Sylvia, The Russian Shrink
"What a piece of work is man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable
in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god!
(Act 2, scene 2, of Shakespeare's Hamlet).
Cognitive psychology is concerned with the scientific study of human mental activities involved in acquisition, storage, retrieval, and utilization of information. Among its wide concerns are perception, memory, reasoning, problem solving, intelligence, language, and creativity. Research in these areas has widespread practical applications. Cognitive psychology is a living, breathing thing for us - not some obscure, academic quest that only PhDs can be interested in, but a dynamic and vibrant approach to questions of human memory and thought. A student some 30 years ago, filled with curiosity about how memory works, would have been sent off to study retroactive interference, paired-associate learning, and forgetting curves. The same student today is sent off to study human reasoning, comprehension of paragraphs, brain processes, and the like. This is certainly a more rewarding set of questions to study, which also shows that there has been progress.
A staggering array of topics fit under the general heading of cognitive psychology. Among the more specific concerns of cognitive psychologists are perception, attention, memory, and imagery. Studies of perception and attention might be concerned with how much of people's vast sensory experience they can further process and make sense of, and how they recognize incoming information as forming familiar patterns. Questions regarding the quality of memory include how much information can be maintained, for how long and under what conditions; how information is organized in memory and how is it retrieved or lost; and how accurate the memory is, as well as what can be done to facilitate a person's recall skills. Cognitive researchers concerned with imagery are interested in people's ability to "see" in their minds a picture or image of an object, person, or scene that is not physically present. Cognitive researchers are interested in the properties of such images and how they can be manipulated.
The term cognition is considerably richer in its connotation and indeed is almost an umbrella term for any and all of the "higher mental processes." Webster's defines it as "the process of knowing in the broadest sense, including perception, memory, judgement, etc." (Webster's New World Dictionary, 1986). Cognitive Psychology, Neisser's (1967) landmark book, claimed that cognition "refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used including terms as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem solving, and thinking."
In addition to these concerns, there is great interest in the higher order processes of planning, reasoning, problem solving, intelligence, language, and creativity. Cognitive psychologists want to know, for example, what steps are involved in planing a route to a destination or a solution to a problem, and what factors influence people's more abstract ability to reason. They seek to understand the importance of prior knowledge or experience, to discover which strategies are effective, and to see what obstacles typically impede a person's thinking. They are interested in the relationships between language and thought, and between creativity and intelligence.
Cognitive psychologists typically employ an information-processing model to help them better understand mental events. An assumption of this model is that mental activities can be broken down into a series of interrelated stages and scientifically studied. A general comparison can be made between the information processing of a human and a computer. For example, both have data input into the system, humans through their sense organs and computers via the keyboard. Both systems then translate and encode the data. The computer translates the keyboard input into electromagnetic signals for storage on a disk. People often translate the raw data from their senses to a linguistic code, which is retained in some unique human storage device. Both humans and computers can manipulate the stored information in virtually limitless ways, and both can later retrieve information from storage for output. Although there are many dissimilarities between how computers and humans function, this comparison imparts the flavor of the information-processing model.
Cognitive psychologists employ a scientific approach. While the working processes of the mind cannot be directly seen, one can objectively record the data input into the system and the ensuing response. One can also objectively measure the accuracy of and the time required for the response. Based upon this information, one can draw logical inferences as to the mental steps involved in generating that response. One of the continuing challenges of cognitive psychology is the construction of experiments in which observable behaviors accurately reveal mental processes.
The definition of the term memory means the mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval, and the mental storage system that enables these processes. Operationally, memory is demonstrated when the processes of retention and retrieval influence our behavior or performance in some way, even if we are unaware of the influence. Furthermore, we understand this definition to include not just retention across hours, weeks, or years, but even across very brief spans of time, in any and all situations in which the original stimulus event is no longer present. Memory is referring to three different kinds of mental activities in this definition: initial acquisition of information, (usually called learning or encoding), subsequent retention of the information, and then retrieval of the information.
To a remarkable extent, the scientific study of human memory and cognition is quite new. Although elements of explanations, and certainly many experimental tasks, appeared even in the earliest years of psychology, the relevant body of work and theorizing has been created since the 1950s. And yet, as is true of most topics in psychology, interest in human memory and cognitive processes is as old as recorded history. Aristotle, born in 384 B.C., considered the basic principles of human memory in his treatise De Memoria [Concerning Memory] (Hothersall, 1984). Even a casual reading of ancient works such as Homer's The Iliad or The Odyssey reveals that people have always wondered about how the mind works and how to improve its functioning. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates fretted that the invention of written language would weaken reliance on memory and understanding, much the way modern parents worry that calculators will weaken children's learning of math. Philosophers of every age have considered questions of the nature of thought and memory. Descrates even decided that the ultimate proof of human existence is our awareness of our own thought - Cogito ergo sum, "I think therefore I am". Given this preoccupation with thought and mind in a Western culture, it is no wonder that Ebbinghaus's comment, "psychology has a long past but only a short history," is so widely repeated.
Aristotle is historically "first" in psychology. He is generally viewed as the first philosopher to have advocated an empirically based "natural science" approach to understanding. While he was certainly not the only great thinker to have insisted on observation as the basis for all science, he did "get there first" with this fundamentally important idea. Aristotle's inquiry into the nature of thought and mind by his own natural science method led him to a reasonably objective explanation of how learning and memory take place. Equally important to psychology as a whole was Aristotle's insistence that the mind is a "blank slate" at birth, a tabula rasa or clean sheet of paper. This theory claims that the experiences of the individual are of paramount importance, since experience, rather than inborn factors, "writes" a record onto the blank paper. It is possible that no other issue has so preoccupied philosophers of all ages, as the issue of the "nature/nurture" or "heredity/environment" debate.
Most of the other anticipations of psychology date from the Renaissance and later periods and largely consist of developments in the area of scientific methods and approaches. By the mid - 1800s, positions such as Descrates' "rational"approach had been discarded by scientists, in favor of observational or empirical methods. Thus by the time psychology appeared, the general procedures of scientific inquiry had been developed and were, for the most part, accepted by all scientific disciplines and areas. There was widespread agreement on the need for science to be based on objective procedures and methods such as careful quantification and definition, empirical observation, and so on. Given the notable progress made in scientific fields such as physics, biology, and medicine by the mid - 1800s, it is not surprising that the early psychologists thought the time was ripe for a true "science of the mind."
The term verbal learning is the label attached to that branch of experimental psychology that deals with human subjects as they learn "verbal material," items or stimuli composed of letters or sometimes words. The ground-breaking research of Herman von Ebbinghaus in which desirably objective methods for studying human memory were invented and used started the verbal learning tradition within experimental psychology. Tasks such as serial learning, paired-associate learning, and to an extent free recall were the accepted methods of investigation, using Ebbinghaus-inspired nonsense syllables.
The changes in verbal learning from its early work to its emergence as cognitive psychology around 1960 seem to have been quite evolutionary, a gradual shifting of interests and interpretations that blended almost seamlessly into cognitive psychology. In 1957, Skinner published a book entitled Verbal Behavior, a treatment of human language from the radical behaviorist standpoint of reinforcement, stimulus-response associations, extinction, and so on. Skinner's basic idea was that human language use followed the same laws of learning that has been discovered in the animal learning laboratory: a reinforced response is expected to increase in frequency; a nonreinforced response should extinguish; a response conditioned to a certain stimulus should be emitted to the same stimulus in the future. In principle human language, obviously a learned behavior, could be explained by the same sort of mechanism as any learned behavior - with knowledge of the current reinforcement contingencies and past reinforcement history of the individual.
Possibly the single most startling development of this period, certainly in terms of its impact on society, is the invention of the computer. Initial work had began in the 1930s and 1940s on what we now call computer science, although philosophers had conceived of such a machine in general terms long before the technology existed to build one. At some point during the 1950s, a few psychologists realized the possible relevance of computing machinery to issues in psychology, that in a sense, in some interesting and possibly useful ways, computers behave like people. They take in information, do something with it internally, then eventually produce some observable product. The product, to a greater or lesser extent, reflects what went on during the "internal" phase.
As with any major change, it takes a while for the new approach to catch on, for people to learn the new rules, to feel free to speak the new language, and to decide that the new direction is worth following. Just as 1879 approximates the formal beginning of psychology so 1960 seems to approximate the beginning of cognitive psychology in its modern form.