Sir Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969)

– George A. Miller (1920-)

• Metaphors of Cognition and Brain Structure– Information-processing model - Lachman,

Lachman, and Butterfield (1979)

– Connectionism – McClelland & Rumelhart, 1985; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986)

• Cognitive Science• Cognitive Neuroscience