A brief history of cognitive psychology from Ancient Greek philosophers through the cognitive revolution

1. HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
ANCIENT TIMES TILL THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION

2. EMPIRICISM
◼Empiricism rests on the tenet that knowledge comes from an
individual’s own experience.
◼Empiricists recognize the role of genetics but hold that human
nature is changeable, malleable.
◼People are the way they are largely because of previous
learning

3. … EMPIRICISM
◼Empiricists believe that experience and learning determine
behaviour and individual differences.
◼Environment therefore plays a powerful role in determining
one’s intellectual (and other) abilities

4. NATIVISM
◼Nativists emphasize the role of constitutional factors in the
acquisition of abilities and tendencies
◼Nativists attribute individual differences to original biologically
endowed capabilities.
◼The debate between empiricists and nativists is still on today!

5. PLATO
◼Nativist
◼Storing something in
memory is like writing on a
wax tablet
◼Mind is like an aviary with
birds flying about, and
memory retrieval is like trying
to catch a specific bird –
sometimes, you do,
sometimes, you don’t.

6. ARISTOTLE
◼Empiricist
◼Spoke about memory and
illusions

7. RENE DESCARTES (1569 – 1650)
◼ Nativist and Rationalist
◼ Human reason is unique.
◼ Insights more certain than
experience
◼ Introduced idea of mental
objects / structures (physical
and symbolic)
◼ Views are still influential

8. DAVID HUME (1711 – 1776)
◼Empiricist
◼Ideas are based on
experience of external
world and internal
reflections – together
form simple ideas
◼Reason combines simple
ideas into complex ones.
◼Ideas are associated via
similarity and contiguity

9. …HUME
◼“post hoc ergo proptor hoc”
(after therefore because)
◼Goal of science: “to know the
different operations of the
mind, to separate them from
each other, to class them
under their proper heads”
◼Introduced operations of the
mind – comparison and
association.

10. IMMANUEL KANT (1724 – 1804)
◼ Nativist, proposed a synthesis
of rationalist and empiricist
traditions
◼ Mind provides structures to
organize knowledge,
experience provides facts to fill
the structures
◼ Mind without experience is
empty, experience without
mind is blind

11. …KANT
◼ Three kinds of structures:
◼ Dimensions – because of this, we
experience objects as extended in
time and space
◼ Categories – abstract
characterizations of the
relationship among objects
◼ Schemas – generic concepts
used to describe the general
properties of a class of objects
(unit of knowledge)

12. JOHN LOCK
◼Empiricist
◼Like Hume, spoke about two
ideas/ experiences
becoming joined together
simply through contiguity

13. JOHN STUART MILL
◼Empiricist
◼Followed in Aristotle’s tradition
◼suggested that internal
representation is of three types:
◼(1) direct sensory events;
◼(2) events that are stored in
memory; and
◼(3) transformation of these
events in the thinking process

14. FROM THEN TO NOW
◼Were not interested in mental processes as cognitive
psychologists are today
◼However, we will be referencing back to them as we
study memory, thinking, reasoning, mental
representation, problem solving.
◼Gave the foundations to classical conditioning as well

15. … FROM THEN TO NOW
◼Till 1870s no one even asked whether these opinions, questions
could be answered through research.
◼But when people began doing so, experimental psychology was
born!

16. STRUCTURALISM
◼ Wundt’s laboratory in 1879 and the first
wave of Doctorates in psychology
◼ The science of mind
◼ Study conscious experience through
introspection
◼ Importance of replications – testing
under similar and different conditions
◼ Wundt: “higher” mental processes could
not be investigated through
introspection

17. …STRUCTRALISM
◼ Titchener applied the term
“structuralism” to his as well
as Wundt’s endeavors
◼ Focus on content and
structure of the mind rather
than function: how the mind
works, as opposed to why the
mind works

18. …STRUCTURALISM
◼Ebbinghaus (1913) studied
memory using over 2000
nonsense syllables (to avoid
previous associations) and
himself as a subject

19. …STRUCTURALISM
◼ The forgetting curve
◼ Has great influence on
cognitive psychology –
especially in the area of
memory
◼ Encouraged psychologists to
examine memory using
meaningless material for
decades

20. FUNCTIONALISM
◼ William James’ “Principles of
Psychology” 1890
◼ Human mind is active and inquiring
◼ Talks about perception, attention,
reasoning, and the tip-of-the-tongue
phenomenon
◼ Also talks about two different kinds
of memory and distinguished
between memory structure and
memory process – the foreshadow
of the AS model!

21. … FUNCTIONALISM
◼ Assumed that the way the mind
works has a great deal to do with its
function
◼ Habit as the flywheel of society – a
mechanism basic to keeping out
behaviour within bounds
◼ Dewey and Thorndike: the most
important thing that the mind did
was to allow the individual to adapt
to the environment

22. BEHAVIOURISM
◼ Study of behaviour
◼ Observable, objective events
◼ Banished all “mental
language” from use
◼ No significant contribution
to mental processes

23. BEHAVIOURISM
◼ Still, contributed method for
studying cognition
◼ Stressed the
importance of
defining concepts
◼ Stressed importance
of experimental
control

24. …BEHAVIOURISM
◼ Skinner argued that
“mentalistic” entities as images,
sensations and thoughts
should not be excluded just
because they are difficult to
study
◼ They need to be studied, but
did not believe they were to be
treated differently from
observable behaviour

25. …BEHAVIOURISM
◼ Argued against the existence
of mental representation as
anything more than a copy of
the environment
◼ A simple functional analysis of
the relationship between
stimuli and behaviours can be
used to study mental events

26. … BEHAVIOURISM
◼ Other behavioursts like
Tolman were more accepting
of mental representation
◼ Tolman believed that even
rats have goals and
expectations
◼ demonstrated that animals
have both expectations and
internal representations that
guided their behaviour

27. GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
◼ Gestalt – form, configuration, shape
◼ Objected to introspection
◼ Carried out most early research on
perception and problem solving
◼ Stated the observer did not
construct a coherent perception
from simple, elementary sensory
aspects of an experience, but
instead apprehended the total
structure of an experience as a
whole.

28. …GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
◼ Structuralism, functionalism,
and behaviourism offer
incomplete accounts of
psychological and in particular
cognitive experience.
◼ Chose to study subjective
experience of stimuli and
focus on how people use or
impose structure on their
experiences

29. …GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
◼ Laws explain why certain
components of a pattern seem to
belong together.
◼ The mind imposes its own
structure and organization on
stimuli
◼ The mind organizes perception
into wholes rather than discrete
parts
◼ The wholes tend to simplify
stimuli

30. …GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
◼Emphasized the role of the
mind
◼Believed ‘insight’ played a
big role in learning
◼Foreshadowed the most
common theory of steps in
creativity

31. BARTLETT
◼ Rejected Ebbinghaus’ experimental
method
◼ Used meaningful material – lengthy
stories
◼ Examined how people’s mental
influenced their later recall of the
material
◼ Proposed that memory is a
reconstructive process involving
interpretations and transformations of
the original material

32. GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY
◼ Piaget conducted studies on
cognitive development of
infants, children, and adolescents
◼ Sought to describe the
intellectual structures
underlying cognitive experience
at different
developmental points through
the genetic
epistemology approach
(That nature sets the timetable and the unfolding of
development happens within these genetic bounds but
with interaction of the environment – similar to
Eriksons’ epigenetic principle)

33. …GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY
◼ Largely sympathetic to the
gestalt idea that the relationship
between parts and wholes is
complex
◼ Noted that there exists a
qualitative difference in the
cognitive processes between
children and adults
◼ Has major influence on cognitive
psychology

34. STUDY OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
◼ Galton wondered whether
intellectual traits could be
inherited
◼ Questioned the role
of genetics on
intelligence
◼ Developed statistical tests to
answer his questions

35. …STUDY OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
◼ Studied a variety of cognitive
abilities
like mental imagery
◼ Noted individual differences in
these
◼ Left a legacy in
terms of inventions,
tests, questionnaires, and
statistical techniques

36. THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
◼While experimental psychologists were rethinking the
definition of psychology, other important developments were
occurring elsewhere.
◼Human factors engineering – a product of WWII – design to suit
the human machine
◼Increased insight into communication systems and their
passage, interpretation, and use by humans

37. THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
◼ Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics
was gaining popularity, Marvin
Minsky and John McCarthy
were inventing artificial
intelligence,
◼ Alan Newell and Herbert
Simon were using computers
to simulate cognitive
processes.

38. THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
◼ It was also in 1956 that Jerry
Bruner, Jackie Goodenough and
George Austin published A
Study of Thinking which took
seriously the notion of cognitive
strategies.
◼ 1956 signal-detection theory
was applied to perception by
Tanner, Swets, Birdsall and
others at Michigan

39. … THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
◼Meanwhile, Chomsky was
single-handedly redefining
linguistics

40. … THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
◼ Miller published an article entitled
‘The magical number seven, plus or
minus two’ describing some limits on
our human capacity to process
information.
◼ In 1956 Ward Goodenough and
Floyd Lounsbury published several
articles on componential analysis
that became models for cognitive
anthropology, and J.B. Carroll edited
a collection of papers by Benjamin

41. … THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
◼ Miller in his article “history of cognitive
psychology” dates the moment of
conception of cognitive science as 11
September, 1956, the second day of a
symposium organized by the ‘Special
Interest Group in Information Theory’ at
the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
◼ Many important researchers attended a
symposium at MIT and came away with
a strong pro-cognitive psychology
feeling

42. PRESENT TIMES
THIS IS WHAT YOU AS STUDENTS WILL COLLABORATE AND COMPLETE

43. SOME IMPORTANT CURRENT TRENDS
◼ Artificial Intelligence has entered everyday life and deep learning systems
are being investigated
◼ Cognitive neuroscience is becoming more central to all branches of
psychology and soon the cognitive science-cognitive neuroscience
differentiation may not exist
◼ There is increasing prominence of statistical models based on Bayesian
probability theory; a move away from the General Linear Model (will help us
understand more about mind/brain engine… they are applied in robotics
and are making autonomous vehicles possible

44. SOME IMPORTANT CURRENT TRENDS
◼Increasing emphasis on embodiment; how the brain uses
information from the sensory systems and interaction with the
world to perform complex tasks
◼Greater emphasis on social cognition; role of neurochemistry in
social decision making for instance.
◼Linguistic diversity and the development of new languages; the
emojis for instance

45. READ MORE ABOUT
◼The human connectome project

46. RETURN TO PRESENT!
END OF HISTORY