Key milestones in the development of cognitive psychology as a discipline

Cognitive Psychology

This is the branch of psychology that is predominantly occupied by the mental process. These would include how people think, perceive ideas and things, recall and also learn. It is related to other disciplines like philosophy, neuroscience and linguistics.

According to Kendra Cherry (2011), cognitive psychology has to do with acquisition, encoding and storage of information in the human brain.

Milestones in development of cognitive psychology

The history of cognitive psychology development into a discipline dates back as far as 1701 when Yale University which by then was considered to be one of the nest in the world by then. This marked the beginning of the cognitive psychology. This was followed by other universities like University of Pennsylvania that opened a cognitive psychology in 1896.

Later on in 1879 there were several experiments to study how the mind works were conducted Wilhelm Wundt had a keen interest in memory and language processing that he conducted so many cognitive psychology experiments.

Wilhelm Wundt became the first to dedicate his time to the study of the science of Psychology into the laboratory with the aim of studying human thoughts in a scientific manner. This marked one of the most significant phases of development of the discipline of cognitive psychology.

There was another milestone progress when a mega symposium on information theory in 1956 the venue being the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here there was a deliberate effort to computerize the study of cognitive be behavior and come up with faster and better ways of studying the psychological thought process of an individual and come up with possible remedies as fats as possible. The other major things that were discussed in this symposium were computer simulation and linguistics. It is worth noting that the acceptance of cognitive psychology was gradual and it was during this meeting that there was almost universally accepted with Bruner dating the birth of cognitive at September 1956.

In 2003 the Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP) was formed. It was a centre that was and still is dedicated to studying the methods and theories of evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and experimental economics in order to help tap the potential of cognitive psychology into the society. It is also dedicated to looking at the various mechanisms for an individual to navigate this social world that is complex.

b. The importance of behavioral observation in cognitive psychology.

The observation of the behavior of an individual is important in cognitive psychology since it is the gateway to the inner emotional disposition of the individual or the group that the psychoanalyst is dealing with at that time.

It is through the study of the behavior that the psychotherapist will be able to analyze a behavior and accordingly categorize it and be able to find a possible solution. For instance dysfunctional emotions, cognitions and behaviors can be diagnosed through a goal oriented systematic procedure. It is from here that the correct approach of the Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) can be prescribed (Christine Webber, 2010).

It is evident that CBT has and continues to be used effectively for the treatment of a good number of behavioral complications including anxiety, eating, psychotic disorders, mood, and personality.

The treatment is usually manual and time bound, specific technique-driven, brief and direct for treatment of very specific psychological disorders.

CBT can be use for handling a psychological complication of a group or and individual depending on the setting as long as the behavior patterns have been studied. It has been seen to be used for self-help circumstances as well.