Cognitive psychology is one of the core branches of psychology that is concerned
with the study of mental processes. It deals with mental processes involving the
use of the brain in problem-solving, memory and language (Feldman, 2012).
Cognitive psychology attempts to explain the correlation between the biological
functions of the brain and the human mind in understanding the ambient
environment. As such, it explains how individuals diagnose life issues, understand
and solve problems in the day-to-day lives through their mental processes, which
plays the principal role of mediating between stimulus from the environment and
the response. Ordinarily, human beings exhibit several psychological
manifestations. For instance, people possess the thinking ability, which enables
them to reason out on diverse aspects of life, and they are also able to remember
past events in their lives. They also portray perception on new happenings in life in
an attempt to construct a realistic way of reasoning to unravel mysterious
phenomena.
Moreover, human beings have the ability to learn new skills from their day-to-day
experiences and keep the memory of different episodes. From a psychological
perspective, these are all the works of cognition. Ideally, cognition refers to
thinking, a mental process through which people learn; reason and solve problems.
So cognitive psychologists focus on how human beings acquire information from
the environment, especially in the form of a stimulus and process it through mental
cognitive processes. The processed information is then stored to keep the memory
of life events.
Evolution of cognitive psychology appears to be quite fascinating, and it exhibits
rapid advancement owing to the technological development, which characterized
scientific studies in the second half of the 19th Century. The discipline emerged
after modern psychologists seemed to abandon the behaviorism aspect as the
mainstream of psychology and focused on the functionalism aspect, which is based
on the stream of consciousness (Fulcher, 2003). Today, cognitive psychology has
become one of the dominant disciplines of psychology whose application is
gaining popularity in different fields, especially in the field of medicine.
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 com-
munication 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 in-
troduced 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.
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 the-
ories (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], electroencepha-
logram [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.
