Psychology

This is a paper on cognitive psychology. The first part of the paper is a definition of cognition. Provided on this section is background information on cognitive psychology. The second part of the paper is an explanation on the interdisciplinary perspective as it relates to cognitive psychology. The section reveals the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive psychology. The third past is a description on the emergence of cognitive psychology as a discipline. The last section provides an assessment of the effects of the decline of behaviorism on the discipline of cognitive psychology.

The term cognition originates from the Latin term cognoscere whose meaning is to apprehend. Chambers English Dictionary defines this term as to be conscious (Garnham and Oakhill, 1994). From the most basic level, this term refers to intellect. Cognition is the scientific terminology that refers to the process of thoughts. This term is concerned with the mental processes. It is used in a variety of disciplines including psychology and cognitive science. Cognitive science is the study of information presentation and transformation in the brain. It refers to information processing perspective of humans psychological processes (Ellis, 1993).

Cognitive psychology is a field in psychology that is concerned with psychological processes. The process in question includes visual, reminiscence, thoughts, emotions, problem-solving as well as language. The school of thought that originates from this field is referred to as cognitivism. Cognitivism is concerned with the ways through which human beings process information. Cognitive psychology is a part of cognitive science. It is a branch of psychology that has relationship with other fields like neuroscience, linguistics and philosophy. Regardless the fact the cognitive psychology derives from past psychological approaches, it is basically differs from them in two ways. The first one is that cognitive psychology utilizes scientific methods. This field of psychology refuses introspection as a suitable method of analysis. This makes it different from fields like Freudian psychology. The second way that cognitive psychology differs is that it accepts the existence of innate mental states. This makes it different from behaviorist psychology (Berkeley, 1997).           
 
Cognitive psychology is an interdisciplinary field. This is because it crosses the conventional Bounderies between academic fields as well as schools of thoughts. Cognitive psychology is a field that has obtained its methods and processes from conventional schools of thoughts like cognitivism and behaviorism. Cognitive psychology was broke off from psychology. It also derives from traditional theories like computational theory of mind. Since the development of Cognitive psychology as a discipline, cognitive theories have become very common in other psychological disciplines like social psychology, abnormal psychology, personality psychology as well as developmental psychology. Cognitive psychology has been linked to the field of psychology that used to be referred as experimental psychology. All the aspects discussed reveal the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive psychology (Garnham and Oakhill, 1994). 

The emergence of cognitive psychology is believed to have taken place between 1950 and 1970. The major motivating factor to the development of modern cognitive psychology was the Second World War. This is due to the emphasis ob studies on human performance and attention. It was necessary to research on the functioning of the human mind in order to gather information on performance during the war. The other factor that contributed was the development of computer technology mostly that involved in AI. The last factor that might have an impact on the development of cognitive psychology is the renewed interest linguistics.   

The word cognitive psychology was coined by Ulric Neisser in 1967 (Berkeley, 1997). This means that cognitive psychology is a recent discipline in psychology. Cognitive psychology developed as a different field of study towards the end of the 1950s and the beginning of 1960s. This makes it one of the most recent areas of research in psychology. Cognitive psychology developed as a distinct field of study following the cognitive revolution. Up to the 1950s, behaviorism has been the well known theory in psychology. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the focus in psychology began to move from behaviorism to things like attention reminiscence, and problem solving (Ellis, 1993). This is what is known as cognitive evolution. The revolution was started by the appraisal behaviorism and empiricism by Noam Chomsky. However, the origins of cognitive thinking like computational theory of the mind dates back to the 17th century, from the work of Descartes. This theory continued up to the 1940s and 1950s with the work of Alan Turing. Nevertheless, during that period it was not recognized as a distinct branch of psychology that could be studied as an academic discipline. The popularity of cognitive psychology was motivated by Donald Broadbent in his book Perception and Communication since then the field began to expand with a leading paradigm of information processing model. This model of cognition that was invented by Broadbent has been in use since that time in the study of cognitive psychology. This way of thinking can be associated with the development of computers. In the model, information processing in the mind is related to information processing on the computer (Garnham and Oakhill, 1994). Hypothesis in this area refers to information input, representation, processing and output. Related to language as the basic mental information representation system, this discipline has used tree and network psychological schemes. The discipline has singularly contributed to artificial intelligence this makes it general in the idea of semantic network. One of the pioneers of cognitive psychology, George Miller is famous for dedication in his profession to the establishment of WordNet. This is a semantic network for English as a language. This way of understanding psychological processes has permeated psychology in the last few years. It is currently the dominant method in the study of psychology (Berkeley, 1997).
            
The decline of behaviorism made the attention to be shifted to cognitive psychology. Behaviorism is a branch of psychology that is based on the study of behaviors. In psychology, this school of thought holds that behavior can be defined scientifically without a relation to innate psychological actions or theoretical constructs like the mind. This school of thoughts holds that all the processes are observable. There is thus no difference between observable processes like actions and processes like emotions and thoughts that cannot be seen. From the 19th century, this was the school of thought that was so popular in psychology.  This school of thought began to differ with others like mental psychology in considerable ways (Garnham and Oakhill, 1994).

Towards the end of the 20th century, behaviorism began to fade as a result of the start of cognitive psychology. Despite the fact that these two theories differ considerably hypothetically, they have complemented each other practically in therapeutic procedures. One of the procedures where they have complemented each other is cognitive-behavioral therapy. This is a famous procedure that utilizes both cognitive and behaviorist processes like systematic desensitization and contingency management (Ellis, 1993). This is a therapeutic treatment for such conditions like phobias and addiction. Nevertheless, these two fields of psychology are very different, while behaviorism is concerned with the observable characteristics, cognitive psychology deals with the innate mental states. With the increase in understanding of the mental processes, behaviorism could not hold grounds. Psychologists got more interested in cognitive psychology with the demise of behaviorism. The other effect was that there was a fresh need to research on cognitive psychology and find out how it could be developed to incorporate the aspects of behaviorism that were still applicable in psychology (Berkeley, 1997).