COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Candidates should:

· be able to describe and evaluate the cognitive approach in psychology;

· consider the issues around memorising material, and the problems of eyewitness testimony;

· consider the explanations of cultural differences in cognitive performance;

· understand the central issues in the area of autism and the theory of mind;

· understand the basic characteristics of language;

· be able to evaluate the usefulness of applying the results of animal research to people;

· understand the role of reinforcement in learning;

· consider the implications of research in cognitive psychology.

LOFTUS, E. and PALMER, J. (1974) Reconstruction of automobile destruction.

DEREGOWSKI, J. (1972) Pictorial perception and culture.

BARON-COHEN, S., LESLIE, L.M. & FRITH, U. (1985) Does the autistic child have a theory of mind?

GARDNER, R. & GADNER, B (1969) Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Cognition means knowing, so cognitive psychologists are interested in the ways in which we come to know the world around us - how we come to attain, retain and regain information, through the processes of attention, perception, memory, problem solving, language and thinking in general. These are processes which can only be inferred and which cannot be seen directly.

Cognitive psychology can be seen as a separate theoretical approach, or perspective within psychology (see below and Study Guide 3.2). Cognitive psychology sees the person as an information processor and cognitive psychology has been heavily influenced by computer science, with human cognitive processes being compared with the operation of computer programs (the computer analogy)

The Cognitive Revolution

The word psychology is derived from two Greek words, psyche (mind, soul or spirit) and logos (discourse or study) which put together, produce 'Study of the mind'.

The appearance of psychology as a subject discipline in its own right is generally dated at 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt and his co-workers were attempting to investigate 'the mind' through introspection. Introspection involved observing and analysing the structure of their own conscious mental processes (thoughts, images, feelings) as they occurred.

However by the 1920s the validity and usefulness of this method were being seriously questioned, in particular by an American psychologist, John B. Watson. Watson believed that introspection produced results which could never be proven or disproved, e.g. if my introspection produces different results from yours, how can we ever decide whose is correct? Of course we cannot, because there is no objective way of doing so. Consequently Watson proposed that psychologists should confine themselves to what is measurable and observable by more than one person, namely behaviour.

So a new brand of psychology had emerged known as behaviour-ism. It largely replaced Wundt's Introspectionism, advocating that human beings should be regarded as complex animals and studied using the same scientific methods as used by chemistry and physics. This was the only way, Watson believed, that psychology could make claims to being a science itself: to emulate the natural sciences, psychology must adopt its objective methods. The study of inaccessible, private, mental processes was to have no place in a truly scientific psychology.

Behaviourism (in one form or another) was to remain the dominant force within psychology for the next thirty years or so, especially in the USA and, to a lesser extent, in Britain.

The Cognitive Approach (or the information processing approach)

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, academic psychologists were increasingly coming to view the behaviourist approach as useful but limited. Taking the new work on computers and communications technology as inspiration, they became increasingly interested in how human beings processed the information which they were receiving from their senses.

This information processing approach (the cognitive approach) offered an appealing alternative to the limitations of behaviourism, and rapidly became very popular; and the advent of the computer provided an appealing metaphor or analogy for conceptualising how the human mind worked. The growth of cognitive psychology continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Cognitive psychology included many different facets of mental life, such as attention, perception, memory, problem solving and reasoning. What makes these mental (or cognitive) processes different from behaviour is that they are essentially 'private' in that, at best, you can only infer from, say a person's furrowed brow or head scratching that they are trying to puzzle out a problem or make up their mind about something.

The cognitive approach sees the person as an information processor. Cognitive psychologists are concerned with how human beings process information they have received from their senses. From being the 'study of the mind' to the 'study of behaviour', psychology has come round again to the mind, but this time with a very strong emphasis on the need for empirical investigations (especially the experimental method) to back up the theories.

There were, however two limitations to the cognitive approach which gradually became apparent.

One of these was the way that it became strictly tied to the principle of rigorous laboratory investigation, to the exclusion of other methods. Psychologists had become increasingly aware that such methods could investigate only a limited range of human behaviour, and pressure began to grow for more 'ecologically valid' (realistic) methods of investigating what human beings do and how they think - methods (e.g. non experimental methods) which could acknowledge the complexities of human behaviour in everyday life.

The second limitation was related to the first, though not the same. This was the growing influence of the computer metaphor in cognitive psychology. In the early years of the cognitive revolution, it had been shown that individual and social factors also influence cognitive processes: a person's assumptions and expectations, ideas and enthusiasms, values and beliefs all influence how receptive they are to information. As theoretical models in cognitive psychology became more closely tied to the idea that the human brain is 'like' a computer, these concepts became increasingly overlooked, or ignored. Despite these limitations the cognitive approach and especially the social cognitive approach is still one of the most influential and exciting areas in psychology and has influenced many other areas in psychology.