History and Key Milestones in Cognitive Psychology

Introduction: Origins of Cognitive Psychology

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 the formation of normal and neurotic personality, a position that led to his parting ways with Adler, who went on to form a new approach that became the basis for all cognitive psychologies.

Information Theory and Communications Research

Behaviorism formed the basis of the work of most American psychologists from the 1920s through to the 1950s. However, during World War II, there were significant breakthroughs in communications research and information processing approaches. New concepts and theories were developed about signal processing and communication (Schacter, 1987). These developments profoundly affected psychologists of the WWII era.

One notable figure during this period was Shannon, who formulated Information Theory. The theory postulated that information is communicated by sending signals through multiple stages, and that human perception and memory can be conceptualized in a similar manner (Schacter, 1987). When sensory information enters the receptors, it is fed to perceptual analyzers whose outputs become inputs 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 continues to dominate cognitive psychology to this day.

Donald Broadbent's Perception and Communication theory postulated that information from the perceptual system first passed through a filter that allowed only information to which people were attending (Schacter, 1987). This model supported the concept of selective attention, something that had been rejected by behavioral psychologists. Information passing through Broadbent's filter was then directed to a limited-capacity decision channel — a system bearing some resemblance to short-term memory — and from there to long-term memory. The dual memory models developed in the 1970s drew heavily from Broadbent's account of the transfer of information from short- to long-term memory. The quantitative measurement of information in terms of bits also attracted the interest of a number of psychologists (Schacter, 1987).

Computer Modeling and Artificial Intelligence

Another key milestone in the development of cognitive psychology was the emergence of the computer modeling approach. Digital computers were developed as a result of technological advances during the WWII era, prompting questions about whether computers could be compared to human intelligence (Schacter, 1987). This led Allan Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herb Simon to design a computer program capable of solving difficult logic problems — a task previously considered the exclusive domain of the human brain (Schacter, 1987).

Newell and Simon subsequently developed programs with general problem-solving capabilities comparable to those of human beings, arguing that these programs solved problems in ways similar to humans. Their work proved crucial in establishing artificial intelligence as a field. Later efforts were made to integrate information processing approaches with computer modeling. To date, computational processes operating on mental representations remain a vital component of modern cognitive psychology (Schacter, 1987).