Before the cognitive
revolution the dominant school of thought in psychology was behaviorism.
Following from the scientific method of observation psychologists believed that
they could learn all they needed to know from behavioral observation. More
extreme behaviorists, B.F. Skinner among them, denied the existence of minds in
effect disregarding the possibility of mental processes. More moderates
entertained the possibility of internal stimuli to explain behavior. But at the
end of the day, behaviorists relied on behavior as the only path through which
we learn.
In contrast to behaviorism, cognitive psychology seeks to
study of how people perceive, remember, think, and solve problems. More
sophisticated studies of memory such as that of episodic memory dealing with
our memories of events, semantic memory dealing with the power of speech, and procedural memory which
are the things we do repeatedly, like drive home or sign our names. These are
all areas that are explored by cognitive psychologists.
Ulrich Neisser first coined the term in his 1967 book
entitled, Cognitive Psychology. In it he defines the field as he conceived it,
and describes people as information processors, as opposed to the
aforementioned behaviorists who measured only what they could observe in
behavior.
The “Cognitive Revolution” was an intellectual movement in
the 1950s conceived within the context of interdisciplinary communication
between psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. One of more revolutionary
ideas borne out of this revolution is that of AI, the thinking behind it was
that by creating Artificial Intelligence in computer science, scientists could,
by way of reverse engineering make inferences of analogous mental processes in
humans.
In his book Blank Slate, prominent modern linguist Steven
Pinker stated, “The first bridge between biology and culture is the science of
mind , cognitive science. The second bridge between mind and matter is
neuroscience, and the third bridge between the biological and the mental is
behavioral genetics, the study of how genes affect behavior”.
The point of these examples is to demonstrate the dramatic
shift in thinking regarding the way in which the sciences looked at, and tried
to make sense of human behavior. Where the focus was to look from outside, now
it is completely reverse. Even behavior is explained with genetics which is
part of our biological makeup.
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