Cognitive psychology is a broad field of study which encompasses how people consciously respond and communicate about information derived from sensory stimuli. This includes such mental functions as perception, attention, memory, thinking, learning, speaking, reasoning, creativity, decision-making, and motivation. Everything we touch Taste, smell, hear, see or feel comprises the world of phenomena or those aspects of life we can apprehend with the physical senses. According to Ulrich Neisser, the term cognition refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used. It is concerned with these processes.
even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucination. Cognition or thinking is said to occur in an ineffable realm known as the mind. But what is the mind?
According to a 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary, the mind is the intellectual or rational faculty in man, the understanding, the intellect. The power that conceives, judges, or reasons. Also the entire spiritual nature, the soul, often in distinction from the body.
Psychology has its origins, of course, in philosophy. And philosophy for millennia was basically constructed around finding the mind. And they attempted to find the mind and the metaphysical issues related to mind.
without much success. While some early philosophers, the monists, believed the body and the mind were aspects of a single entity, the dualists in the West, such as Plato and Aristotle, saw the mind and the body as separate from one another. Eastern philosophers, such as Confucius and Lao Tzu, viewed the mind as a tool that could often be an impediment to self-knowledge and understanding of the world. To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders, says Lao Tzu.
If you attribute human behavior and actions to mind, and trace the word mind back through the eons, trace it back to the Greeks, soul is the original word to be used here. A search for the human soul, not human behaviors. And so ultimately, that word psyche, which has a multiple, simplicity of meanings in Greek. It comes to be thought of as the word that we use today in modern psychology. Western thinkers have attempted for centuries to locate the mind and its relationship to being.
Frenchman Rene Descartes provided a simple axiom which linked mental processes to existence. I think, therefore I am. Descartes was a proponent of rationalism.
whereby knowledge was obtained through logical analysis of known phenomena. His counterpart was John Locke, a British empiricist, who felt the best way to obtain knowledge and learn about the world was from direct observation and experience. The first scientific studies of human neural impulses to sensory stimuli were conducted by physiologist Hermann von Hemmholtz, who measured the speed of nerve impulses.
paving the way for experimental research of what would become psychological topics. But it was his student, Wilhelm Wundt, who established the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig and came to be known as the father of scientific psychology. Wundt's experiments on sensation and perception, reaction time, time perception, attention and memory, identified specific aspects of consciousness. of concern today in cognitive psychology.
Von's discoveries were extended by his student, Edward Titchener, who sought to define the mind by reducing thought processes down to their basic structure, using observers he trained to record their responses and reactions to external physical stimuli. Titchener's psychological research sought to provide answers to three seminal questions. What are the simplest components of conscious processes? What are the laws by which conscious elements are associated? And how are these conscious elements related to physiological conditions?
Titchener's introspection-based findings were criticized for their subjectivity and lack of practicality by those who wish to further psychology's goals of becoming a real science on par with physics, chemistry, and biology. Enter philosopher-turned-psychologist William James, who sought to explain the function rather than the structure of conscious components. And James, more than anyone else I think, creates the modern psychology that I call the two-headed dog. On the one hand, William James wants psychology to act as if it is a natural science and use the methods of natural science to make great headway into the processes that underlie human actions and thinking.
On the other hand, William James wanted psychology to be a very applied, functional science. And the main principle of positivistic science in the 20th century was the goal is to observe, describe, predict, and ultimately control human behavior. In a laboratory in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, physiologist Ivan Pavlov found that dogs who heard a bell ringing when they were served food became conditioned to salivate upon hearing the bell, whether food was served or not.
This led to his theory of conditioned reflexes, as it was conditional or dependent upon the dog forming an association between the sound of the bell and delivery of food. Connecting sensory stimuli through conscious recognition to behavior was a great leap forward, a notion seized upon by American psychologist John Watson, who founded a new school of psychology called behaviorism. In behaviorism, psychology had found a method people could understand and relate to. Psychology, said Watson, is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science.
Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. The time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness, when it no longer deludes itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation. Watson was the ultimate radical behaviorist who wanted to expunge mind from the psychology vernacular altogether.
That mind was nothing more than you talking to yourself. without having your lips move. And JB, in his own way, did a couple of classic Watsonian-type studies where he attempts to demonstrate that, in fact, what you have, what you're calling mind, what you're calling mental activity, is really nothing more than a behavior.
You are using language, and you're talking to yourself. So when you say, I am thinking about something, the radical behaviorist is going to tell you, no, you're not. You're thinking about yourself.
Talking to yourself, and I can measure language, you see. It's something that is observable and objectifiable, but I can't measure your mind. Watson eventually applied his knowledge of human behavior to marketing products and achieved success as an advertising executive with J.
Walter Thompson, marketing personal care products such as Pond's cold cream. Though Watson's behaviorist manifesto laid the groundwork, Behaviorism's most famous proponent was Burris Frederick Skinner, better known as B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism became the predominant view in psychology for several decades. Skinner felt all behavior is determined by external stimuli, to which an individual simply reacts.
Over time, these reactions modify behavior, according to a principle Skinner termed operant behavior. Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes. and they tend not to repeat responses that lead to neutral or negative outcomes. Skinner proved his theory on rats and pigeons, whose simple actions were positively rewarded with a food pellet or punished by an electrical shock, thus reinforcing the behavior.
Skinner felt that thinking was superfluous and that free will was an illusion. So when you tell me that you have free will as a scientist, I'm going to ask you what you mean by that, and I'm going to trace your concept of free will back to some event or some mechanism, that's probably a better word, that will explain why you feel that you have free will, when in fact you must live, if you're a scientist, in a deterministic universe. Parallel to the rise of behaviorism in the United States, the German Gestalt psychologist accepted the notion of consciousness, but opposed attempts to reduce consciousness to elements of its structure or function. But Gestalt theory, or Gestalt psychology, was a phenomenological approach, meaning that looking at behavior in the kind of microscopic ways, molecular ways, that psychologists were doing at the time, stimulus-response relationships.
introspectively looking at elemental analyses of behavior. Gestalt psychologists thought you ought to look at behavior as it occurs, experience as it occurs. So that if I look out the window from Titchener's point of view and trying to describe the basic sensations that would make up my perception, I would say I see hues and shapes and textures and contours, and that later my Maybe even milliseconds later, my brain says to me that these are cars and trees and buildings and other things out that window. The Gestalt psychologists thought that was a very artificial approach to psychology, and they argued that, no, when you look out the window, you see cars and trees and buildings, and that's the basis of the experience. Another way to illustrate the Gestalt point of view is embodied in the notion of what they termed a figure ground.
which formed a basis for where one placed their attention during the act of perceiving. There's something that becomes the focus of your attention, and that we call the figure, and whatever else is there then becomes ground against which that figure is imposed, but will not attract much of our attention. And the most famous example of that, which came again out of the Gestalt school, was the faces, vase, illusion as it's sometimes described. So if you see the white, let's say the faces are done in black, then the vase appears in the middle of the picture in white.
And that means that the white is the figure and the black is ground. But if you see the blackest figure with the whitest background, then you see these two faces facing each other. And it all depends on which one you focus on. In the 1950s, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and the other humanists challenged Skinner's deterministic point of view, saying men were not animalistic stimulus-response creatures, rather that humans have free will and their behavior stems from an individual's sense of self or self-concept.
Which motivated people toward personal growth. Maslow's Pyramid of Needs clearly depicts the human progression of motivation, beginning with basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing, ascending toward the ultimate human need of self-actualization. And then this issue comes to what I consider to be a flashpoint in the middle of the 20th century, in the great debates between Carl Rogers and B.F.
Skinner, between the hard-headed scientists. who wants psychology to be the scientific study of behavior, and the humanist Carl Rogers, who's interested really and truly more or less in not controlling human behavior, but in accentuating and optimizing humanity, B.F. Skinner is still arguing that whether you call it cognition, whether you call it thinking, whether you call it mental events, you're still searching for some sort of ghost inside the machine.
rather than focusing on the mechanical observations of the organism's behavior. And he's making the argument that just as personality might be a construct, so is the term cognitive science. The history of cognitive psychology cannot be complete without mentioning the contributions of Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud, who sought to discover unconscious determinants of behavior.
through a process of talking therapy he termed psychoanalysis freud saw the mind or psyche as organized into three interrelated forces ego the motivating self-concept id the pleasure-seeking selfish source of personal satisfaction and super ego one's conscience or moral compass working together these three forces explain behavior personality motivation and even abnormal behavior. It's interesting that most people, when you say the word psychology, the first name that comes to mind is not Carl Rogers, it is not B.F. Skinner, it is Sigmund Freud, because Freud had such a profound impact on the course of Western civilization's thinking. He was part of it, and he also helped guide and direct and create the idea.
of mental activities, the idea of the unconscious, that the average citizen comes to say, I can understand that because I can't explain it. In 1967, Ulrich Nießer published his landmark book, Cognitive Psychology, which opened the door to a new way of thinking about thinking and that human behavior cannot be properly understood without carefully analyzing the information perceived by an organism. How one knows the world depends on what you bring to the world to interpret it.
There is no direct world. The world is always something that one constructs, and one constructs it in a fashion that not only satisfies one's needs but makes one get on. with other people along the way. You have to somehow get information.
You organize the information and you transform it to suit the needs of what it is that you're involved on, and that's cognitive psychology. How this new information is incorporated within existing cognitive schema, or mental framework by which knowledge is organized, draws from Jean Piaget's stage theory of development. When new information is perceived, the organism either assimilates it as is within existing mental structures, or changes existing mental structures to accommodate the new information, either way producing growth.
In this way, people are continuously involved in constructing and deconstructing their visions of themselves and the greater world. There are no meanings that are given to you by the world, meaning-making as such. is the central human activity.
We construct our worlds. We each have different ones we learn how somehow to get along with. And it's the process of constructing reality, constructing meaning, meaning-making. It's the construction of meaning that is so critical where culture comes into the thing to such a degree. Culture is usually defined by social scientists as shared attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviors which characterize a particular psychosocial group.
Ordinariness constitutes the culture and in order for them to live with other people they've got to share ordinariness. So in the process of doing so they can't work in terms of the absolute diversity of the world, they've got to work in terms of... categories, for example, categories of things.
There are things that are good, there are things that are bad, there are things that have authority, there are things that don't have authority, and so on like that. Bruner's notion of categories is an example of how the mind stores and organizes data derived from perception. What we store or remember represents only a small portion of what we perceive. George Miller, Bruner's colleague at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University. developed the theory of magic number seven, suggesting that most people can only hold seven plus or minus two bits of information in their short-term memory.
Miller termed this quantity a chunk of information and found that information recall is better when it is chunked together. This is why learning by repetition is less effective than learning by association. A great example of repetition being insufficient is is If I were to ask you which way Lincoln faces on a penny, most people have no idea.
What's it say across the top of his head, or on the left, or on the right? We have no idea. Even though we've seen pennies hundreds, thousands of times, we never paid attention to what it says on the left, or what it says across the top of his head.
Repetition turns out to be a fairly inefficient strategy. Students that simply go over words over and over and over and over again have discovered that that's a pretty laborious way to learn, and it also leads to a pretty temporary memory. Instead, what we've learned is that if we have you study by linking new things that you're trying to learn to stuff that you've already learned, you try to understand it or comprehend it or make sense of it. I always tell students, if they want to know if they really understand something, go to a blackboard and see if you can teach it to somebody else.
In cognitive psychology, information processing for long-term memory is said to consist of three common operations. Encoding. The transformation of sensory input into memory chunks, storage, how encoded information is retained in the mind, and retrieval, how one accesses stored encoded information. However, memories can fade if they are not periodically rehearsed, or they can become distorted through cognitive reconstruction. Memory and the cognition are reconstructive processes.
As long as we have this false belief that everything we've ever had, everything we've ever experienced, is stored in our head in a literal way, we're going to get into trouble. That leads us to get into trouble with respect to eyewitnesses, for example, where we believe that they have a perfect recollection of what went on. TV shows that show hypnosis can influence you to remember things that otherwise you couldn't. Those are all based upon a computer metaphor that says we...
store information in a perfect, non-changing way. Human memory is really much more dynamic than that. What we perceive of the world and what we remember is a function of our relative position in space and time, as in the Eastern allegory of the blind man and the elephant. Each man touches the elephant and describes what he feels. One feels a big floppy ear, the next a long flexible trunk, the third a broad expanse of hide.
The fourth, a massive round leg and so forth. All of what we perceive and remember is selective. We selectively perceive and we also selectively reconstruct stuff.
The he said, she said stories are not deliberate attempts by people to deceive. That's just an outgrowth of the reconstructive nature of how we remember things. We all tend to remember things in a way that makes our own contributions a little elevated, a little self-flattering. We call it a self-serving bias. That's not a flaw of memory, it's a feature of memory.
That's just how memory works. Cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics identified what he termed the Language Acquisition Device, or LAD, in innate capacity of human beings, which enables children to rapidly learn and demonstrate language skills proficiency. I think it's important for students of cognitive psych to appreciate the huge...
...advances that language gave us. Language gives us a couple of things. It gives us a much more permanent way to store memories.
We can now remember things that happened to us, not just as events, but as stories. We don't have to remember what the sunset looked like. We can remember the verbal description of the sunset. Once we have language, that allows us to store things in a more abstract way that are much more durable. The other thing that language does for us...
is allow us to communicate, I would estimate, probably a ten times more rapid rate than any other species can. Language is a shorthand way of communicating verbal information. It's kind of an MP3 encoder. Efforts to locate the sites of cognitive functions in the brain relate back to the work of German physician Franz Josef Gall, whose cadaver dissections revealed nerve fibers connecting each side of the brain to opposite sides of the spinal cord.
Gaul attempted to correlate bumps on the surface of the skull with personality characteristics. And though his notions of phrenology proved more pseudoscience than science, they did forecast the future when technology caught up to theory in today's burgeoning field of cognitive neuroscience, where mental events are correlated with physiological brain function. So what Pavlov did and what most cognitive psychologists have done and still do is behavioral work. So tasks are designed, let's say, to tap into a particular cognitive construct, like memory or motivation. And then the animal or the human performs that task, and the measures are all behavioral.
So for Pavlov... you're looking at salivary output of the dog, let's say, or how many times a rat pushes a bar, or your reaction time in solving some task. When you move into neuroscience, your measures are both behavioral because you.
you need to have the behavioral correlate of what you're measuring, but then you can also measure with electrodes the neurons actually firing. So there's been a move from EEG measures where you can put electrodes on people or animals'heads and measure from the outside, brain waves essentially, to being able to insert electrodes into the brain tissue and measure the firing of one particular neuron or groups of neurons while the animal performs the task and the idea is that you're tapping into correlations between the neurons firing and the behavior. Cognitive neuroscience is also responsible for the functional distinction of people being called left brained or right brained notions that have made their way into the popular vernacular. There are two hemispheres they communicate to each other through white matter tracks called Colossa.
But most brains, not all brains, but most people's brains are lateralized. So that means they have some functions essentially more represented in one side of the brain than the other. And the most common lateralized functions are handedness.
So most people are right-handed. And that's controlled by the left side of your brain. And then also language.
So for most people, language is controlled, both speaking language and understanding language, is on the left side of your brain. In a 1996... survey of University Psychology Department's chairpersons, these ten psychologists were ranked as having made the most notable contributions to the field.
Eight of these we have discussed in relation to cognitive psychology, excepting only G. Stanley Hall and E. L. Thorndike, whose contributions were mainly in the field of educational psychology, an essential realm within the study of cognitive processes. Thank you.
In the middle of the 20th century, in the great debates between Carl Rogers and B.F. Skinner, between the hard-headed scientist who wants psychology to be the scientific study of behavior and the humanist Carl Rogers who's interested really and truly more or less in not controlling human behavior but in accentuating and optimizing humanity, B.F. Skinner is still arguing that whether you call it cognition, Whether you call it thinking, whether you call it mental events, you're still searching for some sort of ghost inside the machine, rather than focusing on the mechanical observations of the organism's behavior. And he's making the argument that just as personality might be a construct, so is the term cognitive science. The history of cognitive psychology cannot be complete without mentioning the contributions of Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud who sought to discover unconscious determinants of behavior through a process of talking therapy.
He termed psychoanalysis. Freud saw the mind or psyche as organized into three interrelated forces. Ego, the motivating self-concept.
Id, the pleasure-seeking selfish source of personal satisfaction. and superego, one's conscience or moral compass. Working together, these three forces explain behavior, personality, motivation, and even abnormal behavior. It's interesting that most people, when you say the word psychology, the first name that comes to mind is not Carl Rogers, it is not B.F.
Skinner, it is Sigmund Freud, because Freud had such a profound impact on the course of Western civilizations. Thinking. He was part of it and he also helped guide and direct and create the idea of mental activities, the idea of the unconscious that the average citizen comes to say, I can understand that.
because I can't explain it. In 1967, Ulrich Nießer published his landmark book, Cognitive Psychology, which opened the door to a new way of thinking about thinking and that human behavior cannot be properly understood without carefully analyzing the information perceived by an organism. How one knows the world depends on what you bring to the world to interpret it.
There is no direct world. The world is always something that one constructs and one constructs it in a fashion that not only satisfies one's needs but makes one get on. with other people along the way.
You have to somehow get information, you organize the information and you transform it to suit the needs of what it is that you're involved on. In his own way, he did a couple of classic Watsonian-type studies where he he attempts to demonstrate that in fact what you have, what you're calling mind, what you're calling mental activity is really nothing more than a behavior. You are using language and you're talking to yourself.
So when you say I am thinking about something, the radical behaviorist is going to tell you no you're not, you're talking to yourself. And I can measure language, you see. That's something that is observable and objectifiable.
but I can't measure your mind. Watson eventually applied his knowledge of human behavior to marketing products and achieved success as an advertising executive with J. Walter Thompson, marketing personal care products such as Pond's cold cream. Though Watson's behaviorist manifesto laid the groundwork, behaviorism's most famous proponent was Burris Frederick Skinner, better known as B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism became the predominant view in psychology for several decades.
Skinner felt all behavior is determined by external stimuli, to which an individual simply reacts. Over time, these reactions modify behavior, according to a principle Skinner termed operant behavior. Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes, and they tend not to repeat responses that lead to neutral or negative outcomes. Skinner proved his theory on rats and pigeons.
whose simple actions were positively rewarded with a food pellet or punished by an electrical shock, thus reinforcing the behavior. Skinner felt that thinking was superfluous and that free will was an illusion. So when you tell me that you have free will as a scientist, I'm going to ask you what you mean by that, and I'm going to trace your concept of free will back to some event or some mechanism.
That's probably a better word that will explain why you feel that you have free will, when in fact you must live, if you're a scientist, in a deterministic universe. Parallel to the rise of behaviorism in the United States, the German Gestalt psychologists accepted the notion of consciousness, but opposed attempts to reduce consciousness to elements of its structure or function. But Gestalt theory, or Gestalt psychology, was a...
phenomenological approach meaning that looking at behavior in the kind of microscopic ways molecular ways that psychologists were doing at the time stimulus response relationships introspectively looking at elemental analyses of behavior gestalt psychologists thought you ought to look at behavior as it occurs experience as it occurs so so that if i if i look out the window from through a process of talking therapy. He termed psychoanalysis. Freud saw the mind, or psyche, as organized into three interrelated forces. Ego, the motivating self-concept. Id, the pleasure-seeking, selfish source of personal satisfaction.
And superego, one's conscience or moral compass. Working together, these three forces explain behavior, personality, motivation. and even abnormal behavior.
It's interesting that most people, when you say the word psychology, the first name that comes to mind is not Carl Rogers, it is not B.F. Skinner, it is Sigmund Freud, because Freud had such a profound impact on the course of Western civilization's thinking. He was part of it, and he also helped guide and direct and create the idea. mental activities, the idea of the unconscious, that the average citizen comes to say, I can understand that because I can't explain it. In 1967, Ulrich Neisser published his landmark book Cognitive psychology, which opened the door to a new way of thinking about thinking, and that human behavior cannot be properly understood without carefully analyzing the information perceived by an organism.
How one knows the world depends on what... you bring to the world to interpret it. There is no direct world. The world is always something that one constructs, and one constructs it in a fashion that not only satisfies one's needs but makes one get on with other people along the way.
You have to somehow get information. You organize the information and you transform it to suit the needs of what it is that you're involved on, and that's cognitive psychology. How this new information is incorporated within existing cognitive schema, or mental framework, by which knowledge is organized, draws from Jean Piaget's stage theory of development.
When new information is perceived, the organism either assimilates it as is within existing mental structures, or changes existing mental structures to accommodate the new information, either way producing growth. In this way, people are continuously involved in constructing and deconstructing their visions of themselves and the greater world. There are no Meanings that are given to you by the world, meaning making as such, is the central human activity.
We construct our worlds. We each have different ones we learn how somehow to get along with. And it's the process of constructing reality, constructing meaning, meaning making. It's the construction of meaning that is so critical where culture comes into the thing to such a degree.
Culture is usually defined by social scientists as shared attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviors which characterize a particular psychosocial group. Ordinariness constitutes the culture in an order... Though Watson's Behaviorist Manifesto laid the groundwork, behaviorism's most famous proponent was Burris Frederick Skinner, better known as B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism became the predominant view in psychology for several decades.
Skinner felt all behavior is determined by external stimuli, to which an individual simply reacts. Over time, these reactions modify behavior, according to a principle Skinner termed operant behavior. Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes, and they tend not to repeat responses that lead to neutral or negative outcomes. Skinner proved his theory on rats and pigeons, whose simple actions were positively rewarded with a food pellet or punished by an electrical shock, thus reinforcing the behavior. Skinner felt that thinking was superfluous and that free will was an illusion.
So when you tell me that you have free will as a scientist, I'm going to ask you what you mean by that, and I'm going to trace your concept of free will back to some event or some mechanism, that's probably a better word, that will explain why you feel that you have free will, when in fact you must live, if you're a scientist, in a deterministic universe. Parallel to the rise of behaviorism in the United States, the German Gestalt psychologists accepted the notion of consciousness, but opposed attempts to reduce consciousness to elements of its structure or function. But Gestalt theory, or Gestalt psychology, was a phenomenological approach, meaning that looking at behavior in the kind of microscopic ways, molecular ways that psychologists were doing at the time.
stimulus-response relationships, introspectively looking at elemental analyses of behavior. Gestalt psychologists thought you ought to look at behavior as it occurs, experience as it occurs. So that if I look out the window from Titchener's point of view and trying to describe the basic sensations that would make up my perception, I would say I see hues and shapes and textures and contours. and that later my maybe even milliseconds later my brain says to me that these are cars and trees and buildings and other things out that window.
The Gestalt psychologists thought that was a very artificial approach to psychology and they argued that no when you look out the window you see cars and trees and buildings and that's the basis of the experience. Another way to illustrate the Gestalt point of view is embodied in the notion of what they termed a figure ground, which formed a basis for where one placed their attention during the act of perceiving. There's something that becomes the...
Connecting sensory stimuli through conscious recognition to behavior was a great leap forward, a notion seized upon by American psychologist John Watson, who founded a new school of psychology called behaviorism. In behaviorism, psychology had found a method people could understand and relate to. Psychology, said Watson, is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science.
Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. The time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness, when it no longer deludes itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation. Watson was the ultimate radical behaviorist who wanted to...
sponge mind from the psychology vernacular altogether. That mind was nothing more than you talking to yourself without having your lips move. And JB in his own way did a couple of classic Watsonian type studies where he attempts to demonstrate that in fact what you have, what you're calling mind, what you're calling mental activity is really nothing more than a behavior. You are using language. and you're talking to yourself.
So when you say, I am thinking about something, the radical behaviorist is going to tell you, no, you're not. You're talking to yourself. And I can measure language, you see.
It's something that is observable and objectifiable. But I can't measure your mind. Watson eventually applied his knowledge of human behavior to marketing products and achieved success as an advertising executive with J.
Walter Thompson. marketing personal care products such as Pond's cold cream. Though Watson's behaviorist manifesto laid the groundwork, behaviorism's most famous proponent was Burris Frederick Skinner, better known as B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism became the predominant view in psychology for several decades. Skinner felt all behavior is determined by external stimuli, to which an individual simply reacts.
Over time, these reactions modify behavior, according to a principle Skinner termed operant behavior. Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes, and they tend not to repeat responses that lead to neutral or negative outcomes. Skinner proved his theory on rats and pigeons.
whose simple actions were positively rewarded with a food pellet or punished by an electrical shock, thus reinforcing the behavior. Skinner felt that thinking was superfluous and that free will was an illusion. So when you tell me that you have free will as a scientist, I'm going to ask you what you mean by that, and I'm going to trace your concept of free will back to some event or some... mechanism....on rats and pigeons whose simple actions were positively rewarded with a food pellet or punished by an electrical shock, thus reinforcing the behavior. Skinner felt that thinking was superfluous and that free will was an illusion.
So when you tell me that you have free will as a scientist, I'm going to ask you what you mean by that and I'm going to trace your concept of free will back to some event. or some mechanism, that's probably a better word, that will explain why you feel that you have free will, when in fact you must live, if you're a scientist, in a deterministic universe. Parallel to the rise of behaviorism in the United States, the German Gestalt psychologists accepted the notion of consciousness, but opposed attempts to reduce consciousness to elements of its structure or function.
But Gestalt theory... or Gestalt psychology was a phenomenological approach, meaning that looking at behavior in the kind of microscopic ways, molecular ways that psychologists were doing at the time, stimulus-response relationships, introspectively looking at elemental analyses of behavior. Gestalt psychologists thought you ought to look at behavior as it occurs, experience as it occurs.
So that if I look out the window, I know, From Titchener's point of view and trying to describe the basic sensations that would make up my perception, I would say I see hues and shapes and textures and contours, and that later, maybe even milliseconds later, my brain says to me that these are cars and trees and buildings and other things out that window. The Gestalt psychologists thought that was a very artificial approach to... psychology and they argued that no, when you look out the window you see cars and trees and buildings and that's the basis of the experience. Another way to illustrate the Gestalt point of view is embodied in the notion of what they termed a figure ground, which formed a basis for where one placed their attention during the act of perceiving.
There's something that becomes the focus of your attention and that we call the figure. and whatever else is there then becomes ground against which that figure is imposed, but will not attract much of our attention. And the most famous example of that, which came again out of the Gestalt school, was the faces vase illusion, as it's sometimes described. So if you see the white, let's say the faces are done in black, then the vase appears in the middle of the picture in white, and that means that the white is the figure and the black is ground. But if you see the blackest figure with the whitest background, then you see these two faces facing each other.
And it all depends on which one you focus on. In the 1950s, Carl Rogers, Abraham...