Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how people think, focusing on mental processes like attention, language, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. The field emerged in the 1960s as a departure from behaviorism, which from the 1920s through the 1950s argued that unobservable mental events were not suitable for empirical science. This shift happened when researchers in linguistics, cybernetics, and applied psychology began using models of mental processing to account for human behavior. Insights from cognitive psychology later spread into other areas of psychology and into fields like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics.

History

Philosophical questions about the mind go back to ancient Greece. In 387 BCE, Plato proposed that the brain is where mental processes occur.

In 1637, René Descartes argued for innate ideas and mind-body dualism—the view that mind and body are separate substances. This sparked debates throughout the 19th century over whether thought comes only from experience (empiricism) or includes inborn knowledge (nativism). Key figures included empiricists George Berkeley and John Locke, and nativist Immanuel Kant.

The mid-to-late 19th century was crucial for psychology as a science. Two discoveries later proved important for cognitive psychology: Paul Broca identified a brain region largely responsible for language production, and Carl Wernicke found an area mainly involved in language comprehension. Both areas were named after them, and damage to these regions causes what are now called Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, behaviorism dominated psychology. Its followers initially considered mental events like thoughts, ideas, attention, and consciousness unobservable and therefore outside scientific psychology.

Carl Jung was an early pioneer whose work predated much behaviorist literature; in his 1921 book Psychological Types, he introduced the idea of cognitive functions. Another pioneer, Jean Piaget, worked outside behaviorism’s boundaries. From 1926 through the 1950s and into the 1980s, he studied the thoughts, language, and intelligence of children and adults.

In the mid-20th century, four main influences shaped cognitive psychology as a formal school. First, World War II’s new warfare technology created a need to understand human performance—how to train soldiers and manage attention under stress. Behaviorism offered little help, but Donald Broadbent combined concepts from human performance research and information theory to advance the field. Second, advances in computer science drew parallels between human thought and computer functions, opening new areas of study.

Allen Newell and Herbert Simon developed artificial intelligence and later worked with cognitive psychologists, encouraging a view of mental functions modeled on computer memory storage and retrieval. Third, Noam Chomsky’s 1959 critique of behaviorism and empiricism sparked the “cognitive revolution.” In psychology, J. S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow, and G. A. Austin published A Study of Thinking in 1956; G. A. Miller, E. Galanter, and K. Pribram published Plans and the Structure of Behavior in 1960; and that same year, Bruner and Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, which institutionalized the revolution and launched cognitive science. Fourth, formal recognition came with research institutions like George Mandler’s Center for Human Information Processing in 1964.

Mandler later described the field’s origins in a 2002 article. Ulric Neisser popularized the term “cognitive psychology” with his 1967 book Cognitive Psychology. He defined cognition broadly as all processes that transform, reduce, store, recover, and use sensory input, even without external stimulation—as in images or hallucinations. He noted that cognition touches everything humans do, but cognitive psychology approaches this from a particular viewpoint, distinct from other perspectives like dynamic psychology, which starts with motives rather than sensory input.