What were the early influences on cognitive psychology?

Early cognitive psychology developed from work in mental processes, experimental psychology, memory research, and later information-processing theories that treated the mind as an active system.

What did J. S. Mill contribute?

He proposed “mental chemistry,” arguing that complex ideas are built from simpler mental elements, which helped frame cognition as something that can be scientifically analyzed.

What did Fechner contribute?

He showed that mental processes like perception can be measured experimentally, establishing psychophysics as a foundation for cognitive study.

What did Ebbinghaus contribute?

He experimentally studied memory and discovered key principles like the forgetting curve and spacing effects.

What was the Würzburg School’s contribution?

It expanded psychology beyond simple association by studying higher cognitive processes like thinking and judgment.

What did William James contribute?

He summarized early cognitive research and emphasized the stream of consciousness and active nature of thought.

FREDRIC BARTLETT (1886 - 1969)

What was Bartlett’s main idea about memory?

Memory is reconstructive and shaped by schemas rather than being a literal recording of events.

What was the “War of the Ghosts” study?

Participants recalled a culturally unfamiliar story in distorted ways, reshaping it to fit their own cultural expectations.

What did Bartlett conclude?

People remember the meaning (gist), not exact details, and memory is shaped by prior knowledge and schemas.

JEAN PIAGET (1896 - 1980)

What was Piaget’s main contribution?

He developed a stage theory of cognitive development based on schemata that change as children interact with the world.

What are schemata?

Mental structures that organize knowledge and guide how we interpret and respond to experience.

What is the sensorimotor stage?

(0–2 years) Learning through senses and actions; development of object permanence.

What is the preoperational stage?

(2–7 years) Symbolic thinking develops, but logic is limited and egocentrism is common.

What is the concrete operational stage?

(7–11 years) Logical thinking about concrete objects and events becomes possible.

What is the formal operational stage?

(11+ years) Abstract, hypothetical, and systematic thinking develops.

What is cybernetics?

The study of communication, control, and feedback systems in both machines and biological organisms.

What did Wiener contribute?

He founded cybernetics, focusing on feedback systems that regulate goal-directed behavior.

What did McCulloch and Pitts contribute?

They showed that neural activity can be modeled using logical systems, influencing neural networks and AI.

What did Shannon and Weaver contribute?

They developed information theory, explaining how information is transmitted and processed.

How did cybernetics influence cognitive psychology?

It introduced the idea that the mind works like an information-processing system with input, storage, and output.

What is the overall impact of early cognitive psychology?

It shifted psychology toward studying internal mental processes, including memory, development, and information processing, forming the basis of modern cognitive science.

EMERGENCE OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY (1950'S) KEY FIGURES

What did Noam Chomsky contribute?

He argued against behaviorism in language learning and proposed that humans have an innate capacity (Language Acquisition Device) for grammar.

What is the “poverty of stimulus” argument?

Children learn language too quickly and accurately to be explained only by environmental input.

What did George Miller contribute?

He showed limits of working memory, famously proposing “7 ± 2” chunks of information capacity.

Why is Miller important?

He helped establish information-processing limits as a core concept in cognitive psychology.

What did Jerome Bruner contribute?

He emphasized active thinking in learning and promoted cognitive development theories and concept formation.

GESTALT AND PHYSIOLOGICAL INFLUENCE

What did Gestalt psychologists contribute?

They showed that perception and thinking are organized wholes, not just associations of parts.

What did Karl Lashley contribute?

He argued that cognition is distributed across the brain rather than localized in simple stimulus-response chains.

What did Donald Hebb contribute?

He linked learning to neural connections, showing how cognition has a biological basis.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY INFLUENCE

Why is social psychology important for cognitive psychology?

It showed that thinking involves interpretation of social situations, not just internal mental processes.

What did Solomon Asch study?

Conformity and how people change judgments under group pressure.

What did Leon Festinger contribute?

Cognitive dissonance theory, showing tension between beliefs and behaviour.

What did Fritz Heider contribute?

Attribution theory, explaining how people interpret causes of behaviour.

What did Milgram, Zimbardo, and Darley & Latané contribute?

They showed how social context strongly influences obedience, roles, and helping behaviour.

What caused the cognitive revolution in the 1950s?

It emerged from critiques of behaviorism, advances in language theory, information processing models, brain research, and social psychology insights into human thinking.

COGNITIVE REVOLUTION

What was the cognitive revolution according to Hebb?

In his APA presidential address, Hebb argued that psychology was moving away from strict behaviorism toward studying internal mental processes, especially neural mechanisms underlying thought, perception, and learning.

What did Hebb emphasize in this shift?

He emphasized that behavior cannot be fully explained by stimulus–response associations alone and that the brain must be understood as an active, organized system supporting cognition.

What was Hebb’s overall position?

He proposed that cognitive processes have a biological basis and should be studied through both psychology and neurophysiology, linking mind and brain.

What role did Chomsky play in the cognitive revolution?

He challenged behaviorist accounts of language, arguing that language is innate and too complex to be explained by reinforcement alone.

What did Miller contribute?

He showed limits of working memory (7 ± 2 chunks) and introduced information-processing constraints on cognition.

What did Bruner contribute?

He emphasized active thinking, concept formation, and the importance of cognitive strategies in learning.

What did Gestalt psychology contribute?

It showed that perception and thinking are organized wholes rather than simple associations.

What did physiological psychology contribute?

Lashley and Hebb demonstrated that cognition depends on distributed brain systems rather than simple stimulus–response pathways.

What did social psychology contribute?

It showed that cognition is shaped by interpretation of social situations (e.g., conformity, attitudes, and attribution).

What was the overall outcome of these developments?

Together, they shifted psychology toward studying internal mental processes, marking the rise of modern cognitive psychology.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

What is artificial intelligence?

AI is the study of machines that can perform tasks associated with human cognition, such as learning, reasoning, perception, and problem-solving.

ALAN TURING

Who was Alan Turing?

He was a mathematician who founded the field of artificial intelligence and proposed a test for machine intelligence.

What is the Turing Test?

It is a procedure where a judge interacts with a human and a machine through text; if the judge cannot reliably tell them apart, the machine is considered to exhibit intelligence.

What is weak AI?

It is the view that computers can simulate intelligent behaviour but do not truly understand or possess mental states.

What is strong AI?

It is the view that properly programmed computers could literally have minds and real understanding.

What is the Chinese Room argument?

Searle’s thought experiment where a person follows rules to manipulate Chinese symbols without understanding them, yet produces correct answers.

What does it show?

It shows that symbol manipulation (syntax) is not the same as understanding (semantics), challenging strong AI.

Which psychological approaches oppose AI most strongly?

Humanistic and existential psychology.

Why do they oppose AI?

They argue that humans are not machines and emphasize free will, meaning, creativity, and subjective experience, which they believe cannot be reduced to computation.

What is information-processing psychology?

It is the view that the mind processes information like a computer, transforming input into output through mental operations.

What did Newell, Shaw, and Simon show?

They demonstrated that computer programs could solve problems in ways similar to humans, suggesting that human thinking can be modeled computationally.

What was the impact of their work?

It introduced the computer metaphor into psychology and made concepts like memory storage, encoding, and retrieval central to cognitive theory.

What is faculty psychology?

The idea that the mind consists of distinct mental capacities or “faculties” such as memory, perception, language, and reasoning.

Why did it return in cognitive psychology?

Neuroscience and cognitive research showed that different brain regions specialize in different functions.

What is the modern version of faculty psychology?

It is modularity—the idea that the mind consists of specialized systems that work together.

What is cognitive science?

An interdisciplinary field studying mind and intelligence using psychology, neuroscience, AI, linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology.

What is its main goal?

To understand how cognition works by integrating insights from multiple scientific disciplines.

What is a limitation of cognitive science?

There is no single unified theory of mind, and consciousness and emotion remain only partially explained.

What is connectionism?

It is a theory that mental processes arise from networks of simple interconnected units rather than symbolic rules.

What is its historical foundation?

It is based on associationism and Hebb’s idea that neurons that fire together strengthen connections.

What are neural networks?

Computer models inspired by the brain, consisting of input units, hidden units, and output units that learn patterns through weighted connections.

How do they learn?

They adjust connection strengths based on experience, forming distributed representations.

Why are they important?

They are robust, adaptive, and reflect how the brain processes information in a distributed way.

What is GOFAI?

“Good Old-Fashioned AI,” which uses explicit symbols and fixed rules to simulate intelligence.

How is GOFAI different from neural networks?

GOFAI uses rule-based symbolic reasoning, while neural networks learn from experience through distributed activation patterns.

What is a key limitation of GOFAI?

It is brittle and breaks down when rules are incomplete or incorrect.

What is Hebbian learning?

Learning where connections strengthen when neurons activate together, based on correlation.

What is back-propagation?

A supervised learning method where errors are calculated and used to adjust network weights.

What is back-propagation?

A supervised learning method where errors are calculated and used to adjust network weights.

How do Hebbian learning and back-propagation differ?

Hebbian learning is unsupervised and associative, while back-propagation uses error correction to improve performance

What is the main idea of connectionism and neural networks?

Cognition emerges from distributed networks of simple units that learn from experience rather than from fixed symbolic rules.