Cognitive Psychology: Definition, Theories And Main Authors
Every time we talk about what psychology is and what “psychologists say,” we are simplifying a lot. Unlike what happens in biology, in psychology not only is there no unified theory on which the entire discipline is based, but The different psychological currents that exist are based on largely irreconcilable positions and many times they do not even share an object of study.
However, that does not mean that today there is no dominant current that has imposed itself on the others. This current of psychology is, in our days, the cognitivism on which cognitive psychology is based.
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that It is dedicated to the study of mental processes such as perception, planning or drawing inferences That is, processes that have historically been understood as private and outside the scope of the measurement instruments that have been used in scientific studies.
Cognitivism and cognitive psychology have been a knock on the table by a community of researchers that did not want to give up the scientific study of mental processes, and approximately Since the 60s they have formed the hegemonic current of psychology throughout the world
To explain the origins of cognitive psychology we must go back to the middle of the last century.
Cognitive psychology and the computational metaphor
If in the first half of the 20th century the dominant schools in the world of psychology were psychodynamics initiated by Sigmund Freud and behaviorism, from the 1950s onwards the world of scientific research began to experience a time of accelerated changes caused by the emergence of progress in the construction of computers.
From that moment It became possible to understand the human mind as an information processor comparable to any computer , with its data input and output ports, parts dedicated to storing data (memory) and certain computer programs responsible for processing the information appropriately. This computational metaphor would serve to create theoretical models that allow us to formulate hypotheses and try to predict human behavior to a certain extent. Thus was born the computer model of mental processes, widely used in psychology today.
The cognitive revolution
At the same time as technological progress in the field of computing occurred, behaviorism was increasingly criticized. These criticisms focused, basically, because It was understood that its limitations did not allow mental processes to be adequately studied by limiting itself to drawing conclusions about what is directly observable and what has a clear impact on the environment: behavior.
Thus, During the 1950s, a movement emerged in favor of a reorientation of psychology towards mental processes This initiative included, among others, followers of the ancient Gestalt psychology, memory and learning researchers interested in cognitive matters, and some people who had distanced themselves from behaviorism and, especially, Jerome Bruner and George Miller, who They led the cognitive revolution.
It is considered that cognitive psychology was born as a result of this stage of demands in favor of the study of mental processes, when Jerome Bruner and George Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies from Harvard in 1960. Shortly later, in 1967, psychologist Ulric Neisser provided a definition of what cognitive psychology is in his book Cognitive psychology. In this work he explains the concept of cognition in computational terms, as a process in which information is processed to be able to use it later.
The emergence of cognitive psychology and the cognitivist paradigm meant a radical change in the object of study of psychology. If for the radical behaviorism of BF Skinner what psychology should study was the association between stimuli and responses that can be learned or modified through experience, cognitive psychologists began to hypothesize about internal states that allowed explaining memory, attention , perception, and countless topics that until then had only been timidly touched on by Gestalt psychologists and some researchers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The methodology of cognitive psychology, which inherited many things from behaviorism, consisted of making assumptions about the functioning of mental processes, making inferences from these assumptions, and testing what is taken for granted through scientific studies, to see. if the results fit with the assumptions from which they are based. The idea is that the accumulation of studies about mental processes would outline how the mind could work and how it does not work human being, this being the driving force of scientific progress in the field of cognitive psychology.
Criticisms of this conception of the mind
Cognitive psychology has been strongly criticized by psychologists and researchers associated with the behaviorist movement. The reason is that, on their view, there is no reason to consider mental processes to be anything other than behavior, as if they were fixed elements that remain inside people and that they are relatively separated from what is happening around us.
Thus, cognitive psychology is seen as a mentalistic perspective that, whether through dualism or through metaphysical materialism, confuses the concepts that are supposed to help understand behavior with the object of study itself. For example, religiosity is understood as a set of beliefs that remain within the person, and not a disposition to react in certain ways to certain stimuli.
As a result, the current heirs of behaviorism consider that the cognitive revolution, instead of providing compelling arguments against behaviorism, he limited himself to showing that he had refuted it putting one’s own interests ahead of scientific reasoning and treating the attributions made about what may be happening in the brain as if it were the psychological phenomenon to be studied, instead of the behavior itself.
Cognitive psychology today
Currently, cognitive psychology continues to be a very important part of psychology, both in research and in intervention and therapy Their progress has been helped by discoveries in the field of neuroscience and the improvement of technologies that allow scanning the brain to obtain images of its activation patterns, such as fMRI, which provides extra data about what is happening in the head. of human beings and allows “triangulating” the information obtained in the studies.
However, it should be noted that neither the cognitivist paradigm nor, by extension, cognitive psychology are free from criticism. Research carried out within cognitive psychology rests on several assumptions that do not have to be true, such as the idea that mental processes are something different from behavior and that the former causes the latter. There is a reason why, even today, behaviorism exists (or a direct descendant of it, rather, and not only has it not been fully assimilated by the cognitive school, but it also harshly criticizes it.
