Chapter 1: Introduction To Cognitive Psychology

Front 1

William Wundt

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Main concern: contents of mind / 1879 – established the first psychology laboratory / He pioneered Introspection method, reaction times (RT) and focused on the conscious experience that preceded the response. He was not concerned with unconscious processes. He considered these as a part of physiology research and not psychology.

Front 2

Hermann Ebbinghaus

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Main concern: mechanisms of mind
He pioneered Experimentation to research Memory & Perception. Identified the need to control confounding variables, manipulate the independent variable systematically and measure its effects on the dependant variable. In his classic memory experiments he used novel short letter strings to examine participants’ memory. On 1985 he published the book On Memory with his findings some of which are still being explored today. Chapter 5 (Working Memory) there is a research on serial order effects which is parallel to Ebbinghaus research on ‘how well a certain item is remembered can depend where in a list of items it is situated. He also researched perception and as so, he discovered the visual illusion with the cycles

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William James

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Main concern: function of mind (both the 2 above)
1987, same year with Wundt, he established the first psychology teaching laboratory. Seems like today’s evolutionary psychology. He mainly considered how our behaviour (including our emotions) helps us to live an function in the real world. He used introspection method. He discovered the term ‘stream of thought, of consciousness’. He conducted a few empirical studies but mainly concentrated on observation and analysis of human behaviour.

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Behaviourism

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Watson was the principal behaviourist. He defined behaviourism as the part of psychology that deals with human behaviour.
Watson tried to apply psychology on real life like education, advertising and clinical problems. All behaviourists agree that psychology should be scientific and objective that is, publicly observable. Since consciousness is privately observable, later behaviourists like Skinner suggested that psychology should be scientific with reference to the things that are observable and measurable. Complex activities are measured as chains of stimulus-response.
Bartlett, a British psychologist suggested later suggested that the way we manage to remember depends on our internal mental representations. He showed stories and investigated how participants managed to recall them later.

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Criticism / Problems with behaviourism

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Behaviourists did not explain higher mental processes like problem solving, remembering, consciousness etc as these are not observable or measurable. Lashley supported that behaviourism cannot explain how people produce language or how pianists play the piano or typists typing fast and choosing the correct button or tennis players pointing correctly and fast at the ball. Chomsky supported Lashley’s argument on language production. He argued that language cannot be considered as a series of learned responses to a set of stimuli. His example was children’s capability to learn a language easier than an adult. Language is rule-based and children acquire a language by acquiring its rule-base so there is an implicit or unconscious knowledge.