History of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology is concerned with advances in the studies of memory, language processing, perception, problem solving, and thinking. However, to explore the beginning of Cognitive Psychology should be traced to the field of psychology whose history diagram was shown as Figure 1. The earliest roots of psychology would be divided into two different approaches to understand the human mind: philosophy and physiology. The pre-evidences are the two Greek philosophers Plato (ca. 428-348 B.C.) and his student Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) who has profoundly affected modern thinking in psychology and in many other fields.

Both of them are the originators of rationalist and empiricist. A rationalist is one who believes that there is a route to knowledge is through logical analysis. In contrast, Aristotle’s approach is that of an empiricist, the one who believes that we acquire knowledge via empirical evidence, obtained through experience and observation.

In Aristotle’s view, then, it leads directly to empirical investigations of psychology, whereas Plato’s view foreshadows the various uses of reasoning in theory development. But, most psychologists today seek a synthesis of the two: They all base empirical observations

on theory but in turn of using these observations to revise their theories. To elaborate on Aristotle’s ideas, Kemp (1996, 2000) [19] attempted to locate cognitive processes in the brain and to prove to have little to do with our current understanding of the brain.

Furthermore, The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) [20] began the discussing empricalism versus rationalism. His impact on philosophy interacted with the nineteenth-century scientific exploration of the body and how it works to produce profound influences the eventual establishment of psychology as a discipline in the 1800s.

Weber, 1834

Figure 1. Evolution of Cognition Psychology

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist and Psychologist who made Psychology a field of its own. He was the first person in history to be called a

“psychologist,” as well as the first person to teach a course in Physiological Psychology at Heidelberg in 1867. Wundt established psychology as a unique branch of science with its own questions and methods. Wundt was the first person to take all of the nineteenth century’s sprouting of the new psychology onto the old and creating his new science, and published a book on physiological psychology. The form of psychology Wundt called scientific metaphysics. This form of psychology would be used to integrate the empirical work in the lab with other scientific findings, reviewed by Piaget [6].

The philosophical and psychological developments lead to the emergence of cognitive psychology. Developments in other sub-fields also contributed to the development of cognitivism and modern psychology. Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958) [21, 22] studied topics not easily explained by simple conditioning, and to embrace methods other than the experimental manipulation of environment contingencies (Gardner, 1985). Lashley was deeply interested in neuroanatomy (the study of the structures of the brain) and in how the organization of the brain governs human activity. Lashley brashly challenged the behaviorist view that the human brain is a passive organ merely responding to environmental contingencies outside the individual; instead, he considered the brain an active and dynamic organizer of behavior. Donald Hebb (1949) [22, 23] was the first psychologist to provide a detailed, testable theory of how the brain could support cognitive processes. His influential work provides a strong foundation for some of the current trends in cognitive psychology. Behaviorists did not jump at the opportunity to agree with theorists like Lashley and Hebb. They thought that psychology should be the science of the behavior analysis but Human mind. From Watson [24] to Skinner [25], they applied their experimental analysis of behavior to almost everything, from learning to problem solving and even to the control of behavior in society. The other such as, Functionalism, was a major paradigm shift in the history of American psychology. As an outgrowth of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the functionalist approach focused on the examination of the function

and purpose of mind and behavior. Rather than the structures of the mind, functionalism was interested in mental processes and their relation to behavior. William James, a functionalism, became known to influence the psychology. The following, G. Stanley Hall, Mary Calkins, and Edward Thorndike are spreading functionalist psychology as well. As for Gestalt psychology, it is founder is Max Wertheimer. Those psychologists started to focus on “pattern” from “Gestalt”, “Form”, and “Configuration”. They declared that Behavior is equal to the function of Human and Environment. Each pattern is sensitive to each case respectively. As this description, the definition of behavior is not purely only a set of

“Stimulus-Response”. For these instances above, they all were the emergences of cognitive psychology.

Generally, cognitive psychology is a science of the research of human cognitive process. The Switzerland philosopher Jean Piaget, originally a biologist, is now best remembered for his work on the development of cognition. Piaget (1985) [26] suggested that learning process is iterative, in which new information is shaped to fit with the learner's existing knowledge, and existing knowledge is itself modified to accommodate the new information.

Table 1. Arguments of Psychology to Soft Computing Techniques.

Psychology Branch Specific Arguments Soft Computing Branch Behaviorism[24,25] Stimulus-Response (S-R) AI-based learning[1,2,27]

Biological

Psychology[21,22,23]

Neurology, and Brain Theory Neural Network[27]

Darwin-Science Psychology, [James]

Natural Selection, Theory of Evolution

Genetic Algorithm, Genetic Programming[32]

Gestalt[6] Involve “Human” Factor and Anti

S-R None

To sum up the statements, the roots of the cognitive movement are extremely varied: It includes gestalt psychology, behaviorism, even humanism; it includes thinkers from linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and engineering; and it especially involves specialists in computer technology and the field of artificial intelligence. Cognitive psychology is far more sophisticated and philosophical than behaviorism. It does, of course, have the tremendous advantage of being tied to the most rapidly developing technology we have ever seen -- the computer. But more and more people saw AI as ultimately being a good model for human beings, and they are confused about cognitive psychology and other sub-psychology. For the reason, to develop the new human-thinking model to aggregate knowledge should be understood the psychology theory first even cognitive psychology.

After all, the history of psychology is more continuous and complete for a long time than AI techniques. In Table 1, this work tries to summary some relationship about sub-psychology to soft computing.