Course: Cognitive Psychology
24PSY3200
Program: B.Sc. Psychology (Sem-3)
Unit-1
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Delivered By: Dr. Raksha Singh
Assistant Professor
Chitkara School of Psychology and Counselling
Chitkara University, Punjab
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1.1. Cognitive Revolution in Psychology
The Cognitive Revolution, finding its emergence in the mid-20th
century, opened up a new perspective in the scientific discipline of
psychology. In essence, it relegated the behaviorist approaches
where predominant views about psychology had revolved around
perceptions, rather than mental processes. Thus, the cognition
revolution emerged as an oppositional force against the behaviorist
approach that mostly ignored critical internal cognitive functions
such as thinking, memory, and problem-solving. It was influential
thinkers such as cognitive psychologists Ulric Neisser and Noam
Chomsky who redefined even the very spheres of psychological
study.
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This revolution focused, or rather, was deeply concerned with an
individual's perception, processing, and storage of information.
Using a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates linguistics,
neuroscience, and even computer science, the Cognitive Revolution
established the foundation for today's cognitive psychology.
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The Cognitive Revolution was another controversial shift in
psychology developed largely in the 1950s and 1960s. The change of
focus from behaviorism to a process of thought was attempted in order
to avoid the unidirectional approach of behaviorism, where efforts are
taken more towards observable behaviors with negligence towards the
internal cognitive functions that actually drive those behaviors.
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Major figures among them were Ulric Neisser, Noam Chomsky, and
George A. Miller, who redefined what was within the scope of
psychological study through an emphasis on people's perception,
thinking, remembering, and problem-solving ability. Technological
change-the invention of computers-provided new metaphors for
understanding the mind as an information-processing system. In short,
the Cognitive Revolution laid the grounds for modern cognitive
psychology, enriching our understanding of human thought and
behaviour as well as furthering interdisciplinary gains in linguistics,
artificial intelligence, and neuroscience.
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Cognitive Revolution History
The Cognitive Revolution was a good paradigm shift for psychology
during the mid-20th century. It marked a shift in psychologists'
attention from behaviorism to that of mental processes. There were
two forms of origin: first, theoretical dissatisfaction in the existing
models and second, technological advances that would yield new
insight into human cognition.
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The Pre-Cognitive Era
Before the Cognitive Revolution, psychology was dominated mainly by
behaviorism, paying attention to the observable behavior of people and
minimizing their internal mental processes as being unscientific. These were
some of the writers, such as John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, who promoted
such a perspective, suggested that psychology only concerned itself with
observable and measurable behavior and almost completely avoided analyzing
cognitive processes.
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Cognitive Psychology Introduction
A spate of new awareness about the limitations of behaviorism during the 1950s
finally spurred the development of cognitive psychology. Prominent theorists such
as Ulric Neisser and George A. Miller started advocating the study of mental
processes pointing out people's perceived processing and information storage
capacities. This led to the development of a new discipline that would be very much
devoted to unraveling the intricacies of human thinking.
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Technological Influences
Advanced technology, especially computers and information theory, was an important force in
bringing about the Cognitive Revolution. Novel technologies provided fresh metaphors for
considering the mind as an information-processing system. Psychologists were inspired to consider
not only what mental entities, such as memories, or attentional resources, could be processed but
also to model cognitive functions. Computer processing analogies made possible the modeling of
mental processes and opened new fields for research.
Key Contributions and Theorists
Through several key contributions by theorists such as Noam Chomsky challenging the behaviorist
views about language acquisition and Herbert Simon based on problem-solving, the revolution
was sustained. Their work demonstrated that the rational processes are complex and must be
understood to have a wholesome grasp of human behavior. In this process, cognitive psychology
becomes a leading force in the field in the study areas of education, artificial intelligence, and
many other disciplines.
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Cognitive Revolution Pioneers
A set of "founding fathers" or trailblazers who overturned the prevailing behaviorist models
and underscored the centrality of mental processes thrust the Cognitive Revolution forward.
From these pioneers is derived modern cognitive psychology, which delineates how the
human mind functions.
Ulric Neisser
Ulric Neisser is sometimes credited to be the father of cognitive psychology due to significant
pioneering contributions made to this discipline. He participated in work that laid the very
basis of the discipline systematically. In 1967, his book, Cognitive Psychology, defined a
newly emerging discipline: perception, memory, and how thinking occurs; thus, bringing
psychology into cognitive science.
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Noam Chomsky
But the truly crucial work on language acquisition by Noam Chomsky for the Cognitive Revolution was his
devastating review in 1959 of B.F. Skinner's Science and Human Behavior, which basically rocked the scientific world
with its argument that language acquisition was rooted in innate cognitive structures and not strictly behaviors. The
revolutionary change this brought to linguistic theory and cognitive psychology cannot be overstated.
George A. Miller
George A. Miller was one of the leaders of the Cognitive Revolution and a significant figure in memory and
information-processing research. His classic paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," made clear
human limits on memory capacity; basic concepts from that work remain part of our way of thinking about cognition.
Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon worked immensely in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. He identified problem-solving as
an essential feature of human cognition. His works related to decision-making and bounded rationality have definitely
influenced how humans take information and make decisions, both in the areas of psychology and economics.
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continued…
Allen Newell
Allen Newell was the chief co-founder along with Herbert Simon of cognitive
science and artificial intelligence. Newell and Simon made the first computer
models simulating human problem-solving processes, demonstrating for the first
time the hope that computational approaches could understand cognition, opening
up the possibility of interdisciplinary collaboration between psychology and
computer science.
Cognitive Revolution Contributions
The Cognitive Revolution contributed much to psychology by rediscovering mental
processes and enlarging the walls of psychological research. This change not only
enriched our knowledge of cognition but also spread throughout all
interdisciplinary fields for education, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience.
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1.2 Goals of Cognitive Psychology
The primary objectives of cognitive psychology are to understand how the
mind works and how people process information.
1. To Understand Mental Processes
Study how humans receive, process, and store information.
Includes analysis of input (stimuli) and output (responses).
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2. To Explain Internal Representations
Understand how information is represented internally in the brain (e.g.,
images,language, symbols).
3. To Study Information Processing
● Determine how information flows through the mind using a computer
metaphor (input →processing → output).
● Investigate sequential and parallel processing.
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4. To Explore Conscious and Unconscious Processing
● Differentiate between automatic and controlled processes.
● Study how we can perform some tasks without conscious effort.
5. To Improve Learning and Memory
● Discover techniques to enhance memory (mnemonics, chunking, etc.).
● Understand why we forget and how to retain information better.
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6. To Apply Knowledge in Real-Life Domains
● Improve education, therapy, decision-making, AI development, etc.
● Help in clinical settings, especially in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).
7. To Study Errors and Biases
● Investigate cognitive distortions, heuristics, and biases in thinking.
● Understand causes of irrational or flawed reasoning.
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Scope of Cognitive Psychology
1.Social/Communal Psychologists
2.Scientific Psychologists
3.Developmental Psychologists
4. Neuropsychologists
5.Managerial Psychologists
6. Clinical Psychology
7. AI and Robotics
8. Linguistic Analysis
9.Medical
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SCOPE of Cognitive Psychology:
The scope of cognitive psychology could be assumed by realizing its sub
disciplines
and the effort or the work done on it.
1. Social/Communal Psychologists:
Social psychologists try to examine the mental process involved in thinking
about other
persons.
2. Scientific Psychologists:
Clinical psychologists inspect the role that mental practice play in
psychopathology.
3. Developmental Psychologists:
Developmental psychologists examine about the ways that cognitive procedure
amend throughout the life time.
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Continued…
4.Neuropsychologists:
Cognitive psychology is also connected with neuropsychology, in which
neuropsychologists to understand the connotation between mental dispensation
and brain action.
5. Managerial Psychologists:
Cognitive psychology plays its role in manufacturing or structural set up
where in administrative psychologists are maintained to know how cognitive
procedure such as memorizing and decision-making plans work out in
administrative or industrial workstation.
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1.3 Paradigms of Cognitive Psychology: Information-Processing Approach,
Connectionist Approach
What is Paradigm?
● Body of knowledge structured according to what its proponents consider
important and what they do not.
● Paradigms are intellectual frameworks that guide investigators in
understanding phenomena.
● It includes assumptions investigators make .
● It also specify what kinds of methods are apt for an investigation.
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4 Paradigms
1.What assumptions underlie the paradigm?
- There is 1 truth out there
- Objectivity is important in finding the truth .
2.What issues and questions does the paradigm emphasize?
- How can we predict and control phenomena ?
- How can we ensure a bias free search for the truth
3.What analogies does the paradigm use?
-People are like bone china, handle with care
-The human is like a machine.
4.What research methods and measures does the paradigm favor?
- Experiments, Participant observation , Interviews , Surveys.
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Paradigms of Cognitive Psychology
1. Information Processing approach
2. Connectionist
3. Evolutionary
4. Ecological
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Information Processing Approach
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Introduction
● Information processing approach to cognitive development projects that
human beings process sensory information that they receive from their
immediate environment mentally and not merely respond to sensory
stimuli. Mental processes take place in the sequence of Registering,
storing and retrieval of information and is precursor to any behavioral
outcome, be it that of activation or inhibition.
● It dominated in cognitive psychology during 1960-70s and even today
(Attkinson and Shiffrin Model).
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Basic Assumptions
The information processing approach is based on several assumptions, including:
1. Information made available by the environment is processed by a series of
processing systems (e.g., attention, perception, short-term memory);
2. These processing systems transform or alter the information in systematic ways;
3. The research aims to specify the processes and structures that underlie cognitive
performance;
4. Information processing in humans resembles that in computers.
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• The development of the computer in the 1950s and 1960s had an important
influence on psychology. It was, in part, responsible for the cognitive
approach becoming the dominant approach in modern psychology (taking
over from Behaviorism).
• The computer gave cognitive psychologists a metaphor, or analogy, to
which they could compare human mental processing. The use of the
computer as a tool for thinking about how the human mind handles
information is known as the computer analogy.
• Essentially, a computer codes (i.e., changes) information, stores
information, uses information and produces an output (retrieves info).
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Continued…
The idea of information processing was adopted by cognitive psychologists
as a model of how human thought works.
• For example, the eye receives visual information and codes information
into electric neural activity, which is fed back to the brain where it is
“stored” and “coded.”
• This information can be used by other parts of the brain relating to mental
activities such as memory, perception, and attention. The output (i.e.,
behavior) might be, for example, to read what you can see on a printed
page.
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continued…
• Hence the information processing approach characterizes thinking as the
environment providing input of data, which is then transformed by our
senses.
• The information can be stored, retrieved, and transformed using “mental
programs,” with the results being behavioral responses.
• Cognitive psychology has influenced and integrated with many other
approaches and areas of study to produce, for example, social learning
theory, cognitive neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence (AI).
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Information Processing Model of Memory
• When we selectively attend to one activity, we tend to ignore other stimulation. However, our
attention can be distracted by something else, like the telephone ringing or someone using our
name.
• Psychologists are interested in what makes us attend to one thing rather than another (
selective attention), why we sometimes switch our attention to something that was previously
unattended (e.g., Cocktail Party Syndrome), and how many things we can attend to at the same time
(attentional capacity).
• One way of conceptualizing attention is to think of humans as information processors who can only
process a limited amount of information at a time without becoming overloaded.
• Broadbent and others in the 1950s adopted a model of the brain as a limited
capacity information processing system through which external input is
transmitted.
• The information processing model of memory consists of a series of stages, or boxes,
representing stages of processing. Arrows indicate the flow of information from one stage
to the next.
Information Processing Model
• There is a fixed structure that the information processing theory follows,
and it is divided into the following four parts:
• The store model – This is a breakdown of the model which states that the
information that has been received can be stored in any of the processing
units, or the channels through which it passes. These channels are the
sensory register, short-term memory and long-term memory.
• The sensory register – This is that part of the mental processing unit that
receives all information and then stores it temporarily or permanently.
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continued..
• Short-term memory – That part of the sensory register where the
information
• is stored temporarily. Once the decision has been made regarding the
information, the information will either be discarded or transferred to the
long-term memory.
• Long-term memory – The part where all the information is permanently
stored.
• It can be retrieved later as and when the need arises.
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Connectionist Approach
• Connectionism: An approach to understanding human cognition using
mathematical models
• Models used: Connectionist Networks / Artificial Neural Networks
(ANNs)
• Objective: Simulate mental processes through interconnected units
resembling neural networks
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First Wave of Connectionism (1940s–1969)
Key Figures:
● Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts (1943): Formal model of neural
circuits
● Frank Rosenblatt (1958): Perceptron model
● Focus on information storage and organization
● Introduction of the single-layer perceptron
Decline:
● 1969: Minsky & Papert’s critique in Perceptrons
● Resulted in reduced funding and research interest
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Second Wave of Connectionism (1980s–1990s)
Revival:
• 1982: Feldman & Ballard reintroduced the term “connectionist model”
• 1987: Parallel Distributed Processing by Rumelhart & McClelland
Innovations:
• Hidden layers (intermediate processing units)
• Sigmoid activation function (vs. earlier all-or-nothing)
• John Hopfield's mathematical insights
Debates:
• Connectionism vs. Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI)
• Philosophical shift in understanding cognition
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Limitations of Second-Wave Connectionism
● Interpretability: Hard to understand internal processing
● Compositionality: Struggles to explain structured, higher-order
representations.
● Difficulty explaining abstract cognitive phenomena
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Third Wave – Deep Learning Era (2010s–Present)
Marked by: Rise of deep learning and large-scale neural networks
Applications: Large language models (e.g., ChatGPT, GPT-4)
Achievements:
● Improved accuracy and performance
● Advanced pattern recognition and language modeling
Challenges:
• Greater complexity
• Increased interpretability problems
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Summary
• Connectionism has evolved through three major waves
• From early perceptrons to modern deep learning
• Remains central in cognitive modeling and AI, with ongoing debates and
developments.
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Suggested Readings
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits
on Our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review.
Chomsky, N. (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language.
Gardner, H. (1985). The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive
Revolution.
Anderson, J. R. (2010). Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications (7th ed.).
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