Mesulam M M 2000 Principles of Beha�ioral and Cogniti�eNeurology. Oxford University Press, New York

Moody S L, Wise S P, di Pellegrino G, Zipser D 1998 A modelthat accounts for activity in primate frontal cortex during adelayed matching-to-sample task. Journal of Neuroscience18(1): 399–410

Olson C R, Gettner N 1995 Object-centered direction selectivityin the supplementary eye field of the macaque monkey.Science 269: 985–8

Petersen S E, Fox P T, Posner M I, Mintun M, Raichle M E1988 Positron emission tomographic studies of the corticalanatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331: 585–9

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J. L. McClelland

Cognitive Psychology: History

Since the beginning of experimental psychology inthe nineteenth century, there had been interest in thestudy of higher mental processes. But somethingdiscontinuous happened in the late 1950s, somethingso dramatic that it is now referred to as the ‘cognitiverevolution,’ and the view of mental processes that itspawned is called ‘cognitive psychology.’ What hap-pened was that American psychologists rejected be-haviorism and adopted a model of mind based on thecomputer. The brief history that follows (adapted inpart fromHilgard (1987) andKessel andBevan (1985))chronicles mainstream cognitive psychology from theonset of the cognitive revolution to the beginning ofthe twenty-first century.

1. Beginnings

From roughly the 1920s through the 1950s, Americanpsychology was dominated by behaviorism. Behavior-

ism was concerned primarily with the learning ofassociations, particularly in nonhuman species, and itconstrained theorizing to stimulus–response notions.The overthrow of behaviorism came not so much fromideas within psychology as from three research ap-proaches external to the field.

1.1 Communications Research and the InformationProcessing Approach

During World War II, new concepts and theories weredeveloped about signal processing and communica-tion, and these ideas had a profound impact onpsychologists active during the war years. One im-portant work was Shannon’s 1948 paper about Infor-mation Theory. It proposed that information wascommunicated by sending a signal through a sequenceof stages or transformations. This suggested thathuman perception and memory might be concep-tualized in a similar way: sensory information entersthe receptors, then is fed into perceptual analyzers,whose outputs in turn are input to memory systems.This was the start of the ‘information processing’approach—the idea that cognition could be under-stood as a flow of information within the organism,an idea that continues to dominate cognitive psy-chology.

Perhaps the first major theoretical effort in infor-mation processing psychology was Donald Broad-bent’s Perception and Communication (Broadbent1958). According to Broadbent’s model, informationoutput from the perceptual system encountered afilter, which passed only information to which peoplewere attending. Although this notion of an all-or-nonefilter would prove too strong (Treisman 1960), itoffered a mechanistic account of selective attention, aconcept that had been banished during behaviorism.Information that passed Broadbent’s filter then movedon to a ‘limited capacity decision channel,’ a systemthat has some of the properties of short-term memory,and from there on to long-term memory. This last partof Broadbent’s model—the transfer of informationfrom short- to long-term memory—became the salientpoint of the dual-memory models developed in the1970s.

Another aspect of Information theory that attractedpsychologist’s interest was a quantitative measure ofinformation in terms of ‘bits’ (roughly, the logarithmto the base 2 of the number of possible alternatives). Ina still widely cited paper, George Miller (1956) showedthat the limits of short-term memory had little to dowith bits. But along the way, Miller’s and others’interest in the technical aspects of information theoryand related work had fostered mathematical psy-chology, a subfield that was being fueled by othersources as well (e.g., Estes and Burke 1953, Luce 1959,Garner 1962). Over the years, mathematical psychol-ogy has frequently joined forces with the information

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processing approach to provide precise claims aboutmemory, attention, and related processes.

1.2 The Computer Modeling Approach

Technical developments during World War II also ledto the development of digital computers. Questionssoon arose about the comparability of computer andhuman intelligence (Turing 1950). By 1957, AlanNewell, J. C. Shaw, and Herb Simon had designed acomputer program that could solve difficult logicproblems, a domain previously thought to be theunique province of humans. Newell and Simon soonfollowed with programs that displayed generalproblem-solving skills much like those of humans, andargued that these programs offered detailed models ofhuman problem solving (a classic summary is con-tained in Newell and Simon (1972)). This work wouldalso help establish the field of artificial intelligence.

Early on, cross-talk developed between the com-puter modeling and information-processing ap-proaches, which crystallized in the 1960 book Plansand the Structure of Beha�ior (Miller et al. 1960). Thebook showed that information-processing psychologycould use the theoretical language of computer model-ing even if it did not actually lead to computerprograms. With the ‘bit’ having failed as a psycho-logical unit, information processing badly needed arigorous but rich means to represent psychologicalinformation (without such representations, whatexactly was being processed in the information proces-sing approach?). Computer modeling supplied power-ful ideas about representations (as data structures), aswell as about processes that operate on these struc-tures. The resultant idea of human information pro-cessing as sequences of computational processesoperating on mental representations remains thecornerstone of modern cognitive psychology (seee.g., Fodor 1975).

1.3 The Generati�e Linguistics Approach

A third external influence that lead to the rise ofmodern cognitive psychology was the development ofgenerative grammar in linguistics by Noam Chomsky.Two of Chomsky’s publications in the late 1950s hada profound effect on the nascent cognitive psychology.The first was his 1957 book Syntactic Structures(Chomsky 1957). It focused on the mental structuresneeded to represent the kind of linguistic knowledgethat any competent speaker of a language must have.Chomsky argued that associations per se, and evenphrase structure grammars, could not fully representour knowledge of syntax (how words are organizedinto phrases and sentences). What had to be addedwas a component capable of transforming one syn-tactic structure into another. These proposals about

transformational grammar would change the intel-lectual landscape of linguistics, and usher in a newpsycholinguistics.

Chomsky’s second publication (1959) was a reviewof Verbal Beha�ior, a book about language learning bythe then most respected behaviorist alive, B. F. Skinner(Skinner 1957). Chomsky’s review is arguably one ofthe most significant documents in the history ofcognitive psychology. It aimed not merely to devastateSkinner’s proposals about language, but to underminebehaviorism as a serious scientific approach to psy-chology. To some extent, it succeeded on both counts.

1.4 An Approach Intrinsic to Psychology

At least one source of modern cognitive psychologycame from within the field. This approach had its rootsin Gestalt psychology, and maintained its focus on thehigher mental processes. A signal event in this tra-dition was the 1956 book A Study of Thinking, byBruner, Goodnow, and Austin (Bruner et al. 1956).The work investigated how people learn new conceptsand categories, and it emphasized strategies of learningrather than just associative relations. The proposals fitperfectly with the information-processing approach—indeed, they were information processing proposals—and offered still another reason to break from be-haviorism.

By the early 1960s all was in place. Behaviorism wason the wane in academic departments all over America(it had never really taken strong root in Europe).Psychologists interested in the information-processingapproach were moving into academia, and HarvardUniversity went so far as to establish a Center forCognitive Studies directed by Jerome Bruner andGeorge Miller. The new view in psychology wasinformation processing. It likened mind to a computer,and emphasized the representations and processesneeded to give rise to activities ranging from patternrecognition, attention, categorization, memory, reas-oning, decision making, problem solving, andlanguage.

2. The Growth of Cogniti�e Psychology

The 1960s brought progress in many of the above-mentioned topic areas, some of which are highlightedbelow.

2.1 Pattern Recognition

One of the first areas to benefit from the cognitiverevolution was pattern recognition, the study of howpeople perceive and recognize objects. The cognitiveapproach provided a general two-stage view of objectrecognition: (a) describing the input object in terms of

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Figure 1(a) Part of a Collins and Quillian (1969) semantic network. Circles designate concepts and lines (arrows) betweencircles designate relations between concepts. There are two kinds of relations: subset–superset (‘Robin is a bird’)and property (e.g., ‘Robins can fly’). The network is strictly hierarchical, as properties are stored only at the highestlevel at which they apply. (b) Part of an Anderson and Bower (1973) propositional network. Circles representconcepts and lines between them labeled relations. All propositions have a subject–predicate structure, and thenetwork is not strictly hierarchical. (c) Part of a simplified connectionist network. Circles represent concepts, orparts of concepts, lines with arrowheads depict excitatory connections, and lines with filled circles designateinhibitory connections; typically numbers are put on the lines indicate the strength of the connections. The networkis not strictly hierarchical, and is more interconnected than the preceding networks

relatively primitive features (e.g., ‘it has two diagonallines and one horizontal line connecting them’); and(b) matching this object description to stored object

descriptions in visual memory, and selecting the bestmatch as the identity of the input object (‘thisdescription best matches the letter A’). This two-stage

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view was not entirely new to psychology, but ex-pressing it in information-processing terms allowedone to connect empirical studies of object perceptionto computer models of the process. The psychologistUlrich Neisser (1964) used a computer model ofpattern recognition (Selfridge 1959) to direct hisempirical studies and provided dramatic evidence thatan object could be matched to multiple visual mem-ories in parallel.

Other research indicated that the processing under-lying object perception could persist after the stimuluswas removed. For this to happen, there had to be avisual memory of the stimulus. Evidence for such an‘iconic’ memory was supplied by Sperling in classicexperiments in 1960 (Sperling 1960). Evidence for acomparable brief auditory memory was soon providedas well (e.g., Crowder and Morton 1969). Much of thework on object recognition and sensory memories wasintegrated in Neisser’s influential 1967 book Cogniti�ePsychology (Neisser 1967). The book served as the firstcomprehensive statement of existing research in cog-nitive psychology, and it gave the new field its name.

2.2 Memory Models and Findings

Broadbent’s model of attention and memory stimu-lated the formulation of rival models in the 1960s.Thesemodels assumed that short-termmemory (STM)and long-term memory (LTM) were qualitativelydifferent structures, with information first enteringSTM and then being transferred to LTM (e.g., Waughand Norman 1965). The Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)model proved particularly influential. With its em-phases on information flowing between memorystores, control processes regulating that flow, andmathematical descriptions of these processes, themodel was a quintessential example of the informa-tion-processing approach. The model was related tovarious findings about memory. For example, whenpeople have to recall a long list of words they do beston the first words presented, a ‘primacy’ effect, and onthe last few words presented, a ‘recency’ effect. Variousexperiments indicated that the recency effect reflectedretrieval from STM, whereas the primacy effectreflected enhanced retrieval from LTM due to greaterrehearsal for the first items presented (e.g., Murdock1962, Glanzer and Cunitz 1966). At the time theseresults were seen as very supportive of dual-memorymodels (although alternative interpretations wouldsoon be proposed—particularly by Craik andLockhart 1972).

Progress during this period also involved empiri-cally determining the characteristics of encoding,storage, and retrieval processes in STM and LTM.The results indicated that verbal material was encodedand stored in a phonologic code for STM, but a moremeaning-based code for LTM (Conrad 1964, Kintschand Buschke 1969). Other classic studies demonstrated

that forgetting in STM reflected a loss of informationfrom storage due to either decay or interference (e.g.,Wickelgren 1965), whereas some apparent losses ofinformation in LTM often reflected a temporaryfailure in retrieval, (Tulving and Pearlstone 1966).To alarge extent, these findings have held up during over 30years of research, although many of the findings wouldnow be seen as more limited in scope (e.g., the findingsabout STM are now seen as reflecting only onecomponent of working memory, e.g., Baddeley (1986),and the findings about LTM are seen as characterizingonly one of several LTM systems, e.g., Schacter(1987)).

One of the most important innovations of 1960sresearch was the emphasis on reaction time as adependent measure. Because the focus was on the flowof information, it made sense to characterize variousprocesses by their temporal extent. In a seminal paperin 1966, Saul Sternberg reported (Sternberg 1966) thatthe time to retrieve an item from STM increasedlinearly with the number of items in store, suggestingthat retrieval was based on a rapid scan of STM.Sternberg (1969) gave latency measures another boostwhen he developed the ‘additive factors’ method,which, given assumptions about serial processing,allowed one to attribute changes in reaction times tospecific processing stages involved in the task (e.g., adecrease in the perceptibility of information affectedthe encoding of information into STM but not itsstorage and retrieval). These advances in ‘mentalchronometry’ quickly spread to areas other thanmemory (e.g., Fitts and Posner 1967, see alsoSchneider and Shiffrin 1977).

2.3 The New Psycholinguistics

Beginning in the early 1960s there was great interest indetermining the psychological reality of Chomsky’stheories of language (these theories had been formu-lated with ideal listeners and speakers in mind). Someof these linguistically inspired experiments presentedsentences in perception and memory paradigms, andshowed that sentences deemed more syntacticallycomplex by transformational grammar were harder toperceive or store (Miller 1962). Subtler experimentstried to show that syntactic units, like phrases,functioned as units in perception, STM, and LTM(Fodor et al. (1974) is the classic review). While manyof these results are no longer seen as critical, thisresearch effort created a new subfield of cognitivepsychology, a psycholinguistics that demanded soph-istication in modern linguistic theory.

Not all psycholinguistic studies focused on syntax.Some dealt with semantics, particularly the represen-tation of the meanings of words, and a few of thesestudies made use of the newly developed mentalchronometry. One experiment that proved seminalwas reported by Collins and Quillian (1969). Partici-

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pants were asked simple questions about the meaningof a word, such as ‘Is a robin a bird,’ and ‘Is a robin ananimal?’; the greater the categorical difference betweenthe two terms in a question, the longer it took toanswer. These results were taken to support a model ofsemantic knowledge in which meanings were organ-ized in a hierarchical network, e.g., the concept ‘robin’is directly connected to the concept ‘bird,’ which inturn is directly connected to the concept ‘animal,’ andinformation can flow from ‘robin’ to ‘animal’ only bygoing through ‘bird’ (see the top of Fig. 1). Models likethis were to proliferate in the next stage of cognitivepsychology.

3. The Rise of Cogniti�e Science

3.1 Memory and Language

Early in the 1970s the fields of memory and languagebegan to intersect. In 1973 John Anderson andGordon Bower published Human Associati�e Memory(Anderson and Bower 1973), which presented a modelof memory for linguistic materials. The model com-bined information processing with recent develop-ments in linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI),thereby linking the three major research directionsthat led to the cognitive revolution. The model usednetworks similar to that considered above to representsemantic knowledge, and used memory-search pro-cesses to interrogate these networks (see the middle ofFig. 1). The Anderson and Bower book was quicklyfollowed by other large-scale theoretical efforts thatcombined information processing, modern linguistics,and computer models. These efforts included Kintsch(1974), which focused on memory for paragraphsrather than sentences, and Norman, Rumelhart, andthe LNR Research Group (1975), Anderson (1976),and Schank and Abelson (1977), which took a morecomputer-science perspective and focused on storiesand other large linguistic units.

As psychologists became aware of related develop-ments in linguistics and artificial intelligence, soresearchers in the latter disciplines become aware ofpertinent work in psychology. Thus evolved theinterdisciplinary movement called ‘cognitive science.’In addition to psychology, AI, and linguistics, thefields of cultural anthropology and philosophy ofmind also became involved. Themovement eventuatedin numerous interdisciplinary collaborations (e.g.,Rumelhart et al. 1986), as well as in individualpsychologists becoming more interdisciplinary.

3.2 Representational Issues

In the 1970s and early 1980s, cognitive science wasmuch concerned with issues about mental representa-

tions. Whereas the memory-for-language models de-scribed earlier had assumed representations that werelanguage-like, or propositional, other researchers ar-gued that representations could also be imaginal, likea visual image. Shepard and Cooper (1972) providedevidence that people could mentally rotate theirrepresentations of objects, and Kosslyn (1980) sur-veyed numerous phenomena that further implicatedvisual imagery. In keeping with the interdisciplinari-ness of cognitive science, AI researchers and philoso-phers entered the debate about propositional versusimaginal representations (e.g., Block 1981, Pylyshyn1981). In addition to questions about the modality ofrepresentations, there were concerns about the struc-ture of representations. While it had long beenassumed that propositional representations of objectswere like definitions, researchers now proposed therepresentations were prototypes of the objects, fittingsome examples better than others (Tversky 1977,Mervis and Rosch 1981, Smith and Medin 1981).Again the issues sparked interest in disciplines otherthan psychology (e.g., Lakoff 1987).

The cognitive science movement affected most areasof cognitive psychology, ranging from object rec-ognition (Marr 1982) to reasoning (e.g., Johnson-Laird 1983) to expertise in problem solving (e.g.,Chase and Simon 1973). The movement continues tobe influential and increasingly focuses on computa-tional models of cognition. What has changed since itsinception in the 1970s is the kind of computationalmodel in favor.

4. Newer Directions: Connectionism andCogniti�e Neuroscience

4.1 Connectionist Modeling

The computer models that dominated cognitive psy-chology from its inception used complex symbols asrepresentations, and processed these representationsin a rule-based fashion (for example, in a model ofobject recognition, the representation for a frog mightconsist of a conjunction of complex properties, andthe rule for recognition might look something like ‘Ifit’s green, small, and croaks, it’s a frog’). Starting inthe early 1980s, an alternative kind of cognitive modelstarted to attract interest, namely ‘connectionist’ (or‘parallel distributed processing’) models. These propo-sals have the form of neural networks, consisting ofnodes (representations) that are densely intercon-nected, with the connections varying in strength (seethe bottom of Fig. 1).

In 1981 Hinton and Anderson published a booksurveying then existent connectionist models (Hintonand Anderson 1981), and in the same year McClellandandRumelhart (1981) presented a connectionistmodelof word recognition that explained a wide variety ofexperimental results. The floodgates had been opened,

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and connectionist models of perception, memory, andlanguage proliferated, to the point where they nowdominate computational approaches to cognition.Why the great appeal? One frequently cited reason isneurological plausibility: the models are clearly closerto brain function than are traditional rule-basedmodels. A second reason is that connectionist modelspermit parallel constraint satisfaction: different sourcesof activation can converge simultaneously on the samerepresentations or response. A third reason is thatconnectionist models manifest graceful degradation:when the model is damaged, performance degradesslowly, much as is found in human neurologicaldisorders (Rumelhart et al. 1986).

From a historical viewpoint, there is an ironic aspectabout the ascendancy of connectionist models. Suchmodels return to the pure associationism that charac-terized behaviorism. While connectionist modelshardly fit with all behaviorist dictums—their repre-sentations are not restricted to stimuli and responses,and they routinely assume massively parallel pro-cessing—still their reliance on associations runs coun-ter to Chomsky’s arguments that sheer associationismcannot explain language (Chomsky 1957, 1959). Thisissue has formed part of the basis for critiques ofconnectionist models (e.g., Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988).Newell (1990), one of the founders of traditionalcomputational models, suggested a plausible resol-ution: lower-level cognitive processes like object rec-ognition may be well modeled by connectionistmodels, but higher-level cognitive processes likereasoning and language may require traditional sym-bolic modeling.

4.2 Cogniti�e Neuroscience

The other major new direction in cognitive psychologyis the growing interest in the neural bases of cognition,a movement referred to as ‘cognitive neuroscience.’There had been little interest in biological work in theresearch that brought about the cognitive revolution.That early work was as much concerned with fightingbehaviorism as it was with advancing cognitive psy-chology, and consequently much of the research fo-cused on higher-level processes and was completelyremoved from anything going on in the neurobiologyof its day. Subsequent generations of cognitive psy-chologists solidified their commitments to a purelycognitive level of analyses, by arguing that the dist-inction between cognitive and neural levels of analyseswas analogous to that between computer software andhardware, and that cognitive psychology (and cog-nitive science) was concerned primarily with the soft-ware. Since the early 1990s, views about the impor-tance of neural analyses have changed dramatically.There is a growing consensus that the standardinformation processing analyses of cognition can besubstantially enlightened by knowing how cognition isimplemented in the brain.

While many factors may have been responsible forthe change in view, three will be mentioned here. First,the rise of connectionist models that were looselyinspired by brain function had the side effect ofincreasing interest in what was known in detail aboutbrain function. Indeed, these two recent movementshave become increasingly intertwined as connectionistmodels have increasingly incorporated findings fromcognitive neuroscience. Second, in the 1970s and 1980sthere were breakthroughs in systems-level neuro-science that had implications for mainstream cognitivepsychology. As one example, research with neuro-logical patients as well as with nonhuman speciesestablished that structures in the medial temporal lobewere essential for the formation of memories thatcould serve as the basis for recall (‘explicit memory’),but not for other kinds of ‘implicit memories’ (e.g.,Schacter 1987, Squire 1992). As another example,research with nonhuman primates showed that twodistinct systems were involved in the early stages ofvisual perception: a ‘where’ system that is responsiblefor spatial localization, and a ‘what’ system that isresponsible for recognition of the object (e.g.,Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982). Both of these dis-coveries had major implications for the cognitive levelof analyses, e.g., computational models of objectrecognition or memory would do well to divide thelabor into separate subsystems.

The third factor responsible for the rise of cognitiveneuroscience is methodological: the development ofneuroimaging techniques that produce maps of neuralactivity while the brain is performing some cognitivetask. One major technique is positron emission tom-ography (PET). In 1988, Michael Posner, MarcusRaichle, and colleagues used PET in a ground-breaking experiment to localize neurally differentsubprocesses of reading—PET images obtained whileparticipants looked at words showed activated regionsin the posterior temporal cortex; images obtainedwhile participants read the words revealed additionalregions activated in the motor cortex; and imagesobtained while participants generated constrainedassociations to the words revealed still additionalregions in frontal areas (Posner et al. 1988). PETanalyses of object recognition, memory, and languagesoon followed. A more recent technique is functionalmagnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It is now beingused to study virtually every domain of humancognition.

5. Conclusion

This article has given short shrift to important contri-butions that tend to fall off themainstreamof cognitivepsychology. One such case is the work done by DanKahneman and Amos Tversky (e.g., Kahneman andTversky 1973, Tversky and Kahneman 1983) on theuse of heuristics in decision making, which can result

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in deviations from rational behavior.Another exampleis the cognitively inspired study of memory andlanguage deficits in neurological patients (Shallice(1988) provides a review). There are other cases likethese which deserve a prominent place in a fullerhistory of cognitive psychology.

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E. E. Smith

Cognitive Psychology: Overview

1. Meanings of the Term ‘Cogniti�e Psychology’

Cognitive Psychology has at least three differentmeanings. First, the term refers to ‘a simple collectionof topic areas,’ that is, of behaviorally observable ortheoretically proposed phenomena that are studied

within the boundaries of the field of Cognitive Psy-chology. Second, the term alludes to the fact thatcognitive psychologists attempt to explain intelligenthuman behavior by reference to a cogniti�e system thatintervenes between environmental input and behavior.The second meaning of Cognitive Psychology thusrefers to a set of assumptions governing the operationsof the proposed cognitive system. Third, CognitivePsychology means a particular methodological ap-proach to studying, that is, to empirically addressingpotential explanations of human behavior. The twolatter meanings of Cognitive Psychology are discussedin some depth below, after a very brief considerationof the scope of modern Cognitive Psychology and itshistorical roots.

2. The Scope of Cogniti�e Psychology

At present, Cognitive Psychology is a broad fieldconcerned with many different topic areas, such as, forinstance, human memory, perception, attention, pat-tern recognition, consciousness, neuroscience, rep-resentation of knowledge, cognitive development,language, and thinking. The common denominator ofthese phenomena appears to be that all of thephenomena reflect the operation of ‘intelligence’ inone way or another, at least if intelligence is broadlydefined as skill of an indi�idual to act purposefully,think rationally, and interact efficiently with the en-�ironment. Thus, at a general level, Cognitive Psy-chology is concerned with explaining the structure andmental operations of intelligence as well as its be-havioral manifestations.

3. Historical Roots of Cogniti�e Psychology

3.1 The Term Cogniti�e Psychology

The term Cognitive Psychology (latin: cognoscere;greek: gignoskein� to know, perceive) is ratheryoung. Although we do find the related term ‘cog-nition’ mentioned occasionally in the psychologies ofthe late nineteenth and early twentieth century (e.g.,James, Spence, Wundt) where it denoted the basicelements of consciousness and their combinations, thepresent meanings of the term cognitive psychologyowe little to the early theoretical and philosophicalconsiderations of the human mind. Rather, the currentmodern meanings of the term owe much more to (a)the fact that the study of cognition emerged inopposition to the prevailing behavioristic view in the1940s and 1950s that was trying to explain humanbehavior primarily in terms of its antecedent en-vironmental conditions, and to (b) the availability ofboth new theoretical concepts (e.g., information the-ory [Shannon], cybernetics [Wiener], systems theory

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Cogniti�e Psychology: O�er�iew

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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7