Literal Meaning

• Derived from Latin word “Cogitio” which means I

think.
• What will you be studying in cognitive psychology ?
1. Cognition: People think.
2. Cognitive psychology : Scientists think about how
people think.
3. Students of cognitive psychology : People think
about how scientists think about how people think.
4. Professors who profess to students about cognitive
psychology : You get the idea.
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 Introduction
• Cognitive psychologists seek to understand the
mental representations and structures that lead
individuals to comprehend, define, and develop
knowledge.
• The first published book on cognitive psychology-
“Cognitive Psychology” by Ulric Neisser in 1967
offers the following definition: “Cognitive
Psychology refers to all processes by which the
sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated,
stored recovered and used.”
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 Definitions
• This definition provided rich information
about cognitive Psychology.
• Neisser states that cognition begins with
sensory input.
• Next step is sensory input is transformed
which means physical stimulation is encoded
in to neural impulses. (Cognitive code)

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 Definitions
• Cognitive code can be reduced or elaborated.

• Cognitive codes can be stored and recovered,

in addition, highly reduced cognitive codes can
be fleshed out or reconstructed.

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 Definitions
• “Cognitive psychology is the study of how
people perceive, learn, remember, and think
about information.”- Sternberg, R.J., 2009 in
his book Cognitive Psychology
• He further stated that a cognitive psychologist
might study how people perceive various
shapes, why they remember some facts but
forget others, or how they learn language.

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 Concluding Remarks
• Cognitive psychology is currently a thriving area,
dealing with a diversity of phenomena, including
topics like attention, perception, learning, memory,
language, emotion, concept formation, and
thinking.
• Two main aims in cognitive psychology are:
– to provide a theoretical description of the mind (mental
structures or abstract representations, and processes)
– to provide experimental and quantitative evidence
regarding mental functioning.
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 Origins of Cognitive psychology

Historical development of Cognitive

Psychology
 Dialectic
• The progression of ideas often involves a dialectic. A
dialectic is a developmental process whereby ideas evolve
over time through a pattern of transformation.
• What is this pattern?
• Dialectic: in dialectic; A thesis is proposed. A thesis is a
statement of belief. For example, some people believe that
human nature governs many aspects of human behavior
(e.g., intelligence or personality; Sternberg, 1999).
• After a while, however, certain individuals notice apparent
flaws in the thesis.
• What happened?
• Eventually, or perhaps even quite soon, an
antithesis emerges. An antithesis is a
statement that counters a previous statement
of belief. For example, an alternative view is
that our nurture (the environmental contexts
in which we are reared) almost entirely
determines many aspects of human behavior.
• Then what Next ?
• Sooner or later, the debate between the thesis and the
antithesis leads to a synthesis. A synthesis integrates the most
credible features of each of two (or more } views. For example,
in the debate over nature versus nurture, the interaction
between our innate (inborn) nature and environmental
nurture may govern human nature.
• It is important to understand the dialectic because sometimes
we may be tempted to think that if one view is right, another
seemingly contrasting view must be wrong. For example,
intelligence, there has sometimes been a tendency to believe
that intelligence is either all or mostly genetically determined,
or else all or mostly environmentally determined.
• Nature and nurture work together in our
development. If a synthesis seems to advance our
understanding of a subject, it then serves as a new
thesis. A new antithesis then follows it, then a new
synthesis, and so on.
• Georg Hegel, observed this dialectical progression
of ideas. He was a German philosopher who came
to his ideas by his own dialectic. He synthesized
some of the views of his intellectual predecessors
and contemporaries.
 Debate
• Where and when did the study of cognitive
psychology begin?
• Historians of psychology usually trace the
earliest roots of psychology to two different
approaches to understanding the human
mind.
• Philosophical/Psychological antecedents
Philosophical Antecedents of Psychology

• Rationalism versus Empiricism

• Philosophy seeks to understand the general nature
of many aspects of the world (Rationalism)in part
through introspection , the examination of inner
ideas and experiences (from intra-, "inward,
within," and -spect , "look" ).
• Physiology seeks a scientific study of life -sustaining
functions in living matter, primarily through
empirical (observation-based) methods.
(Empiricism).
 Rationalism versus Empiricism
• A rationalist believes that the route to knowledge is through logical
analysis. (or the only route to truth is reasoned
contemplation).Rene Descartes ( 1596- 1650) viewed the
introspective, reflective method as being superior to empirical
methods for finding truth.
• An empiricist believes that we acquire knowledge via empirical
evidence- that is, we obtain evidence through experience and
observation.( or the only route to truth is meticulous observation).
John Locke(1632-1704 ) believed that humans are born without
knowledge and therefore must seek knowledge through empirical
observation. Locke's term for this view was tabula rasa ( meaning
"blank slate" in Latin) . The idea is that life and experience "write"
knowledge on us.
Rationalism versus Empiricism contd..
• German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-
1804) dialectically synthesized the views of
Descartes and Locke, arguing that both
rationalism and empiricism have their place.
Both must work together in the quest for
truth. Most psychologists today accept Kant's
synthesis.
 Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive
Psychology
• Early Dialectics in the Psychology of Cognition
• Structuralism (Wilhem Wundt, 1832-1 920) seeks
to understand the structure (configuration of
elements) of the mind and its perceptions by
analyzing those perceptions into their constituent
components. Wundt used a variety of methods in
his research. One of these methods was
introspection. Introspection is a looking inward at
pieces of information passing through
consciousness.
 Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive
Psychology
• Functionalism (William James,1842-1910)
seeks to understand what people do and why
they do it. Functionalists held that the key to
understanding the human mind and behavior
was to study the processes of how and why
the mind works as it does rather than to study
the structural contents and elements of the
mind.
 Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive
Psychology
• Associationism examines how events or ideas
can become associated with one another in
the mind to result in a form of learning.
– In the late 1800s, associationist Hermann
Ebbinghaus (1850-1909 ) was the first
experimenter to apply associationist principles
systematically.
– Another influential associationist, Edward Lee
Thorndike (1874- 1949 ) , held that the role of
"satisfaction" is the key to forming associations.
 Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive
Psychology
• Behaviorism is a theoretical outlook that
psychology should focus only on the relation
between observable behavior and environmental
events or stimuli. The idea was to make physical
whatever others might have called mental.
Behaviorists studied responses that were
involuntarily triggered, in response to what appear
to be unrelated external events. Ivan Pavlov ( 1849-
1936 ) studied involuntary learning behavior of this
sort from experiment on dog.
 Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive
Psychology
• Proponents of Behaviorism
• The "father" of radical behaviorism is John B. Watson
( 1878- 1958 ) . Watson had no use for internal
mental contents or mechanisms. He believed that
psychologists should concentrate only on the study
of observable behavior.
• B . F. Skinner ( 1904- 1990) , a radical behaviorist,
believed that virtually all forms of human behavior,
not just learning, could be explained by behavior
emitted in reaction to the environment.
 Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive
Psychology
• Edward Tolman ( 1886- 1959 ) thought that
understanding behavior required taking into account
the purpose of, and the plan for, the behavior. Tolman
( 1932 ) believed that all behavior is directed toward
some goal. Tolman is sometimes viewed as a forefather
of modern cognitive psychology.
• Another criticism of behaviorism (Bandura, 1977b) is
that learning appears to result not merely from direct
rewards for behavior. It also can be social, resulting
from observations of the rewards or punishments given
to others.
 Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive
Psychology
• Gestalt psychology states that we best understand
psychological phenomena when we view them as
organized, structured wholes. According to this
view, we cannot fully understand behavior when
we only break phenomena down into smaller
parts. Gestalt psychologists study insight, seeking
to understand the unobservable mental event by
which someone goes from having no idea about
how to solve a problem to understanding it fully in
what seems a mere moment of time.
 Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
• Early Role of Psychobiology
• Karl S. Lashley (1890- 1958 ) , boldly challenged the
behaviorist view that the human brain is a passive
organ merely responding to environmental
contingencies outside the individual. He considered
the brain to be an active, dynamic organizer of
behavior and sought to understand how the macro-
organization of the human brain made possible such
complex, planned activities as musical performance,
game playing, and using language.
 Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
• Donald Hebb (1949) proposed the concept of cell
assemblies as the basis for learning in the brain. Cell
assemblies are coordinated neural structures that
develop through frequent stimulation. They develop
over time as the ability of one neuron (nerve cell) to
stimulate firing in a connected neuron increases.
• Linguist Noam Chomsky ( 1 959) wrote a scathing
review of Skinner's ideas. In his article, Chomsky
stressed both the biological basis and the creative
potential of language. He pointed out the infinite
numbers of sentences we can produce with ease.
 Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
• Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969), a British
Psychologist interested in memory.
• Jean Piaget(1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist
studied the perceptual and cognitive errors of
children in order to gain insight into the nature and
development of the human mind.
• Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), a German psychologist
argued that one could best predict a person’s
behavior in the world by understanding the
person’s subjective experience of the world.
 Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
• Donald Broadbent (1926-1993), a British
psychologist was the first to study what
happens when people try to pay attention to
several things at once. Broadbent (1958)
showed that the limited capacity to handle
incoming information is a fundamental feature
of human cognition and that this limit could
explain many of the errors that people made.
 Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
• George Miller (1956), a American psychologist
pointed out a striking consistency in our
capacity limitations across a variety of
situation– we can pay attention to and briefly
hold in memory about 7 to 9 pieces of
information.
• In 1967 Ulric Neisser Published a book named
“Cognitive Psychology” which was landmark
development of cognitive psychology.