Cognitive Psychology Empiricist

- The study of how people perceive, learn, - Believes that we acquire knowledge via
remember, and think about information. empirical evidence that is, we obtain evidence
- A cognitive psychologist might study how through experience and observation
people perceive various shapes, why they - Empiricism therefore leads directly to
remember some facts but forget others, or empirical investigations of psychology.
how they learn language. - Rationalist theories without any connection to
observations gained through empiricist
Dialectic
methods may not be valid; but mountains of
- The progression of ideas often involves a observational data without an organizing
dialectic. theoretical framework may not be meaningful.
- A developmental process where ideas evolve
Descartes
over time through a pattern of transformation.
- Viewed the introspective, reflective method as
In a dialectic:
being superior to empirical methods for finding
- A thesis is proposed. A thesis is a truth. The famous expression “cogito, ergo
statement of belief. sum” (I think, therefore I am)
- An antithesis emerges. Eventually, or - the only proof of his existence is that he was
perhaps even quite soon, an antithesis thinking and doubting
emerges. An antithesis is a statement that
Locke
counters a previous statement of belief.
- A synthesis integrates the viewpoints. - Believed that humans are born without
Sooner or later, the debate between the thesis knowledge and therefore must seek
and the antithesis leads to a synthesis. A knowledge through empirical observation.
synthesis integrates the most credible Locke’s term for this view was tabula rasa
features of each of two (or more) views. (meaning “blank slate” in Latin).
- If a synthesis seems to advance our - The idea is that life and experience “write”
understanding of a subject, it then serves as a knowledge on us.
new thesis. A new antithesis then follows it, - For Locke, then, the study of learning was the
then a new synthesis, and so on. key to understanding the human mind. He
believed that there are no innate ideas
Philosophy
Structuralism
- Seeks to understand the general nature of
many aspects of the world, in part through - Seeks to understand the structure
introspection, the examination of inner ideas (configuration of elements) of the mind and its
and experiences (from intro-, “inward, within,” perceptions by analyzing those perceptions
and -spect, “look”); into their constituent components (affection,
attention, memory, sensation, etc.).
Physiology
- Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was a German
- Seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining psychologist whose ideas contributed to the
functions in living matter, primarily through development of structuralism.
empirical (observation-based) methods.
Introspection
Rationalist
- A deliberate looking inward at pieces of
- Believes that the route to knowledge is information passing through consciousness.
through thinking and logical analysis. The aim of introspection is to look at the
- Does not need any experiments to develop elementary components of an object or
new knowledge. process.
- A rationalist who is interested in cognitive - Titchener (1910) is sometimes viewed as the
processes would appeal to reason as a first full-fledged structuralist. In any case, he
source of knowledge or justification. certainly helped bring structuralism to the
- Plato United States. His experiments relied solely
on the use of introspection, exploring
psychology from the vantage point of the
experiencing individual.
Functionalism consisted of a consonant and a vowel
followed by another consonant
- Seeks to understand what people do and why
- (e.g., zax). He then took careful note of how
they do it. This principal question about
long it took him to memorize those lists.
processes was in contrast to that of the
Through his self-observations, Ebbinghaus
structuralists, who had asked what the
studied how people learn and remember
elementary contents (structures) of the human
material through rehearsal, the conscious
mind are.
repetition of material to be learned.
- Functionalists held that the key to
understanding the human mind and behavior Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949)
was to study the processes of how and why
- Held that the role of “satisfaction” is the key to
the mind works as it does, rather than to study
forming associations. Thorndike termed this
the structural contents and elements of the
principle the law of effect (1905): A stimulus
mind.
will tend to produce a certain response over
Pragmatists time if an organism is rewarded for that
response.
- Believe that knowledge is validated by its
- Thorndike believed that an organism learns to
usefulness: What can you do with it?
respond in a given way (the effect) in a given
Pragmatists are concerned not only with
situation if it is rewarded repeatedly for doing
knowing what people do; they also want to
so (the satisfaction, which serves as a
know what we can do with our knowledge of
stimulus to future actions).
what people do.
Behaviorism
William James (1842–1910)
- Focuses only on the relation between
- His chief functional contribution to the field of
observable behavior and environmental
psychology was a single book: his landmark
events or stimuli. The idea was to make
Principles of Psychology (1890/1970).
physical whatever others might have called
John Dewey (1859–1952) “mental”

- Profoundly influenced contemporary thinking Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) studied

in cognitive psychology. Dewey is
- Involuntary learning behavior of this sort. He
remembered primarily for his pragmatic
began with the observation that dogs
approach to thinking and schooling.
salivated in response to the sight of the lab
Associationism technician who fed them.
- This response occurred before the dogs even
- Examines how elements of the mind, like saw whether the technician had food. To
events or ideas, can become associated with Pavlov, this response indicated a form of
one another in the mind to result in a form of learning (classically conditioned learning),
learning. over which the dogs had no conscious control.
associations may result from: Proponents of Behaviorism
- contiguity (associating things that tend to John Watson (1878–1958)
occur together at about the same time);
- similarity (associating things with similar - Watson had no use for internal mental
features or properties); or contents or mechanisms. He believed that
- contrast (associating things that show psychologists should concentrate only on the
polarities, such as hot/cold, light/dark, day/ study of observable behavior
night).
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990)
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909)
- A radical behaviorist, believed that virtually all
- The first experimenter to apply associationist forms of human behavior, not just learning,
principles systematically. could be explained by behavior emitted in
- He studied his own mental processes. He reaction to the environment.
made up lists of nonsense syllables that - He believed instead that operant conditioning
—involving the strengthening or weakening of
behavior, contingent on the presence or
 absence of reinforcement (rewards) or
punishments—could explain all forms of
human behavior.
Behaviorists Daring to Peek into the Black
Box
- Some psychologists rejected radical
behaviorism. They were curious about the
contents of the mysterious black box.
Behaviorists regarded the mind as a black box
that is best understood in terms of its input
and output, but whose internal processes
cannot be accurately described because they
are not observable
Gestalt Psychology
- States that we best understand psychological
phenomena when we view them as
organized, structured wholes.
- According to this view, we cannot fully
understand behavior when we only break
phenomena down into smaller parts
- Gestaltists, in contrast, studied insight,
seeking to understand the unobservable
mental event by which someone goes from
having no idea about how to solve a problem
to understanding it fully in what seems a mere
moment of time.
Cognitivism
- Belief that much of human behavior can be
understood in terms of how people think. It
rejects the notion that psychologists should
avoid studying mental processes because
they are unobservable.