Essay About Brief History Of Cognitive Psychology And Brief History

A Brief History of Cognitive Psychology
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
As we have learned, a great portion of cognitive psychology deals with how
knowledge is represented in the mind. In this section on the history of cognitive
psychology we will review three major periods (for a detailed history see Solso
& MacLin, 2000; Wilson & Keil, 1999). First, we will deal with traditional ideas
Information Processing from a very early period. Then we touch on the way knowledge and thinking was
conceptualised by Renaissance scholars. Finally, we will deal with the modern
period with emphasis on current ideas and methods.
Early Thoughts on Thinking
Where did knowledge come from, and how is it represented in the mind? That
eternal question is fundamental to cognitive psychology as it has been through
the ages of humankind. Basically, two answers have been proposed. The
empiricists maintain that knowledge comes from experience, and the nativists
suggest that knowledge is based on innate characteristics of the brain. From a
scientific perspective, neither case can be definitively proved, so the argument
continues without clear resolution. With these issues clearly before us, lets
consider the way ancient philosophers and early psychologists grappled with the
issue. The fascination with knowledge can be traced to the earliest writings.
Early theories were concerned with the seat of thought and memory. Ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphics suggest their authors believed that knowledge was
localised in the heart–a view shared by the early Greek philosopher Aristotle
but not by Plato, who held that the brain was the locus of knowledge.
Cognition in the Renaissance and Beyond
Renaissance philosophers and theologians seemed generally satisfied that
knowledge was located in the brain. They considered that knowledge was acquired
not only through the physical senses (mundus sensibilis – touch, taste, smell,
vision, and hearing) but also from divine sources (mundus intellectualis–Deus).
During the eighteenth century, when philosophic psychology was brought to the
point where , scientific psychology could assume a role, the British empiricists,
George Berkeley, David Hume, and, later, James Mill and his son John Stuart
Mill suggested that internal representation is of three types: (1) direct sensory
events, (2) faint copies of percepts, or those that are stored in memory; and (3)
transformation of these faint copies, as in associated thought. These notions are
the basis of much current research in cognitive psychology.
During the nineteenth century, the early psychologists like Gustav Fechner, Franz
Brentano, Hermann Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, G; E. Muller, Oswald Kulpe,
Hermann Ebbinghaus, Sir Francis Galton, Edward Titchener, and William James
and others started to break away from philosophy to form a discipline based on
empirical results rather than on speculation. By the last half of the nineteenth
century, theories of the representation of knowledge were clearly dichotomous:
that emphasised the structure of mental representation (Wundt, Titchner); and
the processes or acts (Brentano).
About the same time in America, James critically analysed the new psychology
that was developing in Germany. He established the first psychological laboratory
in America, wrote the definitive work in psychology in 1890 (Principles of
Psychology), and developed a well-reasoned model of the mind. Perhaps Jamess
most direct link with modem cognitive psychology is in his view of memory, in
which both structure and process play an important role. F. C. Donders and James
Cattell, contemporaries of Jamess, performed experiments using the perception
of brief visual displays as a means of determining the time required for mental
operations. The technique, subject matter, procedures, and even the interpretation
of results of these early scientists