1: History and key figures (e.g., Neisser, Miller)

1: History and Key Figures (e.g., Neisser, Miller)

The field of cognitive psychology emerged as a distinct discipline largely in reaction to the dominance of behaviorism in the mid-20th century. Behaviorism, championed by figures like John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, focused solely on observable behaviors and stimuli-response associations, explicitly rejecting the scientific study of internal mental processes like thinking, memory, or decision-making as unobservable and therefore unscientific. This perspective proved increasingly inadequate for explaining complex human abilities such as language use, problem-solving, and perception.

The shift, known as the "Cognitive Revolution," gained significant momentum in the 1950s. A pivotal event was the 1956 Symposium on Information Theory at MIT, bringing together influential researchers. George Miller presented his seminal paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." This work demonstrated that human short-term memory has a limited capacity (around 7 chunks of information), shifting focus towards understanding the mind as an active information processor with quantifiable constraints, rather than a passive recipient of stimuli.

Around the same time, Noam Chomsky's critique of Skinner's behaviorist account of language acquisition argued that language learning required innate mental structures and complex internal rules that behaviorism couldn't explain. Developments in computer science, particularly Alan Turing's work and the advent of digital computers, provided a powerful new metaphor: the mind as an information-processing system. This led to the development of computational models of cognition, comparing mental operations to software algorithms running on the brain's hardware.

In 1967, Ulric Neisser synthesized these emerging ideas in his landmark textbook, Cognitive Psychology. This book explicitly defined the scope of the new field, arguing that cognitive processes – perception, attention, memory, language, thinking – could be studied scientifically through carefully designed experiments and inferred from behavior. Neisser emphasized the active, constructive nature of cognition (e.g., how past experiences shape perception) and provided a comprehensive framework that legitimized the study of the mind. Other key figures contributed crucially: Donald Broadbent developed influential models of attention using information flow metaphors; Jerome Bruner explored concept formation and cognitive development; and Allen Newell and Herbert Simon pioneered computer simulations of human problem-solving and reasoning.