Cognitive Revolution Cognitive psychology began to take form as a new way of

understanding the science of the mind during the late 1950s. These formative events
were spurred on by research discoveries in memory, learning, and attention as well
as ideas outside of the mainstay of experimental psychology, such as communication
theory, developmental psychology, social psychology, linguistics, and computer
science, which gave cognitive psychologists additional breadth to deal with the
complexity of human information processing and thinking. The reemergence of
cognitive psychology during this period is commonly referred to as the Cognitive
Revolution, emerging in 1956 with a conference on communication theory at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Solso, 1998) in which seminal papers
were presented by Noam Chomsky, Jerome Bruner, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon,
and George Miller. The coalescence of cognitive psychology during this period was
probably not due to a single group of people (and certainly no precise date of a
movement is possible) but was a reflection of a larger Zeitgeist in which
psychologists appreciated the complexity of the thinking human. At the same time,
cognitive psychologists rejected the traditional, simplistic theories of the mind, but in
many cases held on to the scientific methodology as had developed in the early part
of the twentieth century. The paradigm that offered a pertinent methodology and
embraced a sufficiently wide latitude of intellectual topics was cognitive psychology,
which enjoyed widespread acceptance and growth. Research in verbal learning and
semantic organization led to the development of testable models of memory and
cognition, providing another empirical base for the study of mental processes.
George A. Miller made a distinction between short-term and long-term memory and
his influential paper The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (Miller, 1956)
addressed the limited capacity of short-term memory and introduced the concept of
chunking— the idea that the limits of short-term memory could be extended by
grouping information into larger units of information. In 1958, Peterson and
Peterson in America and John Brown in England found a rapid loss or decay of
memory after the study of nonsense syllables after a few seconds when verbal
rehearsal was absent, thus promoting the idea of a separate stage of short-term
memory. In 1960, Sperling showed that a very transitory memory (or information
storage system) held information for a very brief period of time. This discovery
further advanced the notion that humans were complex information-processing
creatures who processed incoming information through a series of stages. That
simple idea was a perfect model for researchers and theorists interested in memory,
and several models appeared about this time by Atkinson and Shiffrin, Waugh and
Norman, and later by Craik and Tulving. Prior to this period, information theory was
introduced by Shannon and Weaver, who used box diagrams to describe how
information is communicated and transformed along a series of stages. Donald
Broadbent, a psychologist at Cambridge, began applying Shannon and Weaver’s
ideas to selective attention processes and introduced the concept of information flow
to psychology and used box diagrams to describe cognitive processes. Broadbent’s
information flow referred to the series of operations that analyze, transform, or
change mental events such as memory encoding, forgetting, thinking, concept
formation, etc. As such, Broadbent provided “a language to talk about what
happened inside a man which was not a mentalistic introspective language” (Cohen,
1986, p. 23). Elsewhere, technological advances in computer science called for
reexamination of basic postulates of cognition. In 1955, Simon and Newell developed
a computer capable of solving a mathematical proof. Cognitive psychologists were
excited that machines could simulate human thought and computers could possibly
be operating according to the same rules and procedures as the human mind.
Furthermore, since computers were seen as intelligent, it required us to analyze our
own intelligence so that the intelligence of a machine could be determined. As a
result the hypothetical Turing test was devised to determine if observers could
discriminate the output of a computer from that of human responses. Meanwhile, the
behaviorists came under attack from Chomsky, a linguist from MIT, who developed a
method of analyzing the structure of language. Chomsky argued that language was
too complicated to learn and produce via behavioral principles of reinforcement and
postulated the existence of a cognitive structure of an innate language acquisition
device. Another influence that aided cognitive psychology’s foothold was World War
II. Financial support in areas of military interest became readily available during the
war. Because of the military’s interest in developing and using new technology,
research in vigilance, creativity, and human factors was encouraged. One outcome
was a seminal report in 1954 by Tanner and Swets on signal detection demonstrating
that cognitive processes can have a mediating effect on sensory thresholds. Another
outcome of the war was that many soldiers suffered from brain injuries. A vast
amount of clinical data in perception, memory, and language was a by-product of
these victims’ afflictions. In the 1950s, interest turned to attention, memory, pattern
recognition, images, semantic organization, language processes, thinking, and even
consciousness (the most dogmatically eschewed concept), as well as other cognitive
topics once considered outside the boundary of experimental psychology.
Behaviorism and its dogma failed to account for the richness and diversity of human
experience. Behaviorists could not account for the results found by Piaget’s and
Chomsky’s developmental studies. And information theory and computer science
gave psychologists new ways to conceptualize and discuss cognition. Modern
Cognitive Psychology By the 1960s, cognitive psychology had experienced a
renaissance. Cognitive Psychology, which systematized the new science, was written
by Ulric Neisser and was published in America (1967). Neisser’s book was central to
the solidification of cognitive psychology as it gave a label to the field and defined
the topical areas. Neisser used the computer metaphor for selecting, storing.
Recovering, combining, outputting, and manipulating information. And in 1966
Hilgard and Bower introduced a chapter in their Theories of Learning (New York)
that developed the idea of using computer programs to serve as models on theories
of cognition. The 1970s saw the emergence of professional journals devoted to
cognitive psychology such as Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, Memory & Cognition,
and a series of symposia volumes, including the Loyola Symposium on Cognition
edited by Solso and the CarnegieMellon series edited by Chase and others, based on
the Carnegie Symposium on Cognition. In the 1970s and 1980s cognitive laboratories
were beginning to be built, symposia and conferences appeared at national and
regional meetings, courses in cognitive psychology and related topics were being
added to curricula, grants were awarded to people investigating memory, language
processing, attention, and like topics, new textbooks were written on the theme of
cognition, and universities recruited professors of cognitive psychology to replace
those of traditional experimental psychology. In the 1980s and 1990s serious efforts
were made to find corresponding neural components that were linked to cognitive
constructs. Thus, the cerebral location for a word, like hammer, as a noun, might be
far different than the location for the same word if the word were used as a verb.
Furthermore, influential memory theories (such as Tulving’s semantic and episodic
memory theory) were manifest in cerebral localization experiments using brain
imaging technology. The science of human cognition is still undergoing
transformation due to major changes in computer technology and brain science. As a
result cognitive psychology has converged with computer science and neuroscience
to create a new discipline called cognitive science. Finally, with the advent of new
ways to see the brain (e.g. functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI], positron
emission tomography [PET], electroencephalogram [EEG]) cognitive psychologists
have expanded their operations to neuroscience, which promises to empirically
display the parts of the brain involved in cognition that were hypothesized by
twentieth-century psychologists.