In this video, we're going to be talking about cognitive psychology, which began to rise in the 1960s. This is a field of psychology that focuses on mental processes, also known as cognitive processes. This includes things like information processing, memory, perception, language, and problem solving. To give you some historical context, the growing popularity of computers began to inspire psychologists in the 50s and 60s because they were thinking about how computers process information in very specific ways—like input, storage, output. Some psychologists began to think about the mind similarly. Around this time, behaviorism was falling out of favor.
We'll talk about how some of our founders had a little bit to do with that. This shift where behaviorism was falling out of favor and psychologists were beginning to think about the mind with these information processing, computer-type models, was known as the cognitive revolution. And a revolution it was. It completely changed the face of psychology, and to this day, cognitive psychology is one of the most dominant fields; it is absolutely huge. The main research question in cognitive psych is, "How do humans perceive, think, remember, and solve problems?"
Language research also tends to get grouped under cognitive psychology as well. In terms of our founders, first up we have Ulrich Neisser. Neisser was not a fan of behaviorism. He thought it was missing so much of the human experience. He believed that if we were not examining mental processes, then what was the point? Consider how many thoughts go through your head every single day—like a billion. How many of those thoughts do you actually enact some kind of behavior to show? Not very many, right? It's actually like a really small percentage. He thought that if we're only looking at behavior, we're missing out on, like, 90% or more of the human experience. We need to be focusing on the mind.
In 1967, Neisser published a seminal book called "Cognitive Psychology." In this book, he grouped together topics like perception, attention, memory, and problem-solving under the umbrella term of cognition. By doing this, he essentially defined the field in a single book, and because of that, he is often considered the father of cognitive psychology. Neisser's own research focused on perception and memory, establishing cognitive psychology as its own formal field.
We also have George A. Miller, another founder of cognitive psych. His research focused on short-term memory capacity as well as language. We're going to learn more about Miller's research in our cognition chapter coming up later in the course. But to give you a little teaser, if you have ever heard that humans can hold about 7 items in their memory, plus or minus 2, that came from this guy. We'll talk about that more later. Finally, we have Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky is considered a founder of cognitive psychology and is also known as the father of modern linguistics. Linguistics is his main thing. Now, let's revisit some 60-year-old controversy because this is a super fun story. Remember our old friend B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist? In the fifties, Skinner published a book trying to explain language acquisition from a behaviorist standpoint, essentially saying that language acquisition comes from things like reinforcement. That was the last straw for Noam Chomsky. He published a scathing critique of behaviorism and Skinner's work in 1959, proving that the behaviorist standpoint on language acquisition was incorrect, and supporting his own research. This critique opened the eyes of some other psychologists and helped kickstart the cognitive revolution. It wasn't the final nail in the coffin for behaviorism, but it was a significant nail. Chomsky's own research, as I hinted at, focused on language and cognitive processes, and he will come up later in the course in our cognition chapter.
Alright, that is our brief introduction to cognitive psychology, and I will see you guys in the next one. Bye bye.
