BRAINWARE UNIVERSITY
ASSIGNMENT
COURSE NAME : BSC. HONOURS PSYCHOLOGY
STUDENT NAME : NILOY JANA
STUDENT CODE : BWU/BPY/22/021
SEMESTER
: 1ST SEMESTER
SUBJECT NAME : INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY LAB
SUBJECT CODE : PSYC191
TOPIC
: JOURNEY FROM BEHAVIOURISM TO
COGNITION.
INDEX
1. Behaviourism
2. Onset of Cognitive Revolution- Tolman’s Contribution
3. The Cognitive School
4. Importance of Computers and Information Processing
5. Contribution of Aron Beck
6. References
BEHAVIOURISM
One of the major schools of psychology, Behaviourism as a school, focused on observable
behaviour and measuring it objectively unlike any of the schools that were founded before
which focused on the workings of the human mind to determine the causes of its behaviour.
John B. Watson was the first major American psychologist to advocate a behavioural
approach. Working in the 1920s, Watson was adamant in his view that one could gain a
complete understanding of behaviour by studying and modifying the environment in which
people operate. In fact, Watson believed that it was possible to elicit any desired type of
behaviour by controlling a person’s environment.
Watson was influenced in large part by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov
(1849–1936), who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had
previously been associated with the presentation of food. Watson and the other behaviorists
began to use these ideas to explain how events that people and other organisms experienced
in their environment (stimuli) could produce specific behaviors (responses). For instance, in
Pavlov’s research the stimulus (either the food or, after learning, the tone) would produce the
response of salivation in the dogs. In his research Watson found that systematically exposing
a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves elicit fear could
lead the child to respond with a fearful behavior to the presence of the stimulus. In the best
known of his studies, an 8-month-old boy named Little Albert was used as the subject. Here
is a summary of the findings:
The boy was placed in the middle of a room; a white laboratory rat was placed near him and
he was allowed to play with it. The child showed no fear of the rat. In later trials, the
researchers made a loud sound behind Albert’s back by striking a steel bar with a hammer
whenever the baby touched the rat. The child cried when he heard the noise. After several
such pairings of the two stimuli, the child was again shown the rat. Now, however, he cried
and tried to move away from the rat. In line with the behaviorist approach, the boy had
learned to associate the white rat with the loud noise, resulting in crying.
Additionally, Watson went on categorizing behaviour into 4 types:
1. Explicit (Overt) learned behavior such as talking, singing, playing a guitar, etc.
2. Implicit (Covert) learned behaviour such as increase of heart rate caused by the sight
of a dentist’s drill.
3. Explicit unlearned behaviour such as blinking or sneezing.
4. Implicit unlearned behaviour such as glandular secretions and circulatory changes.
Watson believed that everything an individual does, including thinking, has to fall under one
of the four above mentioned categories.
Thus, the behaviorist approach and social learning are reductionist, which means that they
isolate parts of complex behaviors to study. The behaviorists take the view that all behavior,
no matter how complex, can be broken down into the fundamental processes of conditioning.
Another well-known and established name in the school of Behaviourism is B.F. Skinner,
also acknowledged as the father of Radical Behaviourism. Skinner expanded the principles of
behaviorism and also brought them to the attention of the public at large. Skinner used the
ideas of stimulus and response, along with the application of reinforcements and punishment,
to train pigeons and other animals. And he used the general principles of behaviorism to
develop theories about how best to teach children and how to create societies that were
peaceful and productive. Skinner even developed a method for studying thoughts and feelings
using the behaviorist approach. He also argued that free will is an illusion and that all
behavior is determined by environmental factors. His conclusions were that behavior was a
reflection of internal processes and therefore could be analyzed. The effort to consider
internal thoughts and feelings became known as radical behaviorism, and the application of
these ideas is widely used today in applied behavior analysis.
Criticisms faced by the Behaviouristic School:
There are several criticisms and observed limitations of behaviorism theory. While these
concepts and principles predict observable behavioral responses in humans, internal cognitive
processes are largely discounted. Further, behaviorism defines learning as observable
behavior and only values learning resulting in modified behavior, which is only one aspect of
learning. Learning takes place within a complex set of criteria and behaviorism reduces these
processes to observable cause and effect.
Behaviorists theorize that learners are passive and that the teacher is in total control of the
learning that occurs based on the environment they create, however, this removes the agency
of the learner to engage meaningfully in their own learning. The expectation is that the
learner will behave in an expected way in response to particular stimuli created by the
teacher, and they are simply vessels into which learning is poured.
While Skinner attempted to remedy some of the issues above with his radical behaviorism
theory, his attempts to place concepts like emotion, thoughts and conscious state into
measurable criteria falls woefully short. The lack of account for internal processes means that
reasons behind particular behavior are at best oversimplified and at worst overlooked.
Unfortunately, trying to measure behavior without accounting for underlying reasons will not
adequately aid the understanding of human behavior.
All these criticisms that were faced this school led to the developing of a new and another
major school of psychology through a revolution known as the Cognitive Revolution.
ONSET OF COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
As stated earlier, the Cognitive Revolution was a movement that was sparked due to the
highly debatable criticisms faced by the Behaviouristic School and its practices. Many
researchers and scientists had pointed out major concerns against Behaviourism that weren’t
answerable by the members of the school. One of such experiments which is prominently
known is Tolman’s Experiment.
Tolman’s Contribution and his Experiment:
Edward C. Tolman Originally started his academic life studying physics, mathematics, and
chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After reading William
James' Principles of Psychology, he decided to shift his focus to the study of psychology. He
then enrolled at Harvard where he worked in Hugo Munsterberg's lab. In addition to being
influenced by James, he also later said that his work was heavily influenced by Kurt Koffka
and Kurt Lewin.
Tolman is perhaps best-known for his work with rats and mazes. Tolman's work challenged
the behaviorist notion that all behavior and learning is a result of the basic stimulus-response
pattern.
In his classic experiment, rats practiced a maze for several days. Then, the familiar path they
normally took was blocked. According to the behaviorist view, the rats had simply formed
associations about which behaviors were reinforced and which were not. Instead, Tolman
discovered that the rats had formed a mental map of the maze, allowing them to choose a
novel path to lead them to the reward.
His theory of latent learning suggests that learning occurs even if no reinforcement is offered.
Tolman's concepts of latent learning and cognitive maps helped pave the way for the rise
of cognitive psychology.
THE COGNITIVE SCHOOL
Efforts to understand behavior lead some psychologists directly to the mind. Evolving
in part from structuralism and in part as a reaction to behaviorism, which focused so
heavily on observable behavior and the environment, the Cognitive perspective
focuses on how people think, understand, and know about the world. The emphasis
is on learning how people comprehend and represent the outside world within themselves
and how our ways of thinking about the world influence our behavior.
Many psychologists who adhere to the cognitive perspective compare human thinking to the
workings of a computer, which takes in information and transforms, stores, and retrieves it. In
their view, thinking is information processing, which will be covered in details in the later
parts of this assignment. Psychologists who rely on the cognitive perspective ask questions
ranging from how people make decisions to whether a person can watch television and study
at the same time. The common elements that link cognitive approaches are an emphasis on
how people understand and think about the world and an interest in describing the
patterns and irregularities in the operation of our minds.
Although Cognitive psychology began in earnest in the 1960s, earlier psychologists had also
taken a cognitive orientation. Some of the important contributors to cognitive psychology
include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who studied the ability
of people to remember lists of words under different conditions, and the English psychologist
Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), who studied the cognitive and social processes of
remembering. Bartlett created short stories that were in some ways logical but also contained
some very unusual and unexpected events. Bartlett discovered that people found it very
difficult to recall the stories exactly, even after being allowed to study them repeatedly, and
he hypothesized that the stories were difficult to remember because they did not fit the
participants’ expectations about how stories should go. The idea that our memory is
influenced by what we already know was also a major idea behind the cognitivedevelopmental stage model of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Other important
cognitive psychologists include Donald E. Broadbent (1926–1993), Daniel Kahneman(1934),
George Miller (1920–), Eleanor Rosch (1938–), and Amos Tversky (1937–1996).
In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behavior, the cognitive
approach provided a distinct alternative to behaviorism. According to cognitive
psychologists, ignoring the mind itself will never be sufficient because people interpret the
stimuli that they experience. For instance, when a boy turns to a girl on a date and
says, “You are so beautiful,” a behaviorist would probably see that as a reinforcing (positive)
stimulus. And yet the girl might not be so easily fooled. She might try to understand why the
boy is making this particular statement at this particular time and wonder if he might be
attempting to influence her through the comment.
Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we take into consideration how stimuli are
evaluated and interpreted, we understand behavior more deeply. Cognitive psychology
remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as
language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social
psychology, and psychotherapy. The cognitive revolution has been given even more life over
the past decade as the result of recent advances in our ability to see the brain in action using
neuroimaging techniques.
IMPORTANCE OF COMPUTERS AND
INFORMATION PROCESSING
Science is always influenced by the technology that surrounds it, and psychology is no
exception. Thus, it is no surprise that beginning in the 1960s, growing numbers of
psychologists began to think about the brain and about human behavior in terms of the
computer, which was being developed and becoming publicly available at that time. The
analogy between the brain and the computer, although by no means perfect, provided part of
the impetus for a new school of psychology called Cognitive psychology.
The history of computers in Cognitive psychology is short and recent-about 25 year. The
most striking aspect is the increasing speed with which computers have been incorporated
into all phases of cognitive research. In the late 1940s, the first modern computer by John von
Neumann showed that machines could perform logical operations. In the 1950s, there were
speculations that computers actually reflect the way the mind works. Herbert Simon (1969)
was the first to compare the human mind to computer processing systems, saying that the
brain is like the computer’s hardware, and the mind is the computer’s software. Sensory and
perceptual systems therefore, act like input channels, mental processes are analogous to
software applications, memory storage is to disk storage and, memory retrieval is to printer or
screen display. Although Simon’s analogy is compelling, many psychologists complained
that it was too simplistic.
Despite the limitations of Simon’s analogy, it stimulated further growth of cognitive
psychology. The analogy sparked the interest of some cognitive psychologists to generate
insights into how the mind processes information based on how computers work. It also
pushed some other cognitive psychologists to investigate how the mind is further
distinguished from computer software applications.
Cognitive psychology did not only benefit from the development of computers at one end, it
also stirred further growth of computer technology. Artificial intelligence was developed
from the rise of cognitive psychology. Artificial intelligence is a technological innovation for
machines that perform intelligent functions, such as diagnosing medical illnesses, prescribing
treatments, examining equipment failure, evaluating loan applicants, and advising students on
college courses.
Information Processing:
Information processing theory is an approach to cognitive development studies that aims to
explain how information is encoded into memory. It is based on the idea that humans do not
merely respond to stimuli from the environment. Instead, humans process the information
they receive. While experts believe that the brain’s mechanisms and functions are relatively
simple, the magnitude and scope of neural networks and their behaviors are quite powerful as
a whole. These include how the brain processes information. Information processing theory
not only explains how information is captured, but how it is stored and retrieved as well. The
process begins with receiving input, also called stimulus, from the environment using various
senses. The input is then described and stored in the memory, which is retrieved when
needed. The mind or the brain is likened to a computer that is capable of analyzing
information from the environment. Consequently, information processing affects a person’s
behavior. In the expectancy theory of motivation, an individual processes information
through behavior-outcome relationships. Then, they can form expectations based on the
information and make decisions.
Origin of Information Processing Theory:
George Armitage Miller was the first to put forth the idea of the theory of information
processing. He was one of the original founders of cognition studies in psychology. His
studies are based on Edward C. Tolman’s sign and latent learning theories, which propose
that learning is an internal and complex process which involves mental processes.
Miller discovered the capacity of the working memory, which can generally hold up to seven
plus or minus two items. Additionally, he coined the term “chunking” when describing the
functionalities of short-term memory.
Aside from Miller, John William Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin are also associated with the
Cognitive Information Processing Theory. This refers to the proposed multi-stage theory of
memory, which is one of the leading models of information processing theory. Two other
psychologists, Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch made significant contributions to the theory
through their own studies. They presented a more in-depth model of memory with various
stages, such as visuospatial sketch pad, phonological loop, and central executive.
Elements of Information Processing Theory:
While major models of information processing theory vary, they are mostly composed of
three main elements:
1. Information stores – The different places in the mind where information is stored,
such as sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, semantic memory,
episodic memory, and more.
2. Cognitive processes – The various processes that transfer memory among different
memory stores. Some of the processes include perception, coding, recording,
chunking, and retrieval.
3. Executive cognition – The awareness of the individual of the way information is
processed within him or her. It also pertains to knowing their strengths and
weaknesses. This is very similar to metacognition.
CONTRIBUTION OF ARON BECK
Aaron Temkin Beck was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department
of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the father of cognitive
therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). His pioneering methods are widely used in
the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed selfreport measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI),
which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of
depression. In 1994 he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded the nonprofit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which provides CBT treatment and
training, as well as research. Beck served as President Emeritus of the organization up until
his death.
Beck was noted for his writings on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide,
and psychometrics. He published more than 600 professional journal articles, and authored or
co-authored 25 books. His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Martin
Seligman to refine his own cognitive techniques and later work on learned helplessness.
Beck began helping patients identify and evaluate these thoughts and found that by doing so,
patients were able to think more realistically, which led them to feel better emotionally and
behave more functionally. He developed key ideas in CBT, explaining that
different disorders were associated with different types of distorted thinking. Distorted
thinking has a negative effect on a person's behaviour no matter what type of disorder they
had, he found. Beck explained that successful interventions will educate a person to
understand and become aware of their distorted thinking, and how to challenge its effects. He
discovered that frequent negative automatic thoughts reveal a person's core beliefs. He
explained that core beliefs are formed over lifelong experiences; we "feel" these beliefs to be
true.
Cognitive therapy has also been applied with success to individuals with anxiety disorders
and schizophrenia. He also focused on cognitive therapy for borderline personality disorder,
and for patients who have had recurrent suicide attempts.
However, some mental health professionals have opposed Beck's cognitive models and
resulting therapies as very mechanistic or too limited in which parts of mental activity they
will consider. Beck's work was presented as a far more scientific and experimentally-based
development than psychoanalysis (while being less reductive than behaviourism), Beck's key
principles were not necessarily based on the general findings and models of cognitive
psychology or neuroscience developing at that time but were derived from personal clinical
observations and interpretations in his therapy office. And although there have been many
cognitive models developed for different mental disorders and hundreds of outcome studies
on the effectiveness of CBT—relatively easy because of the narrow, time-limited and
manual-based nature of the treatment—there has been much less focus on experimentally
proving the supposedly active mechanisms; in some cases the predicted causal relationships
have not been found, such as between dysfunctional attitudes and outcomes.
REFERENCES
1. Introduction to Psychology- Morgan
2. Psychology- R.S Feldman
3. Information Processing, Stages, Models, Limitations- Imed
Bouchrika
4. The impact of computers on cognitive psychology- Doris
Aaronson, Edward Grupsmith, May Aaronson