Psychology Essays (UOP)

Psy/360 Cognitive Psychology Definition Paper

Cognitive Psychology Definition Paper

Samantha Craig

Psy/360

7/31/2015

In the Field of Psychology, there are many different areas and branches. Cognitive Psychology is a "branch that is concerned with mental processes."(Merriam-Webster, 2015) This means it is about understanding and studying how individuals remember, learn, perceive, think and do problem-solving. Even though it is considered to belong in a group of disciplines in psychology, along with linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. There have been many different milestones throughout the time that have helped cognitive psychology grow and to help understand the psychological process of the mind. The four key milestones that will be covered will be structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism and Gestalt psychology.

Structuralism is to understand the structure of the mind. The basic fundamental of this milestone can be traced all the way back to Wilhelm Wundt who is credited to being the first to have a psychology lab and worked with his students on introspection which according to Galotti (2014) is now days phrased as "soul searching", can also be known as understanding small elements of the conscious mind. He believed that all conscious thoughts are caused by four sensations. These sensations are the mode, quality, intensity, and duration. Students who were handpicked when being in experiments where Wundt would have them talk about what they were consciously experiencing when he gave them a certain stimulus. However, Edward Titchener, who was one of Wundt's students is who came up with the term structuralism and grew off of Wundt's thoughts, Even though this is now not used because the experiments could be faked it did open the doors to understanding and creating better experiments.

Functionalism is described by an individual's mental and behavior life being due to environmental factors. While structuralism was based on a person's consciousness, functionalism does not limit itself to those expectations. William James asked the important question of "why does the mind work the way it does?" (Galotti, 2014) When it came to functionalism, many of the people believed that the mind worked with the body's functions and wanted to know why and how. William James also applied the functionalism thoughts to those of an individual's bad habits. Say a person likes to drink all the time. Functionalist believed that they should be aware of their habits then the mind can try to control the function of this behavior.

Behaviorism was known to reject all the previous milestones before it. "Behaviorism is primarily concerned with observable behavior, as opposed to internal events like thinking and emotion." (Mcleod, 2007) They would add a stimulus and without the subjects knowing they would observe them. This would be like a teacher watching the children in her classrooms behaviors to award them stars if they follow the rules. The problem with this particular milestone is the fact that when the individuals know that they are being observed they tend to change their behaviors that in turn can affect the overall study. Skinner is one of the most well-known behaviorists in history. Skinner along with many others behaviorist believe that when individuals are born they are born as a blank piece of paper and that everything we do is learned. The problem with this was linguistics. When a baby first starts to speak it does mimic, however, it gurgles and babbles and does not form real words. It could grow up with two parents who pronounce words the right way, but the child most likely won't phrase words right. Behaviorism is what is to be believed as the starting point for cognitive psychology and did give us thanks in large part to Skinner a way to observe behaviors by using operant and classical conditionings.

Gestalt psychology is the last of the four milestones that helped shape cognitive psychology. This particular group believed that "psychological phenomena could not be reduced to simple elements but rather had to be analyzed and studied in their entirety."(Galotti, 2014) In Gestalt psychology, it gave us principles such as the laws of Proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and pragnanz. These particular laws are why we group things in the certain way such as crayons by colors, size, and shape. The fascinating one is the illusions of looking at a picture of a vase and seeing two faces staring at each other in Rubin's figure vase illusion.

In conclusion, there are many different milestones that have contributed to cognitive psychology throughout the years. Four of the main milestones would be Structuralism, Functionalism, Behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology. Each one of these has made a profound difference in psychology. Structuralism provided information based on the conscious mind. While functionalism was how metal life and behaviors were caused by the environment. Behaviorism that had the most profound effect was the observation of individual's behaviors, and Gestalt gave psychology principles on how the mind looks at things as a whole.

References

McLeod, S. (2007). Behaviorist Approach. Behaviorism, Retrieved from http://simplypsychology.org

http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/cognitive%20psychology

Galotti, K. M. (2014). Cognitive Psychology in and out of the laboratory (5th ed.). Retrieved from The University of Phoenix eBook Collection database.