The Rise Of The Cognitive Perspective
...ich he worked with in WW2, he also coined the term Cybernetics, which refers to any system with a built in correctional function. In 1948 he published a book, ‘Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine’’, in which he introduced the terms ‘input’, ‘output’ and ‘feedback’, which are used very widely in daily life and in the use of Cognitive Psychology. In 1964 he published another book ‘God and Golem Inc.’ a book concerning the machine and God. He introduced the idea that one-day robots may overtake the human race, which is now seen as a legitimate possibility. That year, 1964, he was awarded the ‘National Medal of Science’ to his services to it. Jean Piaget – he is famous for his work on the development of cognition. It is widely recognised that he would have been the founder of what is now known as ‘Cognitive’ psychology, if the theories that he put forward were in English and not in his mother-tongue, French. His theories were only translated into English in the late 1950’s, by which time Cognitive psychology had already been born in the English-speaking world. Piaget had two daughters, who were subject to his observation as they were growing up, as a result of this observation, he published 3 books. He was specifically interested in the development of thinking; he named the study of this ‘genetic epistemology’. Other Predecessors To Cognitive Psychology These Psychologists do not fit into the above titles, but are as important to the creation of Cognitive Psychology Ebbinghaus – studied how he could easily he could learn a group of nonsense syllables (like zev & hoq) and the learning techniques behind it. Bandura – discovered learning in animals by rewarding and treating Kohler – he trained an ape (apes have a similar brain structure to our own) to problem solve Hall – was a behaviourist, so it is strange that he is considered a forerunner to Cognitive psychology, given that it was made in opposition to the Behaviourist movement. Hall, did move slightly away from Behaviourism though, and started questioning about how the Brain actually worked. The recognition of the Cognitive movement came about in the 1950’s with three main psychologists leading the way. Donald Olding Hebb – died in 1985. He was mostly interested in neuropsychology, where he tried to understand how neurons worked in conjuntion with each other, especially in processes such as learning. He came up with the Hebbian Theory, which explains how we learn, it is where we repeatedly fire neurons in the same way, so that the synapse can be more easily used (accessed) in the future. He spent a lot of his career teaching at the McGill University in Canada, where, with some students he created the A/S ratio. The A/S ratio is a reading of how complex an organisms brain is. George A. Miller – living. Miller was made famous for his paper that was published in 1956, called ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity For Processing Information’...