Cognitive Psychology borrows heavily from the works of Alfred Adler, Albert Ellis, and Aaron Beck. In fact, it is founded on Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology. Freud had insisted that sexual impulses were the chief factor in formation of normal and neurotic personality something that made him part ways with Adler who went ahead and formed a new approach that became the basis for all cognitive psychologies.
Behaviorism formed the basis of the works of most American psychologists from 1920s through to the 1950s. However, during the WWII, there were breakthroughs with regard to communications research and information processing approaches. New concepts and theories were initiated about signal processing and communication (Schacter, 1987). These impacted psychologists of the WWII era. One notable personality during this period was Shannon who came up with Information Theory. The theory postulated that information was communicated by sending signals through myriad stages and that human perception and memory is also conceptualized in a similar manner (Schacter, 1987). When sensory information enters the receptors, it is fed to perceptual analyzers whose out put are in put to memory systems. This is how information processing is initiated. Information Theory postulated that cognition is the flow of information within an organism an idea that to date dominates the realms of cognitive psychology. Donald Broadbent's Perception and Communication theory postulated that information from perceptual system first went through a filter which passed only information to which people were attending...
This model in a way backed the concept of selective attention something that was banished by behavioral psychologists. Information from Broadbent's filter was then directed to limited capacity decision channel a system that bears some semblance to short-term memory. From this channel, information is directed to long-term memory. Dual memory models that were developed in the 1970s drew heavily from Broadbent's transfer of information from short to long-term memory. Quantitative measure of information in terms of bits also attracted the interest of a number of psychologists (Schacter, 1987).
Another key milestone in the development of cognitive psychology as a discipline was the development of the computer modeling approach. Digital computers were developed because of technological advancements during the WWII era. Questions were then asked as to whether computers could be compared to human intelligence (Schacter, 1987). This prompted Allan Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herb Simon to design a computer program that could solve difficult logic problems something that was the preserve of human brain (Schacter, 1987). Newell and Simon subsequently came up with programs that had general problem solving capabilities comparable to human beings'. They averred that the programs had problem solving capabilities similar to humans. Their work proved crucial in establishment of artificial intelligence. Later efforts were made to integrate information processing approaches and computer modeling. To date computational processes operating on mental representations…
