Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. It deals with the perception of information, understanding, thoughts, and formulation and production of answers. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics, cybernetics, and applied psychology used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and into various other modern disciplines, such as cognitive science, linguistics, and economics.Xiong, A.; Proctor, R. W. (2018). "Information Processing: The Language and Analytical Tools for Cognitive Psychology in the Information Age". Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1270. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01270
History Philosophical discussions about the human mind and behavior, as well as their processes, date back to the ancient Greeks. In 387 BCE, Plato suggested that the brain was the seat of mental processes. In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans have innate ideas and promulgated mind-body dualism, which came to be known as substance dualism (essentially the idea that the mind and the body are two separate substances).Malone, J.C. (2009). Psychology: Pythagoras to Present. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (a pp. 143, b pp. 293, c pp. 491) From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century about whether human thought is solely experiential (empiricism) or includes innate knowledge (nativism). Some of those involved in this debate include George Berkeley and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on the side of nativism.Anderson, J.R. (2010). Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. New York: Worth Publishers.
With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid- to late 19th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline. Two discoveries that later played substantial roles in cognitive psychology were Paul Broca's discovery of the area of the brain largely responsible for language production and Carl Wernicke's discovery of an area thought to be mostly responsible for comprehension of language.Eysenck, M.W. (1990). Cognitive Psychology: An International Review. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (pp. 111) Both areas were subsequently formally named for their founders, and disruptions of an individual's language production or comprehension due to trauma or malformation in these areas have come to commonly be known as Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, the main approach to psychology was behaviorism. Initially, its adherents viewed mental events such as thoughts, ideas, attention, and consciousness as unobservable and thus outside the realm of psychology as a science. A pioneer of cognitive psychology, whose work predated much of the behaviorist literature, was Carl Jung. Jung introduced the hypothesis of cognitive functions in his 1921 book Psychological Types. Another pioneer of cognitive psychology, who worked outside the boundaries (both intellectual and geographical) of behaviorism, was Jean Piaget. From 1926 to the 1950s and into the 1980s, he studied the thoughts, language, and intelligence of children and adults.Smith, L. (2000). About Piaget. Retrieved from http://piaget.org/aboutPiaget.html
In the mid-20th century, four main influences arose that inspired and shaped cognitive psychology as a formal school of thought: With the development of new warfare technology during World War II came a need for a greater understanding of human performance. Problems such as how best to train soldiers to use new technology and how to handle matters of attention under duress became important to military personnel. Behaviorism provided little if any insight into these matters, and the work of Donald Broadbent, integrating concepts from human performance research and the recently developed information theory, forged the way in this area. Developments in computer science led to parallels being drawn between human thought and the computational functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas of psychological thought. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and later collaborated with cognitive psychologists to explore its implications. This encouraged a concept of mental functions patterned on the way computers handle memory storage and retrieval, and it opened an important doorway for cognitivism. Noam Chomsky's 1959 critiqueChomsky, N. A. (1959), A Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior of behaviorism, and empiricism more generally, initiated what came to be known as the "cognitive revolution". Within psychology, in response to behaviorism, J. S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow & G. A. Austin wrote "A Study of Thinking" in 1956. In 1960, G. A. Miller, E. Galanter, and K. Pribram wrote "Plans and the Structure of Behavior". The same year, Bruner and Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, which institutionalized the revolution and launched the field of cognitive science. Formal recognition of the field involved the establishment of research institutions such as George Mandler's Center for Human Information Processing in 1964. Mandler described the origins of cognitive psychology in a 2002 article in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.Mandler, G. (2002). Origins of the cognitive (r)evolution. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 38, 339–353.
Ulric Neisser put the term "cognitive psychology" into common use through his 1967 book Cognitive Psychology.Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Neisser's definition on page 4. Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates the then-progressive concept of cognitive processes:
The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. ... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.
Cognitive processes
The main focus of cognitive psychologists is the mental processes that affect behavior. Those processes include, but are not limited to, the following three stages of memory:Atkinson, R. C.; Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). "Human Memory: A Proposed System and Its Control Processes". In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2:89-195. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60422-3
Sensory memory storage: holds sensory information Short-term memory storage: holds information temporarily for analysis and retrieves information from the long-term memory. Long-term memory: holds information over an extended period of time, which receives information from the short-term memory.
Attention
The psychological definition of attention is "a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available sensation perception information". A key function of attention is to identify irrelevant data and filter it out, enabling significant data to be distributed to the other mental processes. For example, the human brain may simultaneously receive auditory, visual, olfactory, taste, and tactile information. The brain can consciously handle only a small subset of this information, and this is accomplished through the attentional processes.
Attention can be divided into two major attentional systems: exogenous control and endogenous control. Exogenous control works in a bottom-up manner and is responsible for orienting reflex, and pop-out effects. Endogenous control works top-down and is the more deliberate attentional system, responsible for divided attention and conscious processing.
One major focal point relating to attention within the field of cognitive psychology is the concept of divided attention. Some early studies examined the ability of a person wearing headphones to discern a meaningful conversation when presented with different messages in each ear; this is known as the dichotic listening task. Key findings involved an increased understanding of the mind's ability to both focus on one message, while still being somewhat aware of information being taken in from the ear, not being consciously attended to. For example, participants (wearing earphones) may be told that they will hear separate messages in each ear and are expected to attend only to information related to basketball. When the experiment starts, the basketball message will be presented to the left ear, and irrelevant information to the right ear. At some point, the basketball-related message will shift to the right ear, and the irrelevant information to the left ear. When this happens, the listener is usually able to repeat the entire message at the end, having attended to the left or right ear only when it was appropriate. The ability to attend to one conversation in the face of many is known as the cocktail party effect.
Other major findings include that participants cannot comprehend both passages when shadowing one, cannot report the content of the unattended message, and shadow a message better when the pitches in each ear differ. However, while deep processing does not occur, early sensory processing does. Subjects did notice if the pitch of the unattended message changed or if it ceased altogether, and some even oriented to the unattended message if their name was mentioned.
Memory The two main types of memory are short-term memory and long-term memory; however, short-term memory has become better understood as working memory, a temporary storage of new and previously learned information.
Working memory
Though working memory is often thought of as a more accurate depiction of short-term memory, it additionally encompasses the ability to process, maintain, and manipulate temporary information across a wide range of everyday activities, even in the face of distraction. Working memory is time-limited (temporary) and capacity-limited. George Miller introduced the idea that humans can hold 7 plus or minus 2 items in working memory at a time, though Nelson Cowan's 4 plus or minus 1 may be more accurate.
One early influential experiment from Ebbinghaus, provided evidence suggesting the nature of forgetting. After attempting to recall several strings of letters (in German) for consecutive days, he posited a forgetting curve.Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1913). On memory: A contribution to experimental psychology. New York: Teachers College. Relevant to working memory, his results indicated a steep decay in memory after only 20 minutes, providing evidence for a separate short-term store.