Schools and Movements
Cognitivism
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Cognitivism is the school of psychology that emerged from the mid-twentieth-century cognitive revolution, treating the mind as an information-processing system and studying internal mental states such as memory, perception, and reasoning directly, in contrast to behaviorism's refusal to consider anything beyond observable stimulus and response. Ulric Neisser's 1967 book Cognitive Psychology gave the new field its name.
Facts
Central QuestionHow does the mind take in, store and process information internally, and how do those internal mental processes mediate between stimulus and behavior, rather than behavior being explained by stimulus-response association alone? 1 Founded Year Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Rejected Here
The cognitive revolution rejected radical behaviorism's refusal to posit internal mental states; Chomsky's 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior argued stimulus-response conditioning could not explain generative language use, a founding argument for treating internal mental processes as a legitimate object of study.
Founded By
In Branch
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Cognitive Revolution
Wikimedia FoundationHistorical background sectionQuote, Historical background section
Behaviorists were interested in 'learning', which was seen as 'the novel association of stimuli with responses.'
1. Wikipedia: Cognitive Revolution
Wikimedia FoundationMain ideas sectionQuote, Main ideas section
A key goal of early cognitive psychology was to apply the scientific method to the study of human cognition.
2. Wikipedia: Ulric Neisser
Wikimedia FoundationOpening paragraph (lede)Quote, Opening paragraph (lede)
He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology".
Wikipedia: Cognitivism (Psychology)
Wikimedia FoundationDefinitionQuote, Definition
a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that gained credence in the 1950s.
Wikipedia: Cognitivism (Psychology)
Wikimedia FoundationOpen Questions: Did Chomsky's critique alone cause the cognitive revolution?, Theoretical approach sectionQuote, Open Questions: Did Chomsky's critique alone cause the cognitive revolution?, Theoretical approach section
One of the most notable criticisms was Noam Chomsky's argument that language could not be acquired purely through conditioning, and must be at least partly explained by the existence of internal mental states.
Wikipedia: Verbal Behavior
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Neobehaviorism, Chomsky's review and replies sectionQuote, Associated With: Neobehaviorism, Chomsky's review and replies section
Skinner's theories of 'operants' and behavioral reinforcements are not able to account for the fact that people can speak and understand sentences that they have never heard before.
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did Chomsky's critique alone cause the cognitive revolution?
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.
History and philosophy of scienceWikipedia: Cognitivism (Psychology)
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.