Histories of psychology commonly credit Noam Chomsky's critique of B.F. Skinner's behaviorist account of language acquisition as the decisive blow that opened the field to cognitivism, but that critique arrived alongside independent pressures from early computing (the mind-as-information-processor analogy) and from Ulric Neisser's own program-building work, and the sources consulted here do not weigh these causes against one another.
What would resolve this A historiographical study tracing citation and hiring patterns across psychology, linguistics and early computer science departments through the 1950s and 1960s, to test whether the shift away from behaviorism tracks the Chomsky critique specifically or the broader cross-disciplinary move.
OpenHistory and philosophy of scienceWikipedia: Cognitivism (Psychology)