Foundations of Cognitive Psychology
Part 2 – History of Cognitive
Psychology
Contributors to the History of Psychology
Early Studies of Mental Processes
• Relating Physical Stimuli
and Psychological
Phenomena - mental
processes that underlie
intelligent behavior are
unobservable
• Pythagoras (584-495
BC) - Greek
mathematician – String
plucking
Early Philosophical Views on the Mind
• How do people acquire
knowledge and how do
they maintain it over
time?
• Socrates (469-399 BC)
• Plato (427-347 BC)
• Aristotle (384-322 BC)
British Empiricists and Associationists
• knowledge is gained through experience with the
world and that experiences with the world are
stored in the mind as associations.
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
• John Locke (1623-1704)
• James Mill (1773-1836)
• John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
PSYCHOPHYSICS
• Study of the relationship between the physical properties of a stimulus
and properties taken on when the stimulus is filtered through
subjective experience
• Early studies of the nervous system and development of psychophysics
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Johannes Mueller (1801-1858)
Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878)
Gustav Fechner (1801-1878)
Paul Broca (1824-1880)
Carl Wernicke (1848-1904)
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Structuralism
• The primary goal of
psychology is to specify
conscious experience through
introspection
• Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
• Edward Titchener (18671927)
Functionalism
• Interested in the study of the
functions of the mind;
emphasis on cause and effect,
prediction and control, and
observation of environment
and behavior
• William James (1842-1910)
• James Rowland Angell (1869–
1949)
Gestalt Psychology
• Emphasis on the importance
of whole patterns in
perception rather than
perception of individual parts
(the whole is different from
the sum of its parts.)
• Max Wertheimer (18801943)
• Kurt Koffka (1886-1941)
• Wolfgang Kohler (18871967)
Behaviorism
• Stressed studying observable
events rather than unobservable
mental processes; learning
consists of developing
associations between stimuli and
responses
• Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
• Edward Thorndike (1874-1949)
• John B. Watson (1878-1958)
• Clark Hull (1884-1952)
• Edward C. Tolman (1886-1959)
• B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
History of Cognitive Psychology – Love/Hate Relationships
Cognitive Psychologists and Studies
• Early memory studies
– Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
– Sir Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969)
– George A. Miller (1920-)
• Metaphors of Cognition and Brain Structure
– Information-processing model - Lachman,
Lachman, and Butterfield (1979)
– Connectionism – McClelland & Rumelhart, 1985;
Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986)
• Cognitive Science
• Cognitive Neuroscience