Evolution of Cognition and Cognitive Psychology - Research Paper Example

? Evolution of Cognition Evolution of Cognition I. Definition of cognition and cognitive psychology Cognition “refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations” (Josephs, 2011). Cognitive psychology on the other hand is defined as “the branch of psychology devoted to the scientific study of the mind” (Braisby and Gellatly, nd, pg. 2). This branch of psychology digs in deep into the human’ mind on how we think, process and learn information. Part of studying cognitive psychology is to understand how we form our beliefs, understand language that could influence our mood and behavior. In the early days of psychology, part of understanding this learning process involved introspection. The advent of cognitive psychology as a discipline in psychology had this method of inquiry dismissed due to its lack of objectivity. II. Interdisciplinary perspective and its relationship to cognitive Psychology Understanding how we learn, which is the field of cognitive psychology involves several other disciplines as we attempt to peek into the mind and understand how it learns, how it influences our moods, our behaviors and our belief system. Often, the work of other sciences intersects with cognitive psychology that it would be difficult to delineate the boundary between them such as that the work of neuroscientists, social scientists, organizational theorists, managers and others. Inquiring into the mind on how it learns, processes and influences us is important for various reasons. Not only that it gives us an invaluable insight on how we learn, but it also has practical applications which have economic value. For example, cognitive psychology is also a field of interest among organizational theorists and managers because understanding how our mind works makes them more effective in dealing with their employees – on how to motivate them, how to keep them happy and how to optimize their performance. Managers cannot motivate employees if they do not understand how their employees perceive things. In addition, enhancing performance cannot be done if an organization cannot optimize the cognitive capacity of its employees. III. The emergence of cognitive psychology as a discipline.  Perhaps it was Descartes of the 17th century who first gave idea to cognitive thinking when he introduced his computational theory of mind. It was Max Wertheimer however who laid the foundation of cognitive psychology when he introduced Gestalt Psychology which laid down the foundation of cognitive psychology through the use of observation of sensory and perceptual phenomena. This gave birth to the early study of psychology such as behaviorism and using introspection as a mode of study in Psychology which was later rejected with the advent of Cognitive Psychology due to its lack of objectivity. Cognitive Psychology was coined by American psychologists Ulric Neisser when he published his book Cognitive Psychology of which he provided its first comprehensive definition of “all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon" (Neisser, 1967) Noam Chomsky revolutionized Cognitive Pscyhology as a discipline in psychology and caused the decline of behaviorial psychology. The shift towards cognitive psychology begun with his work Cartesian Linguistics in 1966 which he laid down language as a faculty of learning which is different from its behaviorist precursor which rely more on classic conditioning as a requisite for learning. Also, the industrial environment of 1950’s and 1960’s needed cognitive psychology more than behaviorism. Its emerging popularity was due to the fact that cognitive psychology involves problem solving which is beneficial in an industrial setting unlike behaviorism which has little economic or industrial application. IV. Assess the effects of the decline of behaviorism on the discipline of cognitive psychology.  The decline of behaviorism on the discipline of cognitive psychology can be attributed to Noam Chomsky’s critique of behaviorism’s model of language acquisition and its consequential point of view of learning. One of the behaviorists, prominent theorists Skinner posited that learning is reinforced by its consequence whereby it is strongest when a pleasure is derived from it and weakened by the opposite according to his operant theory. According to classical behaviorism, we are basically conditioned by our environment and responds solely to the repetition f the stimuli presented to us. The mind itself and its process cannot be scrutinized and that psychology should just limit itself to what can be physically observed which is the human behavior. Behaviorism also rejected the idea of internal processes or subconscious and was only interested with what is manifested behaviorally. The shortcoming and limitation of behaviorism was pointed out by Noam Chomsky which led to its decline. Chomsky contended which recent scholars agreed that learning is not only acquired by natural language or conditioning or by the influences of the environment alone nor was it stimuli driven. According to Chomsky, human beings have internal mental structures because people have the capacity to produce countless numbers of sentences that are different in structure and meaning and therefore can learn in a variety of ways. This internal mental structure was previously dismissed as an illusion to be used as a method in studying psychology. It was also observed that by the study of Albert Bandura that children can also learn by merely observing and without any conditioning or alteration of behavior which manifests that people has internal structure of learning (Bandura, 1996). The decline of behaviorism is basically the abandonment of the idea that people are merely predisposed or conditioned by their environment to learn to favor the more acceptable theory of cognitive psychology that people can learn in countless unique ways. V. Conclusion Perhaps cognitive psychology’s acceptance over behaviorism as a discipline in psychology was cemented with the advent of information technology where people realized the importance of processing information and the need for understanding such processes. Also, the practical application of cognitive psychology is more beneficial in today’s Information Age which is why it became more acceptable than behaviorism because the understanding on how individuals learn provide industries an invaluable insight to make a match between a function and individual’s cognition that would optimize performance. References: Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Chomsky, Noam (1966). Cartesian linguistics: a chapter in the history of rationalist thought. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 1-877275-34-4.; (2009) Third Edition, edited with a new introduction by James McGilvray, Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13 978-0-521-70817-3 Josephs, Ingrid E (2011) The un-making of a method: From rating scales to the study of psychological processes. Theory & Psychology, (21): 47-65 Gellatly, Angus and Braisby, Nick (nd). Foundations of ognitive psychology. Retrieved at [http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199273768/ch01.pdf]  Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York, NY: Meredith Read More