Summary cognitive psychology
Chapter 1: The science of the mind
The scope of cognitive psychology
- The chapter begins with a description of the scope of cognitive psychology. The domain of
this field includes activities that are obviously “intellectual” (such as remembering, paying
attention, or making judgments) but also a much broader range of activities that depend on
these intellectual achievements.
- What form should a “science of the mind” take? We discuss the difficulties in trying to study
the mind by means of direct observation. But we also explore why we must study the mental
world if we’re to understand behavior; the reason is that our behavior depends in crucial
ways on how we perceive and understand the world around us
- Combining these themes, we come to the view that we must study the mental world
indirectly. But as we will see, the method for doing this is the method used by most sciences
The broad role for memory
A huge range of actions, thoughts, and feelings depend on cognition
Our suggestion, in other words, is that many (perhaps all) of your encounters with the world depend
on your supplementing your experience with knowledge that you bring to the situation.
Amnesia and memory loss
Cases of clinical amnesia – cases in which someone, because of brain damage, has lost the ability to
remember certain materials. These cases are fascinating at many levels and provide key insights into
what memory is for. Without memory, what is disrupted?
H.M. was in his mid-20s when he had brain surgery intended to control his severe epilepsy. The
surgery was, in a narrow sense, a success, and H.M.’s epilepsy was brought under control. But this
gain came at an enormous cost, because H.M. essentially lost the ability to form new memories. He
survived for more than 50 years after the operation, and for all those years he had little trouble
remembering events prior to the surgery. But H.M. seemed completely unable to recall any event
that occurred after his operation. If asked who the president is, or about recent events, he reported
facts and events that were current at the time of the surgery. If asked questions about last week, or
even an hour ago, he recalled nothing.
This memory loss had massive consequences for H.M.’s life, and some of the consequences are
surprising. For example, he had an uncle he was very fond of, and he occasionally asked his hospital
visitors how his uncle was doing. Unfortunately, the uncle died sometime after H.M.’s surgery, and
H.M. was told this sad news. The information came as a horrible shock, but because of his amnesia,
H.M. soon forgot about it.
Sometime later, because he’d forgotten about his uncle’s death, H.M. again asked how his uncle was
doing and was again told of the death. But with no memory of having heard this news before, he was
once more hearing it “for the first time,” with the shock and grief every bit as strong as it was
initially. Indeed, each time he heard this news, he was hearing it “for the first time.” With no
memory, he had no opportunity to live with the news, to adjust to it. As a result, his grief could not
subside. Without memory, H.M. had no way to come to terms with his uncle’s death.
,A different glimpse of memory function comes from some of H.M.’s comments about what it felt like
to be in his situation. Let’s start here with the notion that for those of us without amnesia, numerous
memories support our conception of who we are: We know whether we deserve praise for our good
deeds or blame for our transgressions because we remember those good deeds and transgressions.
We know whether we’ve kept our promises or achieved our goals because, again, we have the
relevant memories. None of this is true for people who suffer from amnesia, and H.M. sometimes
commented that in important ways, he didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know if he should be
proud of his accomplishments or ashamed of his crimes; he didn’t know if he’d been clever or stupid,
honorable or dishonest, industrious or lazy. In a sense, then, without a memory, there is no self.
The scope of cognitive psychology – this field is sometimes defined as the scientific study of
acquisition, retention, and use of knowledge. Knowledge is relevant to a huge range of concerns. Our
self-concept, it seems, depends on our knowledge (and, in particular, on our memory for various
episodes in our past). Our self-concept, it seems, depends on our knowledge (and, in particular, on
our memory for various episodes in our past).
The suggestion, then, is that cognitive psychology can help us understand capacities relevant to
virtually every moment of our lives. Activities that don’t appear to be intellectual would collapse
without the support of our cognitive functioning. The same is true whether we’re considering our
physical movements through the world, our social lives, our emotions, or any other domain.
The cognitive revolution
The science of psychology went through a succession of changes in the 1950s and 1960s that are
often referred to as psychology’s “cognitive revolution.” This “revolution” involved a new style of
research, aimed initially at questions we’ve already met: questions about memory, decision making,
and so on. But this new type of research, and its new approach to theorizing, soon influenced other
domains, with the result that the cognitive revolution dramatically changed the intellectual map of
our field.
The cognitive revolution centered on two key ideas. One idea is that the science of psychology
cannot study the mental world directly. A second idea is that the science of psychology must study
the mental world if we’re going to understand behavior.
The limits of introspection
In Wundt’s and Titchener’s view, psychology needed to focus largely on the study of conscious
mental events— feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and recollections.
But how should these events be studied? These early researchers started with the fact that there is
no way for you to experience my thoughts, or I yours. The only person who can experience or
observe your thoughts is you. Wundt, Titchener, and their colleagues concluded, therefore, that the
only way to study thoughts is through introspection, or “looking within,” to observe and record the
content of our own mental lives and the sequence of our own experiences.
Some thoughts are unconscious, which meant that introspection was limited as a research tool. After
all, by its very nature introspection is the study of conscious experiences, so of course it can tell us
nothing about unconscious events.
But there’s another, deeper problem with introspection. In order for any science to proceed, there
must be some way to test its claims; otherwise, we have no means of separating correct assertions
,from false ones, accurate descriptions of the world from fictions. With introspection, this testability
of claims is often unattainable.
The years of behaviorism
Historically, the concerns just described led many psychologists to abandon introspection as a
research tool. Psychology couldn’t be a science, they argued, if it relied on this method. Instead,
psychology needed objective data, and that meant data out in the open for all to observe.
What sorts of data does this allow? First, an organism’s behaviors are observable in the right way:
You can watch my actions, and so can anyone else who is appropriately positioned. Therefore, data
concerned with behavior are objective data and thus grist for the scientific mill. Likewise, stimuli in
the world are in the same “objective” category: These are measurable, recordable, physical events.
In addition, you can arrange to record the stimuli I experience day after day after day and also the
behaviors I produce each day. This means that you can record how the pattern of my behavior
changes over time and with the accumulation of experience. In other words, my learning history can
be objectively recorded and scientifically studied.
In contrast, my beliefs, wishes, goals, preferences, hopes, and expectations cannot be directly
observed, cannot be objectively recorded. These “mentalistic” notions can be observed only via
introspection; and introspection, we’ve suggested, has little value as a scientific tool. Therefore, a
scientific psychology needs to avoid these invisible internal entities.
This perspective led to the behaviorist movement, a movement that dominated psychology in
America for the first half of the 20th century. The movement was in many ways successful and
uncovered a range of principles concerned with how behavior changes in response to various stimuli
(including the stimuli we call “rewards” and “punishments”). By the late 1950s, however,
psychologists were convinced that a lot of our behavior could not be explained in these terms. The
reason, basically, is that the ways people act, and the ways they feel, are guided by how they
understand or interpret the situation, and not by the objective situation itself. Therefore, if we follow
the behaviorists’ instruction and focus only on the objective situation, we will often misunderstand
why people are doing what they’re doing and make the wrong predictions about how they’ll behave
in the future. To put this point another way, the behaviorist perspective demands that we not talk
about mental entities such as beliefs, memories, and so on, because these things cannot be studied
directly and so cannot be studied scientifically. Yet it seems that these subjective entities play a
pivotal role in guiding behavior, and so we must consider them if we want to understand behavior.
It seems, then, that our science of salt passing won’t get very far if we insist on talking only about the
physical stimulus. Stimuli that are physically different from each other (“Salt, please” and the bit
about ions) have similar effects. Stimuli that are physically similar to each other (“Pass the salt” and
“Sass the palt”) have different effects. Physical similarity, therefore, is not what unites the various
stimuli that evoke salt passing.
It’s clear, though, that the various stimuli that evoke salt passing do have something in common:
They all mean the same thing.
The intellectual foundations of the cognitive revolution
One might think, then, that we’re caught in a trap. On one side, it seems that the way people act is
shaped by how they perceive the situation, how they understand the stimuli, and so on. If we want
to explain behavior, then, we have no choice. We need to talk about the mental world. But, on the
, other side, the only direct means of studying the mental world is introspection, and introspection is
scientifically unworkable. Therefore: We need to study the mental world, but we can’t.
There is, however, a solution to this impasse, and it was suggested years ago by the philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). To use Kant’s transcendental method, you begin with the observable
facts and then work backward from these observations. In essence, you ask: How could these
observations have come about? What must be the underlying causes that led to these effects?
It is a way to test the unobservable. → studying mental processes indirectly, relying on the fact that
these processes, themselves invisible, have visible consequences: measurable delays in producing a
response, performance that can be assessed for accuracy, errors that can be scrutinized and
categorized.
Reproducing experiments and varying the experiments to test hypotheses – is what gives science its
power. It’s what enables scientists to assert that their hypotheses have been rigorously tested, and
it’s what gives scientists assurance that their theories are correct.
The path from behaviorism to the cognitive revolution
Concerns were voiced by Edward Tolman (1886-1959). Prior to Tolman, most behaviorists argued
that learning could be understood simply as a change in behavior. Tolman argued, however, that
learning involved something more abstract: the acquisition of new knowledge.
In one of Tolman’s studies, rats were placed in a maze day after day. For the initial 10 days, no food
was available anywhere in the maze, and the rats wandered around with no pattern to their
behavior. Across these days, therefore, there was no change in behavior—and so, according to the
conventional view, no learning. But, in fact, there was learning, because the rats were learning the
layout of the maze. That became clear on the 11th day of testing, when food was introduced into the
maze in a particular location. The next day, the rats, placed back in the maze, ran immediately to that
location. Indeed, their behavior was essentially identical to the behavior of rats who had had many
days of training with food in the maze.
The key point, though, is that—even for rats—we need to talk about (invisible) mental processes
(e.g., the formation of cognitive maps) if we want to explain behavior.
A different spur to the cognitive revolution also arose out of behaviorism— but this time from a
strong critique of behaviorism. B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) was an influential American behaviorist, and
in 1957 he applied his style of analysis to humans’ ability to learn and use language, arguing that
language use could be understood in terms of behaviors and rewards (Skinner, 1957). Two years
later, the linguist Noam Chomsky (1928– ) published a ferocious rebuttal to Skinner’s proposal, and
convinced many psychologists that an entirely different approach was needed for explaining
language learning and language use, and perhaps for other achievements as well.
European roots of the cognitive revolution
Research psychology in the United States was, we’ve said, dominated by the behaviorist movement
for many years. The influence of behaviorism was not as strong, however, in Europe, and several
strands of European research fed into and strengthened the cognitive revolution.
(Many of the Gestaltists fled to the United States in the years leading up to World War II and became
influential figures in their new home.) Overall, the Gestalt psychologists argued that behaviors, ideas,
and perceptions are organized in a way that could not be understood through a part-by-part,
element-by-element, analysis of the world. Instead, they claimed, the elements take on meaning only
