Cognitive Psychology Definition Paper

Cognitive Psychology Definition Paper

Cognitive Psychology Definition Paper

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental function, including memory, perception, reasoning, learning, conceptual development, attention, reasoning, language and decision making ("Cognitive Psychology," 2016). The study of cognition in modern times rests solely on the idea that the human brain is a complex computing system. Cognitive Psychology circles the idea that if we want to know how people work, we then need to recognize the core methods of their mind.

Development of Cognitive Psychology

         Cognitive psychology also studied how people view and understand the world. Subjects wanted to describe the patterns and irregularities during the operation of his or her mind.  There are four key milestones in cognitive psychology's development. The milestones are inadequacies of behaviorism, the computer metaphor and information processing model, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. These four milestones played a huge role in the developing the cognitive approach.

The Inadequacies of Behaviorism 

Behaviorism had was plagued with many issues a big one being that behaviorism left out the effect of genetics entirely. Behaviorism took into account what was learned during reward and punishment. Inquiries were brought up on many issues, and the answers were missing when the question as examined with behaviorism alone. Cognitive psychologists looked at fixed – action patterns, but behaviorists had no answers about them. A fixed-action pattern is behaviors that received small rewards (sometimes none at all) or punishments where the animals were involved in and periods of time where if the behavior has not been picked up yet may never be.

Behaviorism could not provide steady answers with it came to language as well. Behaviorism suggested that language was imitated when demonstrated by someone else. The behaviorist perspective did not address several points. First, learning could not explain the swift rate children gain language. Secondly, the number of sentences to learn is so high there is no way they can be learned solely by imitation. Next, children continually make mistakes using the correct verb structure in a sentence. Considering that most adults do not make these mistakes, a language could not be learned by imitation. Finally, children can gain language skills even their grammar is not corrected by an adult (Perlovsky, 2009).  These four points suggest that there must be more explanations to explain the attainment of language further.  

The Information Processing Model and Computer Metaphor

The second milestone is the information processing model. The information processing model suggests that people, like computers, are general-purpose symbol manipulators (Galotti, 2014, p.16). Several attempts were made to figure out how to explain the brain functions, including a telephone switchboard and solenoids but these were lacking in explaining how the mental process works (Perlovsky, 2009). The computer analogy compares the hardware of a computer to the human brain and the software to the human thought process. The "mind is like a computer‟ analogy connects the input received from the environment to the mental processes that lead to the output of behavior (Willingham, 2007). This revolutionary model allowed psychologists to study and use the scientific method to look at how the mind input processes result in human behavior versus solely looking at behavior itself.

Artificial Intelligence

The third milestone is artificial intelligence and can be defined as “the ability of a computer or other machine to perform those activities that are normally thought to require intelligence” (Artificial intelligence, n.d.). An artificial intelligence program was developed in the 1950’s by Allen Newell and Herb Simon; this program proved theorems in formal logic using abstract constructs and representations (Artificial intelligence, n.d.). This A.I. program demonstrated sophisticated "behavior", it solved problems similarly to how humans answered them, and it used abstract constructs (Willingham, 2007). Through the artificial intelligence, it became apparent that the human mind handled information like a computer. The brain uses representations and processes. This approach gave deeper insight into the processes of the mind and the resulting behavior. 

Neuroscience

The last main milestone, neuroscience, is “a branch (as neurophysiology) of science that deals with the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of nerves and nervous tissue and especially their relation to behavior and learning” ("Neuroscience," 2015). The focus is on the brain and its impact on behavior as well as normal cognitive functions and the impact on the nervous system resulting from neurological, psychological, and neurodevelopmental disorders.  Neuroscience began to show a clear connection between behavior and specific structures of the brain. This link revealed the biological side of behavior that could not be ignored. Studying behavior from this aspect allows a clear picture of a how disorders affect the brain itself initiating behavior and can be compared to normal behavior to gain greater perspective.