Cognitive psychology sees a return to power

A subfield reflects on a history as varied and complex as its subject matter.

Cognitive psychology seems to have had two careers during this century. It arose with the advent of introspective psychology, only to fade and transform during the rise of behaviorism.

But as the century ends, it has returned as a power in modern psychology.

The concept of cognitive processes goes back as far as human thought. It was a very significant part of 19th century philosophical psychology and represented some of the most important "faculties" of mind. Wilhelm Wundt, in his founding of the "new psychology" of the laboratory held that higher cognitive states--such as thought, memory, judgment and reason--could not be studied experimentally. Instead, he proposed that they be studied by examining the products of mind, including laws, languages and folk tales.

Others thought differently. William James, for one, equated cognitive processes with the broad concepts of thinking and feeling. Two of Wundt's students, Edward B. Titchener and Oswald Küelpe, promised a science of cognition--although they eventually doomed it. Titchener and Küelpe rejected Wundt's notion that higher mental processes could not be observed directly in introspective analysis.

Küelpe and his students began a series of experiments in 1901 investigating higher mental processes through a technique of introspection called "Aufgabe," which involved questioning subjects during introspection. The study results suggested that in many higher mental processes there was nothing between the presentation of the problem (6 divided by 3 is...) and the result as it appears in consciousness (2). To Küelpe's students, this suggested thought processes without imagery. They proposed a concept of imageless thought.

Titchener shared Küelpe's belief that cognitive processes could be studied introspectively but not with the results of the research coming out of Küelpe's laboratory. Thus began a great controversy over imageless thought at the end of the century's first decade. It was, at last, as with most controversies, fruitless. The fact that two laboratories could not answer the "simple" question as to whether or not there is imagery in the thought processes led psychologists to mistrust and later reject introspective psychology.

John B. Watson's behaviorism, in which thought processes are represented by objective processes such as muscular or glandular responses, began to seem more fruitful. For Watson, however, thought was nothing more than implicit speech movements or subvocal speech--tiny movements of the larynx that take place during problem-solving.

An alternative to introspection and Watsonian behaviorism was Gestalt psychology in which thought was seen as an organizational process by which a problem was reorganized or solved. Wolfgang Köehler's use of the "Umweg" or detour problem is an example. In it, an animal or child must secure a desirable object by taking an indirect route, the direct route having been blocked. Problem-solving became a major component in Gestalt psychology. Gestalt, however, was not part of psychology's mainstream in the 1920s through the 1950s in which behaviorism dominated American psychology.

It wasn't until the second half of the century that cognitive psychology would come together as a relatively coherent, organized movement, though there is no consensus on when it was founded. Some believe it began in 1948 with Karl Lashley's paper on what psychology needed to do to have a science of cognition; his theory emphasized language. Others believe the more structured form of cognitive psychology derived from a 1955 University of Colorado symposium, which was written up as "Contemporary Approaches to Cognition." The book posed the promise and problems cognitive psychologists faced in defining the field.

Another marker of the cognitive movement's beginning is "A Study in Thinking," which Jerome Bruner published in 1956 with Jaqueline Goodnow and George Austin. The authors defined cognitive processes as "the means whereby organisms achieve, retain and transform information."

The movement has also been attributed to Norbert Weiner's coining of the term "cybernetics" in his 1948 book "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communications in the Animal and the Machine" and to the debate between Noam Chomsky and B.F. Skinner on language. That exchange was initiated by Chomsky's 1959 review of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior."

Whatever the origin, by 1967 cognitive psychology as a subject matter and movement was underway. In that year Ulrich Neisser published his landmark "Cognitive Psychology," which pulled together the wide-ranging literature in the area.

The research and movements since then are too numerous and complex to cover briefly. Cognitive psychology is now firmly established as a major force in psychology. But the question remains whether it will stay put as part of psychology proper or, like so many fields such as comparative, industrial and engineering psychology, move to another discipline or form an independent discipline.

The latter seems to be in evidence as cognitive psychology and cognitive science seem to be becoming more and more similar. The question in the new century will be where and how cognitive psychology develops from here on out.

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