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Psychology: Six Perspectives

Cognitive Psychology

By: Dodge Fernald

Book Title: Psychology: Six Perspectives

Chapter Title: "Cognitive Psychology"

Pub. Date: 2008

Access Date: November 3, 2022

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412938679

Online ISBN: 9781452224862

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n7

Print pages: 216-260

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online

version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology

• Foundations of Cognitive Psychology ◦ Efforts in Gestalt Psychology ◦ Piaget's Cognitive Studies ◦ The Cognitive Revolution ◦ Current Models of the Mind

• Sensation and Perception • Processes in Memory

◦ Sensory and Short-Term Memory ◦ Memories in Long-Term Storage

• Thought and Language ◦ Components in Thinking ◦ Approaches to Problem Solving ◦ Language: Symbols of Thought

• The Cognitive Therapies ◦ Rational-Emotive Therapy ◦ Therapy for Depression

• Commentary and Critique

Cognitive psychology examines the ways people manage the flow of information in their minds. In a general sense, it studies perception, the intake of information; memory, the storage and retrieval of information; and thinking, the diverse uses of this information in reasoning, language, and other mental activities.

Contemplation about human mental activities has occurred from the earliest stages of human history, but the forerunners of modern cognitive psychology appear in the late 19th century. After describing these diverse foundations, but before presenting cognitive therapy and the final commentary, this chapter considers successively our current knowledge about perception, then memory, and finally thinking.

In this context, imagine young Bertha's memories and thoughts on hearing these words in the streets of Vienna: “Hochere Tochter! Hochere Tochter!” Dressed in expensive clothing and jewelry, idle much of the day, she and others of her age and upper-class background became the targets of discreet ridicule. The lower classes jeered them as society's parasites, each a lazy and overindulged “High Daughter.” But these leisurely, high-born young women were not at fault. In fact, they were victims.

They were prevented from acquiring further education and careers outside the home; instead, their parents bestowed on them luxuries designed to gain attractive offers of marriage. They viewed their daughters as opportunities for conspicuous consumption. Families gained their reputation by squandering their resources on superfluous goals and extended idleness.

But how did these young women think about themselves? How did they process this information about their unusual social position?

Some overlooked the exploitation, enjoying their leisurely status. They accepted their golden handcuffs with ease and grace; they did not acknowledge or even recognize the cultural restrictions. Others viewed the problem as a family injustice. They overtly resisted this sexual discrimination at the cost of pain and hardship, as well as family discomfort. Still others regarded themselves at fault, or at least they experienced the problem internally. They developed various illnesses, mental or physical—nervousness, backaches, fears, weaknesses, and sensory disorders (Kaplan, 1984).

In her youth, Bertha fell into the third category. Surrounded by wealth, she lay in a gilded cage, sick and unhappy, prohibited from meaningful work despite her special talents. In Frankfurt, she began to understand herself differently, shedding her golden handcuffs by assisting orphans, prostitutes, and finally

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unwed mothers. Then one day a magazine moved her further toward the second category. Articles and editorials in The Woman caught Bertha's attention. They increased her knowledge, strengthened her understanding, and stimulated her resistance to a problem broader than her own: the plight of women throughout society.

Foundations of Cognitive Psychology

In modern psychology, knowledge and understanding are known as cognition. Thus cognitive psychology deals with knowing, understanding, and all other mental processes—including perception, memory, thinking, and numerous components of these major processes yet to be identified. Like the biological perspective, cognitive psychology is an extensive enterprise, a loose confederation of diverse interests so broad that it may seem more like a diverse subfield than a single systematic perspective in contemporary psychology. With the human mind as its subject of inquiry, cognitive psychology faces an immense challenge.

Expressed in simpler terms that emphasize this breadth, modern cognitive psychology seeks to discover how knowledge is represented in the human mind (Mandler, 1985). Strictly speaking, cognitive psychologists study mental processes only, without concern for their biological background. They believe they can investigate the software, which is human cognitive ability, without substantial knowledge of how it would be implemented in the hardware, the human brain (Byrnes & Fox, 1998; Neisser, 1967). In a word, the focus is largely on consciousness—with practical applications in social behavior, school achievement, job performance, and other mental activities (Sternberg & Dennis, 1997).

Cognitive psychology stands in marked contrast to radical behaviorism, which concentrates on overt actions. The cognitive approach aims to discover what goes on inside the “black box,” as the human mind has been called because of its mysterious, seemingly inaccessible state. Also in contrast to behaviorism, cognitive psychology stimulates theory-building, for mental processes cannot be observed directly. It generates ideas about the way human knowledge is represented in the mind and about the processes that shape and transform these representations, making them useful mental mechanisms (Mandler, 1985).

With these aims, cognitive psychology has become an open, dynamic approach to psychology, emerging without any particular individual becoming the overall leader. It developed instead under the influence of several prominent figures. With its broad mandate and the accelerated development of new equipment, it continues to change rapidly from its earlier roots, which are lengthy, tangled, and diverse.

Efforts in Gestalt Psychology

Like biological psychology, the cognitive perspective developed early roots in Wundt's laboratory, in experiments aiming to explore the human mind or, more exactly, its basic contents. But early cognitive psychology lacked adequate instruments and techniques for measuring mental life. Its method of introspection failed because participants' reports of their experiences and feelings could not be studied in a consistent, accurate manner. Psychology at that time simply could not look inward in any reliable fashion.

Soon a more empirical approach came forth. Called gestalt psychology, for the German word gestalt means whole or configuration, it emphasized the study of unified patterns or wholes, especially of natural organizations, focusing on perception and the role of insight in thinking. In Berlin and elsewhere, the gestaltists insisted that complex phenomena can never be adequately explained in terms of their basic elements. The parts interact. The organic or functional whole may be something more or less than the sum of its parts—or something different altogether.

In an early demonstration, two stationary lights blinked on and off, one after the other, at a constant interval. If the lights were close together and the interval brief, the viewer saw both of the lights blinking at the same time. If their positions were far apart and the interval lengthy, the viewer saw one light and then the other, each in a different location. But with an appropriate distance and interval, the apparatus created the illusion that just one light appeared, moving from the first to the second location. There was no movement of any sort, as the reader well knows from observing modern neon signs. The stationary whole included an emergent property:

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the illusion of movement.

Gestalt psychologists found this illusion so compelling, yet so simple, that they named it after a single letter of the Greek alphabet, the phi phenomenon. For them, such demonstrations made a convincing statement about the study of cognitive phenomena. Examining the whole person, the whole mind, became more important than examining characteristic parts in a more precise but isolated fashion. Information about the parts is of course essential and inevitable because attention must become focused, but the overall phenomenon requires a more holistic approach.

Nevertheless, gestalt psychology failed to achieve its promise. The problems here lay outside the laboratory. The Nazi regime of the 1930s disrupted its work, prompting Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and other leaders to emigrate to the United States, where their investigations contributed to our understanding of learning, thinking, perception, and problem solving. American colleagues extended the fundamental gestalt ideas on wholes and patterns to studies in motivation, social psychology, and organizational psychology, focusing on the place of individuals within the group. But in America gestalt psychology faced stiff opposition from the rising tide of behaviorism, which soon gained ascendancy in the field. Gestalt psychology offered an early research platform for cognitive studies, but it did not come to full fruition.

Piaget's Cognitive Studies

Amid these interrupted efforts in early cognitive psychology, an exception appears in the early, steady work of a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget (1896–1980). For 30 years, he produced major findings in relative obscurity, often studying his own children in everyday settings, rather than research participants in a laboratory. His equipment, crude by today's standards, showed his ingenuity. He preferred informal, flexible methods, chiefly naturalistic observation and the interview. Partly for these reasons, he is not fully representative of modern cognitive psychology. Moreover, he limited his studies to cognitive development, the typical changes in mental abilities during the life span, as people grow older. Cognitive development is just one of several domains in the subfield of developmental psychology, which also examines changes in physical, sexual, emotional, and social development throughout the life cycle.

Piaget's promise in science first appeared with his description of a rare albino sparrow. He was pleased with this publication early in his career—at age 11. Further articles and his work with mollusks in his hometown of Neuchatel, Switzerland, brought him the opportunity to serve as curator of mollusks in a Geneva museum. But he declined the opportunity, deciding to finish high school instead. Then his godfather, thinking Piaget too young to be so specialized, stimulated the youth's philosophical interests, which, along with science, lasted the rest of his life (Singer & Revenson, 1978).

Completing graduate studies in biology and seeking work that would include philosophy, Piaget turned to cognitive psychology. He planned a 5-year study of the development of thought in children—but continued with it for more than 40. He called this work genetic epistemology, for it examined the origin, or genesis, of knowledge (Boden, 1979).

Family events also influenced Piaget's career, particularly the birth of Jacqueline, his first child, followed by Lucienne and then Laurent. Observing their behavior stimulated his interest in the complex mental processes that develop in human beings even before they can understand or use language. He watched his infants trying to find lost toys and throwing things onto the floor. At later ages, he assembled their toys in various ways and then posed questions about them. Still later, he inquired about the moon, being naughty, dreams, and more abstract concepts, all with the aim of understanding how children's knowledge evolves (Piaget, 1952a).

In this extensive effort, Piaget's coworker, Valentine Chatenay, deserves special credit. As Piaget's wife, the children they studied were her children too. She not only supplied the participants; she also made observations and collected data. Their research program, which began almost as a summer job for Piaget, blossomed into a collaborative marital effort and a lengthy career for him.

Her husband is best remembered for identifying four stages in cognitive development, leading to the conclusion that a young child's understanding of the world is not just inferior to that of an adult. It is

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fundamentally different.

From birth to 18 months or older, Piaget discovered, children do not think in the usual adult sense at all. With no substantial capacity for recall, the infant simply senses its environment and reacts to it, prompting Piaget to call this first phase of cognitive development the sensorimotor period. When his daughter Jacqueline was a few months old, Piaget showed her a rattle, and she cooed and squirmed with pleasure. But after she watched him cover it with a blanket, she showed no disappointment at all. She did not even look for the toy. Apparently the rattle had vanished from her thoughts (Piaget, 1954).

Around the time of the second year, the child does look for the toy. Memory is developing more rapidly. The child begins to gain images for thinking about things not immediately present—but cannot use these symbols in flexible ways. This stage is called preoperational thought because the child often cannot think logically about these objects, especially about the operations that might be performed on them. From an adult viewpoint, these childish mistakes are amusing. For psychologists, they depict the most intriguing of the four Piagetian stages.

A traditional test requires the child to explain what happens when certain operations are performed on certain objects. Two identical, tall beakers are filled with colored water. After the child agrees that the beakers contain equal amounts, and while the child is watching, the contents of one beaker are poured into a third empty beaker, which is low and wide. Then the child is asked: “Now which one has more, this beaker or this one—or do they have the same amount?” The psychologist points to the second tall, thin beaker, filled with water, and to the third beaker, low and flat, filled with an equal amount of water. Attending to the height of the tall column of water, the preoperational child chooses that beaker. This child reasons in terms of the dominant stimulus, not the operations involved, thereby demonstrating preoperational thought (Piaget, 1954).

By age six or seven years, or even earlier, depending on the specific features of the task, the child becomes surprised by the question, answering, “They're just the same!” This capacity to think logically and solve problems that are physically present is called concrete operations. The child can reason successfully, knowing that the quantity of liquid has not changed, just its shape.

A hypothetical situation is a different matter, requiring formal operations, the capacity for abstract thinking. Around 11 years of age, the individual may begin to reason logically, even in situations that are not concrete. The child may then be able to imagine the possibilities in a hypothetical situation. Emerging into the teen years, some adolescents begin to form and test hypotheses about government, philosophy, business, and other aspects of daily life solely by reasoning, solving problems entirely in abstract terms (Piaget, 1950, 1952b).

These early efforts by Piaget spawned thousands of investigators in the 20th century. Consistent with science, they have revised or advanced his groundbreaking work, showing that his little Jacqueline and other children knew far more about the world than her father suspected, as noted later.

The Cognitive Revolution

With Piaget studying cognitive development on one side of the Atlantic, American revolutionaries began to appear on the other, separately at first, individually resisting behaviorism, which largely ignored the human mind. These scattered dissidents wanted to bring mental life back into mainstream psychology.

In fact, modern cognitive psychology did not arise as a protest against humanistic psychology, a more immediate predecessor, emerging in the 1950s. Lacking a strong empirical base, humanistic psychology never gained ascendancy in scientific psychology, although it established its own special, more holistic position in the field. Wryly speaking, psychology lost its mind with behaviorism—but then regained it with the protest of cognitive psychology.

Intrusions into the behavioristic rule had begun earlier in small ways, even within the stimulus-response (S- R) expression of traditional behaviorism. To emphasize that an organism intervened between the stimulus and response, the expression sometimes became modified: S-O-R. An organism mediated the stimulus,

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converting it into a response. Eventually, these mediating activities gained the attention of diverse scientists in disparate locations, producing the growth of cognitive psychology.

Among these psychologists, Jerome Bruner maintained a strong interest in perception, stressing that what one perceives is a function not only of the primary stimulation, as studied in behavioristic laboratories, but also of the observers' values, needs, and other expectations. In other words, the individual's personal orientation could not be ignored. Bruner waggishly called this viewpoint the “New Look” in perception because it brought a fresh approach to the study of visual responsiveness. It did so by pointing to the importance of the O, the organism's mental readiness, between the S and R.

In contrast, George Miller came from a background in mathematical psychology, information theory, and speech perception. Eventually this versatility brought him to the study of consciousness and how we store information in the mind. Without memory, human beings would be totally helpless. We would not know what to do about anything. Miller's subsequent research, assigning a finite, numerically defined capacity to immediate human memory, aroused considerable interest among psychologists, many of whom were not yet committed to bringing the mind back into psychology. Miller's work brought hope, a challenge, and a peek inside the black box.

The study of business organizations and their executives initially led Herbert Simon to investigations of human thinking, especially decision making and problem solving. Later, he viewed the human mind as a symbol-manipulating system or, as a colleague expressed it, an information-processing system. But even with this language, Simon and his colleagues lacked the technology to conduct productive studies of thinking. Seeking precision, they noticed that early computers were not just “number crunchers.” They too were symbol manipulators, possessing the potential for manipulating all kinds of information. That realization brought forth the idea of computer simulation, using the computer to depict human information processing and using the computer languages as descriptions of those “thought processes” (Simon, 1980).

These, then, were three early major strands in the re-emergence of cognitive psychology: perception, memory, and computer simulation of human thought. But the field still lacked a name. Another psychologist, Ulrich Neisser, supplied that with the title of his new book a decade later, Cognitive Psychology (1967), the first text in the field. It played a basic role in outlining this perspective, organizing current knowledge, and presenting the computer as a metaphor for thinking about human information processing.

Enormously aided by improved electronic equipment, the cognitive psychology movement gathered momentum, eventually including linguists, engineers, anthropologists, and many others representing diverse interests. Thus, as cognitive psychology gained more adherents, it did not develop the coherence of a highly systematic perspective. It became a loose alliance of diverse psychologists and others sharing an interest in the mysterious phenomenon known as the human mind. Informally called the “cognitive revolution,” that expression perhaps overstates the case, for the cognitive perspective was not new according to Wundtian and Piagetian standards, and it has not been embraced by the entire field (Greenwood, 1999). But since the 1970s it has remained a prominent force, calling attention to the tremendous complexity of information processing in our everyday lives.

In psychology, information processing refers to the representation of the world within an individual—the symbolic activities that constitute the flow of knowledge between an individual and the environment (Mandler, 1985). The most popular general concept in cognitive psychology, it serves as a broad reference to diverse mental processes, all related to intelligence.

In fact, the concept of information processing overlaps with intelligence, broadly defined as the capacity to adapt to new situations and to learn from experience. In psychology, intelligence is a much older term, associated in the early years with psychometric testing—the measurement of mental ability, focusing on amount. The goal, then and now, lies in measuring how much intelligence an individual possesses, comparing people in this respect, and comparing differences in mental functions within one individual. This aim still plays a useful role in society.

But the information-processing viewpoint has become more prominent in recent decades. It focuses not on

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how much intelligence a person possesses but on how intelligence operates, stressing the relationships among our mental functions in managing various types of information and the ways they produce our understanding of the world. From this viewpoint, differences in intelligence are viewed as differences in information processing.

One dimension of information processing, speed of processing, appears regularly in daily life. When told a telephone number, for example, some people repeat it quickly; others need more time and more “tellings.” Fast learners generally are more capable than slower learners, just as older children are mentally quicker than younger ones (Miller & Vernon, 1997). Characterized by biographers as quick-witted, sharp-tongued, and always ready with a retort, Bertha may have possessed considerable speed in information processing, at least in the verbal realm.

The second dimension, knowledge available for processing, includes all information retrievable from long- term memory. The greater an individual's expertise in some area, the greater is that person's ability to acquire and store new knowledge in that same area. In discussions about law, Wilhelm would appear more intelligent than Bertha because he had developed a more extensive background in the law, increasing his storage capacity and his capacity for perceiving and using new information about legal matters. Wilhelm also had more and better schooling. But in the context of feminism, the tables would be turned.

A third dimension, using strategies for processing new information, also is influenced by age and experience. Adults confronted with a simple memory task would use mnemonic devices not even imagined by children. Of course schooling plays a role; mathematics, for example, offers numerous strategies for estimating time, distance, and mass, and these estimates can increase the speed of processing.

Thus, intelligence depicts the human mind in rather static fashion; information processing stresses mental activities. But the basic dimensions of information processing—speed, knowledge, and strategies—certainly describe intelligence too, including its measurement.

Current Models of the Mind

Recently, cognitive psychology has been influenced by still another view of the mind emerging from philosophy and appearing in biological and evolutionary psychology. This view stands in opposition to the work conducted by many prior investigators who considered the human mind as a unitary whole with continuously merging functions. But the idea of the mind as a general-purpose mechanism, operating in a fully unified fashion, now appears to be an oversimplification.

Piaget's conclusion about broad, universal shifts from one cognitive stage to another, for example, still remains generally useful, highlighting the fascinating stage of preoperational thought. But subsequent research shows that these shifts are not as broad or uniform as Piaget suggested. Instead, the child's cognitive development seems to emerge within more specific and separate domains of knowledge (Carey, 1990). And the cognitive activities of adults also reflect more specific, independent mental processes than previously thought.

Today, many contemporary psychologists no longer accept an all-purpose model of the human mind. For them, our mind is not a general-purpose problem solver, a unitary whole with enormous flexibility, engaging in the solution of diverse problems in all kinds of situations. They point out that the potential problems and settings are virtually infinite and potential outcomes too improbable (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This view of the mind as a single, awesomely flexible system is certainly popular with the public. But many cognitive psychologists today regard the human mind instead as a collection of distinct subsystems or modules, each called a domain-specific problem solver, each highly specialized to respond to a specific type of information in particular situations. For this reason, these subsystems, which are relatively independent of one another, are sometimes called content-specific problem solvers. The human mind may include some general-purpose subsystem, but overall it appears to be made up of a large number of idiosyncratic cognitive mechanisms that communicate with one another in a restricted fashion (Fodor, 1983).

Evidence for domain-specific cognitive modules appears in daily life. Someone observing a visual illusion

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remains subject to the misperception, even after it has been explained. Part of the mind, one cognitive module, continues to experience the illusion. Another part knows the truth. But that knowledge does not cause the illusion to disappear. The visual mind and the knowing mind function independently. In certain cases of brain injury, called blindsight, a patient claims to be completely blind in one section of the visual field and yet, without awareness, can make discriminations in that area. Case studies and laboratory manipulations of visual experiences have become popular means of demonstrating that conscious experience is not necessarily continuous with brain activities. We may not even be aware of much complex processing in the brain (Roser & Gazzaniga, 2004).

Incidentally, not all domain-specific modules are innate. Reading, for example, is acquired during a person's lifetime, and once learned, the reading response becomes impossible to suppress. We cannot avoid reading any known word we look at carefully. Moreover, these acquired modules need not be completely domain specific, and they may not even be hard-wired in specific brain areas. In fact, a specific psychological module does not necessarily emerge from a corresponding neural module. There may be no essential connections between cognitive and neural modularity (Flombaum, Santos, & Hauser, 2002).

The domain-specific problem solver probably is not a homogeneous mechanism but instead an assembly of numerous subsystems that, in aggregate fashion, can best account for our seemingly unlimited capacity for adaptation. These cognitive systems are content specific and substantially separate from one another (Fodor, 1983). As noted later, human mental life is sometimes described today as using parallel distributive processing because different sources of information about any one stimulus event—its color, sound, movement, and other features—are processed simultaneously in different brain areas. Thus, disparate pieces of information are manipulated in parallel, meaning at the same time, and in distributive fashion, meaning in diverse regions of the brain. Then these separate bits of information are integrated, creating everyday experience.

Thus, cognitive psychology seeks to understand the mind's design and arrangement of its parts, focusing on its functional organization. Biological psychology aims to understand the integration of the complexly organized brain structures or parts. The former is more mental, the latter more physical, and the integration of the two approaches currently indeterminable. As research continues, these different pathways of investigation should become increasingly interconnected.

One indispensable component of this integrated cognitive design would be a specification about how we store memories. Other components would involve how we integrate sensation and perception, how unconscious thought influences problem solving, and so forth. The complexity of human mental life suggests that we should view the whole domain in the plural, as cognitive structures or architectures (Estes, 1991).

In contrast to Piaget, modern cognitive psychologists have developed a strong commitment to formal experimental methods, made possible by electronic apparatus for presenting precisely controlled stimuli and recording highly specific responses. In this context, a modern computer serves as the model or metaphor for cognitive psychology. The parallel lies not with the electrical wiring and other hardware, which are comparable to brain anatomy, but with the computer program, the software, which is comparable in restricted ways to human mental processes.

The computer receives information through data entry; the human mind obtains information through the process of perception. In the computer, this information is stored by pressing the “save” key, or it is stored automatically. Psychologists and other scientists are still in the very early stages of discovering how information is stored in human memory. Finally, programs enable the computer to manipulate the incoming information, compare it with previously stored information, and use both sources of data to emit a response, thereby solving problems. In the human mind, this manipulation of incoming and stored information is called thinking.

In summary, the computer and human mind share three basic processes: the input of information—perception; its storage—memory; and its use—thinking. The concept of information processing expresses these shared functions, referring to the ways human beings obtain, retain, and use information. But these processes are interactive, each influencing the others. Their borders are arbitrary, roughly marking

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different phases of cognition.

The computer model has clearly advanced cognitive psychology. But inevitably it includes limitations. Most important, the human mind makes meanings. It has an extraordinary capacity for doing so, whereas the computer remains inept in making its own meanings. The human mind interprets information. It searches constantly for the significance and implications of events in daily life, just as Bertha's mind did in studying various articles in The Woman. The human mind creates its own explanations, thereby deepening and broadening itself in unpredictable ways.

Reading The Woman gave Bertha a new view of women's place in the world and what she might do about it. It literally expanded her mind. In addition, it championed an English editor of momentous importance for her. Mary Wollstonecraft, born exactly 100 years before Bertha, almost single-handedly began the modern English-language feminist movement in the Western world.

Both women possessed a strong will, enjoyed writing, challenged injustice, and struggled with gender bias throughout society. As the saying goes, they also came from opposite ends of the rope, especially with respect to social status. Mary came from the lower class, Bertha from the upper.

Owing to her sexual behavior, giving birth outside wedlock, and perhaps because of her feminism, the public regarded Mary Wollstonecraft as a corrupt woman. But the poet William Blake, a personal friend, remembered Mary differently, as a gifted, sensitive human being. In a touching eulogy, he lamented the public perception and saluted her memory, thinking of her as a lonely pioneer.

Sensation and Perception

These cognitive activities—perception, memory, and thinking—are ways of knowing about the world and are hardly separable from one another. But perception stands at the beginning of the cognitive sequence. It is sometimes called the gateway to knowledge, the portal of the mind.

The processes of organizing and interpreting incoming sensory information are collectively called perception. Through perception, we learn about ourselves and our surroundings, using contributions from two sources: the present environment and past experience. On this basis, psychologists make a distinction between sensation, which comes first, and then perception; they have overlapping meanings. In sensation, a person becomes aware of present stimulation; sensation provides raw, unorganized information about the immediate environment, directly from the sense organs. A person experiences, for example, loud and whispered tones and shadows and lights through receptors in the ears and eyes. In perception, she combines this incoming sensory information with past experience, making an interpretation. She realizes that some friends have just arrived for her surprise birthday party.

When sensation and perception are compared with one another, sensation is more biological, closer to the neural activities of our sense organs. Perception is more cognitive, closer to the mental processes in the human mind. But perception requires sensation in the first place, and sensory information, by itself, makes little sense until it is associated with previously acquired information, stored as memories, expectations, and the like.

In advancing the cognitive viewpoint in the mid-20th century, Jerome Bruner noted that studies of perception commonly took place in a darkened laboratory with a participant carefully instructed about accuracy. Yet experiences in anthropology and sociology led him to appreciate the extent to which personal, social, and cultural factors could influence perception. Perceptual experience emerges from external and internal sources; the physical properties of wavelengths and psychological expectancies both influence the observer.

The ignored internal factors became Bruner's concern. In the “New Look” in perception, he examined all sorts of influences on the perceiving organism, including stress, mood, and language. Observers, he pointed out, mold their perceptions in accordance with personal expectancies.

At the outset of this research, he confronted people with incongruous stimuli, at odds with daily experience

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and quite different from the usual laboratory tasks. Using a tachistoscope for rapid exposure of visual images, he asked 28 college students individually to report everything about each of five briefly exposed images of playing cards. Some cards were normal; others were deviant, with the color of the suit reversed. When first confronted with a red two of spades, for example, some participants responded with a disruptive comment: “I'll be damned if I know …” But the major reactions, “two of spades” or “two of hearts,” provided overwhelming evidence that perception is greatly determined by the observer's expectations.

In another instance, Bruner asked children from affluent and deprived backgrounds to manipulate an adjustable circle of light until it matched the sizes of various coins, ranging from pennies to half-dollars. As predicted, the children overestimated the size of the more valuable coins and underestimated the size of less valuable coins. And economically deprived children showed more value distortion than did the children from wealthy families (Bruner & Goodman, 1947). The children also showed greater distortion between a quarter and a nickel than between like-sized metal disks. Thus, even in the estimate of magnitude, presumably a simple matter of physical size, personal values confound judgment. This emphasis on personal and social needs and values became the cornerstone of the New Look, leading to more cognitively oriented studies of perception.

In other words, visual perception depends partly on what is in front of our eyes—the stimulus—and partly on what is behind our eyes—our memories and expectations about what we will see in the first place (Fernald, 1997). It emerges from both sources simultaneously.

Using current terms for these two sets of influences on perception, bottom-up processing starts with what is “out there,” noting the available features of a stimulus, such as its shape, brightness, and movement. In the visual realm, the responding neural cells are called feature detectors because they react only to a single, highly specific characteristic of a stimulus—an oval line, a particular hue, a certain angle. Countless visual features are recorded in this fashion, although little is known as yet about how they are combined. In perceiving Bertha Pappenheim, feature detectors would yield information on the arch of her eyebrow, the shadow across her face, and the shape of her mouth, all of which are part of the overall impression.

In top-down processing, perception begins with what is already “in there,” stored in memory, based on prior experience. It reflects the expectations an individual brings to a perceptual experience. In perceiving Bertha for the first time, some of this stored information would convey knowledge about people in general. Called a schema, this knowledge represents typical details about a particular stimulus or concept, specifying the usual conditions. In perception, it offers an overall framework or background of experience, including several integrated concepts; this framework is useful for perceiving something. A schema about people would include considerable information about the usual size and shape of their physical features, typical and atypical nonverbal behaviors, common range of vocalizations, and so forth. Schemas are efficient ways for the brain to store information. Top-down processing takes advantage of what the perceiver already knows about people, thereby facilitating the incorporation of bottom-up information about a particular individual. Other stored information would be more personal or temporary, as in William Blake's view of Mary Wollstonecraft as a friend and lonely pioneer.

Bottom-up processing starts with the stimulus, top-down with the perceiver. Our capacity for quick, accurate perception of complex events depends on both approaches (Figure 7.1).

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Figure 7.1 Information Processing in Perception. The solid circles and oval represent a plate, the dashed circles a plate in memory. That plate is round, but from an angle the sensation is an oval retinal image. And yet, with the contributions of memory and thinking, the plate is correctly perceived as circular. The combined influences of bottom-up and top-down processing create a perception that matches the object, despite the limited sensory impression

As noted earlier, human beings automatically engage in parallel distributive processing. They manipulate different pieces of information at the same time in different regions of the brain. In a flash, the human being can recognize a friend's voice, note that he is no longer wearing a beard, and resist the odor of his cigar. This experience involves bottom-up and top-down processing. Moreover, the separate bits of sensory information, detected by primarily inborn domain-specific cognitive mechanisms, are transmitted by different nerve pathways and reach different areas of the brain, where they are processed simultaneously. The sensory systems operate for the most part independently, but the sights, sounds, and odors of the same scene are relevant to one another, encoded as different aspects of the same experience. In short, separate but parallel processing permits human beings to perceive different dimensions of the same object without confusion among them (LeDoux, 2002).

Studies of word recognition support an interactive model of perception, combining up and down processes. They show that people recognize a given letter more readily when it is part of a word than when it is included in a non-word. The top-down context supplied by the word aids bottom-up processing of the letter. But how can word recognition facilitate recognition of the letter? Without letter recognition, the word would not have been perceived in the first place. This phenomenon, called the word-superiority effect, has prompted research and debate, and various explanations have been proposed (Balota & Cortese, 2000). The most common view is that neither bottom-up nor top-down processing need be complete before the other can commence. Various subprocesses could be operating simultaneously, provided that their outputs are continuously available to the other concurrent processes.

In summary, human information processing takes advantage of its multiple pathways. As more and more feature detectors become activated, the perceiver increasingly anticipates a certain outcome, and this anticipation facilitates the perception of further details. These processes are interactive, almost instantaneous, and occur automatically.

The great advantage of top-down processing lies in the efficiency it brings to bottom-up contributions. The perceiver need not start anew in each encounter with a person, object, or event. But a great disadvantage occurs whenever the perceiver has an incorrect expectation, producing a disruptive set.

Colloquially called a “mind set,” a set is a readiness to respond in a certain way regardless of the stimulation. It

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is a tendency to perceive a certain something or to perceive it in a certain fashion. The public was predisposed to perceive Mary Wollstonecraft in an unfavorable light. William Blake showed a readiness to perceive her differently. For anyone, it is almost impossible to approach a familiar scene from an entirely neutral standpoint.

Mary and Bertha shared a mental set about family life. One a promiscuous pauper, the other a celibate princess, they both viewed family life with intense dissatisfaction, especially the preferential treatment accorded boys. Mary twice became pregnant outside marriage; Bertha never became pregnant and never married at all. Both experienced unhappiness to the point of depression.

Mary's book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, became the opening salvo in the modern feminist movement. Impressed by this book, Bertha translated it into German, paying for its publication herself. That work launched her career as a feminist and, eventually, as the leader of the women's movement in Germany (Kaplan, 1984).

Processes in Memory

Bertha's fervor for feminism, like Mary's, arose initially from childhood experiences of favoritism toward her brother. Those early scenes, etched firmly into her memory, decades later played a major role in her dedication to “the cause.” She also recalled her high-daughter imprisonment in Vienna. In Frankfurt, those memories persisted, even while the environment helped her move constructively toward overt resistance.

This capacity for reviving prior experience, called memory, is not a single faculty. Among its many forms, the most fundamental include recall and recognition. In recall, a prior experience is reproduced without cues. Try to recall the face of your kindergarten teacher. In recognition, the details are available. From among several faces, can you select the face of your kindergarten teacher? A much easier memory task, recognition simply shows awareness of prior experience.

People use the term memory as a catch-all expression, but specialists in this area usually employ a modifier. Not a separate, unitary mechanism, memory involves diverse mental processes and all sorts of brain organs operating in different ways. Just which ones become involved and how they interact depend on the context evoking the memory (Mandler, 1985).

This position of course raises a fundamental question about the structure of memory. Do human beings possess a single, flexible memory system that includes different ways of processing different kinds of information? Or do they possess several separate memory systems, each designed to respond to different memory tasks? Either way, the concern lies with the cognitive design of memory, not the neural design of the brain (Balota & Cortese, 2000; Estes, 1991).

For decades, psychologists have studied this design in terms of three stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. But the first stage is not explicitly cognitive, for the incoming information has not yet reached the central nervous system.

Sensory and Short-Term Memory

For just a moment after experiencing any event, the peripheral nervous system contains a brief impression of that event. In this first stage of memory, known as reception, or sensory memory, the fleeting residual information from the senses remains in the sensory system; it has not faded away or been transferred to the central nervous system. Sometimes you can hear a remark made an instant earlier, although you were not conscious of that remark when it was uttered. This auditory residue is a form of sensory memory, called echoic memory, for it is “still in your ears.” Similarly, you can still feel a fly on your cheek for a moment after it has flown away, which is another sensory memory, haptic memory, referring to the sense of touch. The image of an exploding firework remains in your visual experience for an instant after the display—iconic memory. All these experiences show that some trace of the sensory input remains, very briefly, after the experience has been terminated.

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This unprocessed information will disappear without some prompt effort to retain it. For retention, it must pass to the second stage. Originally known as short-term memory, the second stage may continue up to 30 seconds following the event, during which the new information is being prepared for storage or it is being ignored. If not processed, it will be lost. In other words, short-term memory can serve as an organizing and loading platform for long-term memory storage.

A major advance in revealing the architecture of human memory, specifically short-term memory, occurred partly by chance. George Miller reluctantly presented his tentative research findings in a public setting, consoling himself by giving them a whimsical title, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (Miller, 1956). He impishly explained that he had been persecuted by this number for seven years, assaulted by it in the mass media, and bedeviled in his research. It assumed various disguises, sometimes a little larger, sometimes slightly smaller, but it never changed beyond recognition. Some design lay behind this number, he mused.

In research on perception and memory, Miller had noticed a common element: The maximum amount of information managed in a task at any one time was approximately seven items, whether the task involved the loudness of tones, intensities of taste, or brightness of visual displays. Using different tests, he found this same average limit of seven in the span of immediate memory. On these bases, it seemed that human beings have some rather specific limitations for the management of new information, built into them through learning or the structure of the nervous system. This suggestion of a fixed capacity for processing or retaining information gave many psychologists what they needed—a substantial platform for further study. The human mind had fixed, short-term limits for perceiving or remembering new information, usually around seven items but sometimes ranging from five to nine (Miller, 1956).

The concept of short-term memory has become popular among the public, but people seriously misunderstand it. They think it means the ability to remember events that occurred just a few minutes, hours, or even days earlier. But after any of those intervals, the experiences are stored in long-term memory, or they have never been remembered at all. During short-term memory—which lasts only a matter of seconds—information is being converted to long-term memory, or it disappears from awareness.

Miller's report still stands as a classic, but current investigators view its central message as most closely related to the principle of grouping, or “chunking,” considered as a means of increasing the short-term storage capacity. In fact, Miller was somewhat tentative about setting the specific limits as seven items, apparently doing so partly through coincidence, partly through a light-hearted effort to generate interest. Today, speculations about other fixed limits have drawn mixed reactions (Avons, Ward, & Russo, 2000; Bachelder, 2000; Cowan, 2000).

Is the storage, whatever its magnitude, a capacity-limited system, meaning that it only has space for a specific number of chunks of information? Or is it time-limited, meaning that it can remain available only for a certain interval while the individual rehearses new information? Or is it both? And what is a “chunk” of information? Neither Miller nor current investigators have provided a satisfactory answer to these questions (Beaman, 2000). The issue remains unsettled, although this research has clearly advanced our understanding of the organization of human memory.

With short-term memory increasingly understood as a prelude to storage, many psychologists began speaking instead of working memory, emphasizing not the brief interval but the numerous cognitive activities in progress. Some investigators use these terms interchangeably. Still others think of short-term memory as one of the components, or activities, of working memory. From the latter viewpoint, working memory serves both functions: as a system for holding and manipulating newly acquired information prior to its use and also for preparing that information for long-term storage (Baddeley, 1992). This viewpoint emphasizes that much of memory is an active process, not a passive state. In many respects, working memory is conscious thought—the time and place for doing mental work. To become conscious, information must come from perception or memory. In either case, it occupies the mind at that moment. Although working memory can apprehend only a very limited amount of information at any one time, in the course of a day it records, temporarily, the immense amounts of information that become our daily consciousness.

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Laboratory studies have confirmed that the limits in working memory are not determined solely by the amount of information but also by the ways we process it. Ask someone to read aloud slowly to you the following sequence of seven single-digit numbers. Afterward, try to repeat it: 7 2 9 3 4 8 1. Then use the same procedures with a list of seven random two-digit numbers. For most people the first list poses a challenge. The second presents an impossible task. What is the reason?

Our span for short-term or working memory depends not only on the number of items or chunks but also on the time it takes for rehearsal, that is, for saying to ourselves at least once the list we just heard. We can remember more single-digit than double-digit numbers because we can say more of them in a limited period. And we have a longer span when we say the numbers quickly rather than slowly. Various studies have demonstrated that our short-term capacity for repeating the list is limited to the amount of material we can repeat to ourselves in approximately two or three seconds. If rehearsal takes longer, the first part of the list will have faded from working memory before we can rehearse the end of the list. A similar limitation occurs in the visual realm (Baddeley, 1992; Baddeley, Thompson, & Buchanan, 1975).

In processing relatively simple information, working memory may use rote memory or rehearsal. More complex information requires more elaborate encoding, a term that emphasizes that the new experience must be thought about or transformed in some special way to be well remembered. This more textured encoding process involves at least three dimensions: organization, chunking, and cueing.

In organization, new information is arranged or rearranged in some systematic, sensible manner. Consider the following seven words: dog, buy, couple, floor, store, walk, groceries. One obvious way to enhance recall is to organize them into a story about a couple who walks to a store with their dog to buy groceries that spill on the floor. Consider another series: drink, festive, bar, cool, eating, ah, goodbyes. This memory task offers a story too. It also offers an alphabetical organization in which each word is a letter longer than its predecessor. The learner thereby knows the first letter and length of each word, which serve as alternative memory aids (Fernald, 1997). These examples are contrived, but they illustrate the need and value of imposing some meaningful organization on the material to be learned.

In laboratory research on organization, some participants are asked to remember long lists of words using free recall, meaning any convenient order. Others must remember the same lists using serial recall, which requires memorization in a particular sequence. Comparisons between the two groups show a surprising result. Serial recall, a seemingly more difficult task, produces better memory. The reason appears to lie with the minimal but specific organization required by serial learning (Earhard, 1967).

A second dimension of encoding concerns the amount of material to be memorized. If the prior lists were three or four times their current length, they would constitute a formidable task, exceeding the capacity of working memory. In chunking, items that are similar in some way are grouped together, producing fewer categories than the number of items in the full list. Then the chunks can be recalled one at a time, each including its own items, providing their number is appropriately limited. Otherwise, more chunks are required. For example, the prior lists include fourteen items altogether. They can be recalled by thinking of them in two chunks or groups, each with seven items or in two chunks with two subgroups each, none containing more than four or five items. In this way, all chunks become manageable.

In a third encoding dimension, called cueing, the learner finds or prepares some stimulus that serves as a signal or reminder for retrieving the stored memories. At one time or another, all of us have been at a loss for cues. We exclaim: “Oh, I know that! I just can't recall it right now.” The memory has no ready means for evoking it.

Retrieval cues involve stimuli relevant to any of the senses. One well-known example appears in Marcel Proust's passage about memories associated with a particular pastry. Even decades later, its odor and taste served as powerful cues for evoking vivid childhood memories of this early treat.

In other instances, the retrieval is even more automatic. An emotional experience produces a flashbulb memory, so called because the details are so completely etched in memory. Even without sensory cues, the memory is readily produced—though not necessarily with greater accuracy (Schmolck, Buffalo, & Squire,

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2000). At the height of their father's illness, Wilhelm shook Bertha vigorously because she was eavesdropping at the sickroom door. That sudden experience apparently produced a flashbulb memory for Bertha; she could not forget the details of Wilhelm's anger, her fear, and even what she was wearing at that time.

Simple repetition of the details, called rehearsal, also serves to extend the span of working memory. It is not considered encoding because the new information is simply repeated and practiced, without arranging it into some meaningful organization, creating chunks, or establishing retrieval cues. One of the most prominent reasons for so-called poor memory is the absence of careful encoding or rehearsal.

Memories in Long-Term Storage

Like perception, information comes into working memory from two directions: sensory memory and memory in long-term storage. In long-term memory, which has no known limit for capacity, information is maintained for indefinite intervals ranging up to the individual's full lifetime. Sometimes simply called storage, long-term memory is not an intermediate or processing stage. The information has been deposited in the memory system. It is memory in the usual sense of bygone experiences stored somewhere in the system. We are not conscious of long-term memory until seeking access to it. In contrast, working memory is a conscious process.

The question of different memory systems and processes emerges prominently in the study of long-term memory. Contemporary psychology has identified several varieties, and they differ from one another in the ways they are retrieved, as well as their content. Two conspicuous pairs have been labeled accordingly: explicit and implicit memory.

Explicit memory reflects our usual manner of thinking about how we retrieve a memory. When we search our memory storage, making a definite, controlled effort to retrieve an earlier experience, the outcome is called explicit memory. The retrieval process may be slow, sometimes halting and laborious. “Let's see. Where did I leave the key to the front door?” Other memories occur without any direct attempt at remembering. In implicit memory, we respond automatically and quickly, even without awareness of attempting retrieval. With a key in hand, you insert it into the lock without asking yourself: “Let's see now. What do I do with this object?” An implicit memory enters consciousness suddenly, just as Bertha, without intent, remembered Wilhelm shaking her at their father's door. In other words, explicit and implicit memory differ in the intent and effort expended in retrieving the stored experience.

Explicit memory is often viewed in two categories, specific and general. The former, called episodic memory, involves events—specific personal experiences, such as the weather yesterday, an embarrassing moment in biology class, your first kiss with an unrelated adult. You remember particular episodes. In contrast, memory for general facts and broad realms of information, not attached to any particular time or place or event, is called semantic memory. It is more diffuse, less tied to a specific context. Its extensive range includes the meanings of words, shapes of common objects, ways of nature, and so forth. Thus, episodic and semantic, the specific and general, are the two main categories of explicit memory.

Implicit memory includes conditioned responses, primed memories, and motor memories. As described earlier, a conditioned response arises through associative learning, the pairing of stimuli and responses. A primed memory occurs when some prior stimulus prompts or improves recall. For example, observing an old photo of someone not seen for many years increases the chances of recognizing that person in a crowd some days later. And finally, a motor memory is a physical behavior or sequence of behaviors performed automatically, without any substantial conscious effort, such as riding a bicycle, making a cup of coffee, and remembering how to access e-mail. Many motor skills are also known as kinesthetic memory, for they are based on movements of muscles and other body parts. Most people, years after their last time on a bicycle, ride successfully without directions or reminders about pedaling, braking, steering, and balancing. But we certainly do forget some skills, such as how to operate an old computer or execute a certain dance step learned years earlier. All these differences—within implicit memory, among the types of explicit memory, and between explicit and implicit memory—suggest that long-term memory is not a single, unitary capacity (Figure 7.2).

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Figure 7.2 Types of Long-Term Memory. These different memories are distinguished by the kinds of information involved and the most responsive areas of the brain. Generally speaking, explicit memories are located toward the front of the brain, implicit memories toward the back. Conditioned memories refer chiefly to classical conditioning; primed memories involve cues that prompt retrieval

Little is known about the limits of the long-term memory system, and investigators are just beginning to discover the most relevant brain areas. These include the cerebral cortex for association among memories, the hippocampus for the formation of new memories, and the cerebellum for the storage of well-practiced habits, especially the coordination of body movements.

An earlier description reported the case of H. M. who, in the 1950s, had his hippocampal regions removed to relieve epileptic seizures. The surgery ended the seizures but left this young man unable to create new, explicit memories. Living a confused life, he still possesses normal awareness of immediate stimulation but remains unable to recall events that have occurred even just a few moments earlier. One time a psychologist tested him for heat sensitivity by placing on H.M.'s forearms disks that were gradually heated to increasing temperatures. He tolerated unexpectedly high temperatures, and the psychologist pointed out the slightly discolored circles they left on the skin of anyone taking this test. But moments afterward, before the circles had faded away, H. M. walked to the nurses' station and asked why he had circles on his arms. Later, he ate a full meal and when a staff member offered him a second meal shortly thereafter, he consumed that meal as well (Hebben, 2005). Clearly, he had no memory of the test experience or his recent meals. Even the bodily conditions were insufficient to stimulate recall.

In several sessions some years ago, H. M. attempted to master a novel drawing task that required the use of a mirror and screen. Before every practice session, he declared that he had never encountered the task previously, which showed a deficiency in explicit memory. He could not remember the prior practice episode. On each occasion, the investigator had to explain the instructions and apparatus anew. But it is noteworthy that, apparently without searching his memory, H. M. performed with increasingly greater competence in each successive session, demonstrating implicit memory (Milner, 1965).

On these bases, forgetting becomes a complex issue. Should H. M. be charged with forgetting when he

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cannot retain something in the first place? Does forgetting occur as a result of defective working memory? Should someone be called forgetful after failing to attend to the original event?

Information that cannot be retrieved is said to involve forgetting. However, the failure may not be attributable to inadequate memory. People sometimes decide that they have a faulty memory for something when in fact that experience has never been fully encoded, or incorporated, in the first place.

It has been speculated instead that memories in storage gradually fade away, a view of forgetting called decay theory. The unused memory perhaps deteriorates through the continuous metabolic action of the nervous system, wearing away the memory trace. Yet the role of decay alone has not been demonstrated, chiefly because it is impossible to rule out other influences on forgetting.

According to interference theory, memories are lost because they are disrupted by other memories. The warehouse gets too full; memories interfere with one another. In one type, called proactive interference, earlier memories disrupt the storage or retrieval of later memories. Information previously in the warehouse somehow prevents access to more recent information. In another type, called retroactive interference, later memories disrupt the storage or retrieval of earlier memories. New information in the warehouse has been piled onto the old, apparently blocking access to that prior information. Extensive evidence supports both types of interference, which may involve failures in retaining or retrieving (Anderson & Neely, 1996).

One way to cope with retroactive interference is to avoid activity immediately after acquiring new information. After studying for an examination, rest and relaxation, and especially a good night's sleep, are the best prescription. In other words, do not engage in highly stimulating activities and certainly do not study for another exam. Retention following sleep is better than retention after the waking state (Dempster, 1988; Jenkins & Dallenbach, 1924).

Still another view of forgetting arises in psychoanalytic theory. In repression, also known as motivated forgetting, the memories allegedly remain in long-term storage, but the person does not want to be aware of them, which reflects a problem in retrieving. The necessary cues, no longer available, presumably become activated only in certain moments of therapy or other unusual circumstances.

Then, too, forgetting may occur through inadequate retrieval cues. Again, the memory remains in long-term storage, but there is no resistance to recall, as in motivated forgetting. Instead, the memory has not been sufficiently integrated into the vast network of associated concepts by which it might be recovered. Moreover, the immediate external cues are also insufficient. The problem here may be poor recording in the original circumstances.

When a memory cannot be retrieved, returning to the circumstances directly or vicariously may produce adequate cues. Visiting the original setting again can enhance recall, known as context-dependent memory. Also, adopting the mental or physical state one was experiencing when the events took place, even without returning to the scene, may improve recall, known as state-dependent memory (Bower, 1981; Godden & Baddeley, 1975). For Bertha, returning to Vienna, falling into another depression, or any other repetition of the original circumstances presumably would aid recall of those earlier days.

Modern psychology emphasizes memory as an active process, especially in encoding and retrieval. Human beings do not file away memories in some complete and static fashion, later to be automatically evoked in perfect detail by the proper cue. Under such conditions, our storage and retrieval systems would be clearly overloaded. Memories, instead, are fragments of past experience. We reconstruct them from bits and pieces. We assemble our memories, and the requisite mental processes can create distortions and even false memories.

Bertha's reconstructions brought forth early memories of her parents' preference for Wilhelm, her father's restrictions on her social life, and the scenes at his bedside. Some of these memories were distorted; others were incomplete. But the roots of her feminism lay in these recollections, suddenly given a focus through Mary Wollstonecraft's book.

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Prompted to write her own feminist literature, Bertha produced a three-act play called Women's Rights. Her language left no doubt about her views. Women deserved the opportunity to earn a reasonable wage, maintain property, and enter into legal contracts, all of which they were denied (Pappenheim, 1899). Her thinking was logical and dramatic, and she announced it with conviction.

Thinking and its accompaniments, especially language, constitute a major element of human cognition. They are the primary means for the transmission and evolution of culture.

Thought and Language

While Bruner and Miller continued their studies of perception and memory, Herb Simon had been thinking about thinking. He and Al Newell planned to teach something to a computer, using the instructions to the machine as a crude model of human thinking. For this new venture, chess seemed too complicated, so they chose instead to teach the machine to discover proofs in Newton's Principia Mathematica. They began with theorem 2.15, and when Simon wrote a long-hand proof in sufficient detail that it could be programmed into the computer, he celebrated that moment as the birthday of problem solving by computer, calling this program the Logic Theorist (Simon, 1980).

Later, combining the Logic Theorist with other programs, Simon and his colleagues developed the General Problem Solver, a more versatile program that considered each problem in terms of a current state and goal. For someone traveling from a certain place in one city to a certain place in another, for example, the place of origin represented the current state and the next immediate destination represented the goal or subgoal. The number of miles between the two points represented the difference between them. By considering the distance and options, the computer could decide at each current state whether to walk, ride a train, or take an airplane. For traveling from Boston to San Francisco, a distance longer than 500 miles, the computer would dictate taking an airplane. But first, for the 15 miles to Logan Airport, it would recommend the train. And to reach the train station, less than a mile from home, it would suggest walking. Using this means-end analysis repeatedly, performed at each stage on the basis of solutions at prior stages, the General Problem Solver eliminated the difference between the current state and next goal, eventually solving the problem (Fernald & Fernald, 1985).

After the success of the General Problem Solver, Simon and his colleagues programmed the psychological foundations for thinking, called the Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer. It provided the basis for a theory about rote verbal learning, thinking, and problem solving in human beings.

Components in Thinking

A general term for the representation and manipulation of information, thinking includes almost the full span of mental activities. It ranges from fantasy to high-level problem solving. Rarely used without a modifier, it includes analytical thinking, which is separating a whole into its basic components, and synthetic thinking, which proceeds in the opposite direction, developing a whole from diverse parts. It includes convergent thinking, aimed at discovering a central idea or single answer to a problem, and divergent thinking, which produces several different answers to the same problem (Sternberg, 2000). Except for immediate sensation, thinking depends on memory.

But what do we manipulate in thinking? To a large extent we manipulate concepts. A concept designates a category or a general idea about something; it considers a group of objects or events as equivalent in some respect, for they possess a common property. Many words express concepts. The word book expresses a concept; it refers to sheets of printed pages bound together. A textbook, novel, and biography are subclasses of a book; each of them also represents a concept. Thinking is based on concepts that, in turn, are acquired through thinking.

The words Principia Mathematica, meaning Newton's book, refer to that particular object; therefore, they are not a concept. The words Logic Theorist do not designate a concept, for they too refer to a particular object, event, person, place, or other specific instance.

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In effective thought, concepts must be organized in some meaningful fashion, often expressed in a proposition, which is a statement or declaration. Thinking in the propositional mode uses words and makes a statement; it proposes or asserts something in words. As symbols, these words typically do not resemble their referents; they do not appear like whatever they represent.

In contrast, images have the appearance of their referents. A visual image of a book looks like a book; an auditory image of a song sounds like that song, and so forth for gustatory, kinesthetic, and other sensory modalities. Even without immediate sensory experience, some images may be quite vivid. Thus, thinking in the imaginal mode involves the mental manipulation of physical likenesses of some things that were previously experienced. Mental images can express concepts, and as reflections of previous experience, they play a vital role in memory.

These two modes, propositional and imaginal, are viewed as independent but connected systems for expressing concepts and representing and processing other information (Katz, 2000). Relying on words and perceptual experience, they appear throughout human cognition (Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 Components in Human Thinking. The solid, two-headed arrow indicates that human beings think with concepts and develop concepts by thinking. Words and images express concepts, embedded in the propositional and imaginable modes. The dashed, two-headed arrow shows that the relationship between these parallel modes remains unclear, awaiting further research

Approaches to Problem Solving

When computers are employed for the type of thinking called problem solving, such as assisting in medical diagnosis, this use is called artificial intelligence. The aim is not to enable computers to perform in a human- like manner but simply to produce efficient solutions to human problems.

As noted in the work of Herb Simon, psychologists and others also use computers to study the problem- solving process, a procedure called computer simulation or computer modeling. The computer and its programs are constructed to represent elements of human thinking, including the relationships of parts to one another and to the whole. This simulation occurs without any effort to represent brain physiology or anatomy. In other words, computer simulation requires investigators to develop hypotheses about human thinking, and

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it provides opportunities for testing of those hypotheses.

As the pioneering effort in computer simulation, the Logic Theorist eventually produced proofs for three- fourths of the theorems in Principia Mathematica. Most importantly it did so without considering every possible alternative at each step. An exhaustive search of that sort, using an algorithm, would have required more than a hundred years (Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958).

An explicit set of directions for solving a specific problem, an algorithm is completely unambiguous—a finite number of steps indicating exactly what to do at any point. It provides a guaranteed solution, whether the problem involves calculating the average salary of social workers, making a cake, or setting up high-tech electronic equipment. An algorithm for the salaries might begin as follows: (1) Place all the numbers in a column, one below another, except for the first number. (2) Justify all the numbers against a right-hand margin. (3) Draw a horizontal line below those numbers. (4) Call the digits in the extreme right column the current column. (5) Add all digits in the current column. (6) If the sum is less than 10, record that sum below the line under the current column. (7) If the sum is greater than 10, record the … (Carberry, Khalil, Leathrum, & Levy, 1979).

Computers in artificial intelligence commonly employ algorithms to check spelling, complete a memory search, and play certain games. But to solve some problems they may require tremendous amounts of time. Experts calculate, for example, that the many possible moves in a chess game would take the fastest computer decades to consider. Algorithms are most useful with a limited number of alternatives.

Human beings use algorithms in some situations. A man searching for a lost earring may walk back and forth in the grass, from end to end, each trip just beyond the unexplored edge of the prior one. Providing he looks carefully and has lost the earring in that grass, he is employing an algorithmic-type strategy, assuring a successful solution to the problem. But instructions for everyday tasks are not prepared as algorithms; human beings typically think in faster ways.

These faster ways are called heuristics. A heuristic is a speculative guide, rule of thumb, or shortcut for solving a problem, often increasing efficiency but providing no guaranteed solution. It offers an approach likely to yield a prompt solution, as opposed to a tedious search of all possibilities. The crowning achievement of the Logic Theorist was its successful use of heuristics, providing the proofs in a much shorter time.

In daily life, people commonly begin with some readily available heuristic, the most convenient strategy. Or they use the most promising strategy. The man who lost an earring would not start a systematic search at one edge of a yard. He would look immediately in the place where he thinks he lost it. Then he might search in the shortest grass or places near the walkway. Without heuristics, human beings would take forever accomplishing the tasks in daily living. Instead, they become selective, using all sorts of heuristics, ranging from working with probabilities to establishing subgoals for complex problems.

Investigators have studied heuristics in all sorts of problem solving. They have focused on the constraints in problem solving, valid and invalid conclusions, gains and losses in group decision making, and unsuccessful heuristics (Holyoak & Spellman, 1993; Kerr & Tindale, 2004). In virtually all such studies, two forms of thinking appear: inductive and deductive reasoning. And they are readily evident throughout daily life.

For example, to promote her new book, Women's Rights, Bertha remained undecided how to acknowledge her authorship. In reaching a decision, she probably used both these forms of reasoning. People everywhere use them in rapid, mixed ways without even thinking about them. In many respects, they represent Piaget's formal operations, for they involve abstract thinking.

The process of inductive reasoning proceeds from particular facts to a general conclusion that may explain something about those facts. But it does not yield a logically certain conclusion. It produces one or several well-founded, fairly probable conclusions (Sternberg, 2000).

In Bertha's time, almost all books were authored by men. Men had more credibility as authors. At this early stage of feminist thought, a feminist book by a female author would seem self-serving. Using these facts,

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Bertha could never be certain which choice would be best: publishing her work anonymously, employing a pseudonym, or using her own name. Through inductive reasoning, she could only generate possibilities and choose among them. Eventually, she decided to use a pseudonym.

In selecting a particular pseudonym, a deductive approach would prove useful. The process of deductive reasoning begins with some general statements or premises and tests a specific instance. If the premises are sound and the thinking is logical, deductive reasoning leads to a valid, specific conclusion. It shows whether a certain decision is warranted, based on the premises. If the premises are wrong, the conclusion may be logically valid, but it will be incorrect (Sternberg, 2000).

Bertha wanted subtle evidence that the book was her work. The pseudonym should give her disguised credit. Thus, a deductive approach might take this form:

A good pseudonym will suggest my name.

P. Berthold suggests my name.

Hence, P. Berthold will be a good pseudonym.

This pseudonym uses Bertha's initials in reverse order, giving her subtle credit. This sequence is sometimes called a syllogism, a formal type of reasoning in which a specific instance is deduced from two or more premises. People in daily life do not construct formal syllogisms—a practice left largely to logicians—but they regularly employ deductive reasoning in this way, however attenuated.

A good pseudonym would also suggest male authorship. Further deductive reasoning might proceed along these lines:

A good pseudonym will seem like a man's name.

P. Berthold seems like a man's name.

Hence, P. Berthold will be a good pseudonym.

Berthold is a masculine version of her first name, suggesting male authorship. Whatever her reasoning, Bertha chose this pseudonym.

In daily life, people employ combinations of inductive and deductive reasoning easily and regularly without thinking about their thinking. But they also make mistakes.

Errors in inductive reasoning occur because people do not check the facts carefully. Instead, they search for facts that bolster their beliefs about the best solution. This tendency to seek support for our beliefs and to ignore contrary evidence is so widespread, even among scientists, that it is called the confirmation bias. Well aware of this bias, Charles Darwin made a point of jotting down immediately any observation that failed to confirm his views. Observations endorsing them needed no special attention.

Errors in deductive reasoning occur on a different basis. Bertha strongly believed that social workers should be underpaid. The lower salary would remind them that they were pursuing a calling—like physicians, ministers, and educators—rather than holding a job. She reasoned this way:

High salaries do not attract altruistic people.

Good social workers must be altruistic.

Hence, good social workers will not be attracted by high salaries.

But the conclusion does not follow. Both premises are incorrect. They are stated too broadly, which is often the error in deductive reasoning. High salaries may attract some altruistic people. And some good social workers

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may not be altruistic. Many physicians, educators, and others today show these exceptions.

In fact, Bertha herself proved an exception. Her daily life as a social worker displayed bedrock altruism; her evenings offered privilege and gentility in the style of Old Vienna.

Language: Symbols of Thought

In earlier days, Bertha captured Breuer's interest through her storytelling, aptly calling it “chimney sweeping”—cleaning the dark places in her life. In her darkest hours, she coined an expression that Breuer found most compelling, one still widely used to refer to all forms of psychotherapy today: “the talking cure.” Offering enrichment sessions for children from The Home, she honored her little visitors with a special title, “Tuesday Guests.” Throughout her career, she used language skillfully, and language of course aids problem solving.

At a more basic level, language aids thought. These two processes develop and function together. For some psychologists, they are inseparable. In fact, language is sometimes described as overt thought. A true language is a system for manipulating symbols of thought, providing an infinite number of meanings and messages, punctuated in written and oral form with stylistic devices.

The basic elements of language are three: phonemes, morphemes, and syntax. A phoneme is the smallest functional unit of sound in a language. English has 26 letters, but the pronunciation of some of them, together with certain pairs of letters, produces 40 basic sound units in our language. Composed of one or more phonemes, a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. The work speak is a morpheme. The word speaking includes two morphemes—the verb and the gerundive ing, which acquires its meaning in conjunction with the verb. And finally, syntax is the set of rules for organizing various units—words, clauses, sentences—within a language.

Infants know nothing of morphemes and syntax, and they hear phonemes as a stream of unintelligible sounds. How do they break up this speech? How do they begin to make use of it?

This question in fact became a pivotal point in support of emerging cognitive psychology. Linguists viewed grammar, syntax, and other language structures as too complex to be acquired solely through reinforcement. Especially when applied infrequently and irregularly, reinforcement cannot produce the exquisite capacity for language demonstrated by normal people. A major confrontation with behaviorism occurred when Noam Chomsky, a linguist, reviewed B. F. Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior (1957), written from the viewpoint of nurture, describing how language is used. Chomsky's review, from the standpoint of nature, described how language is acquired (Chomsky, 1959). Pointing to the indisputable contributions of the organism, he and other linguists thereby earned themselves a solid place in the cognitive revolution.

These contributions become manifest in the phenomenal speed with which very young children master language, the major instrument for human communication. They do so readily because at birth they are “wired” for acquiring the rules for using phonemes and morphemes and for creating appropriate syntax. Observing the similarity of languages throughout the world, even in nonessential ways, linguists speculated about a universal grammar, an inborn tendency for language acquisition that enables the enormous flexibility of our thought and expression (Chomsky, 1959).

In addition to the speed of language learning, behaviorism also did not account well for the child's steady progress and predictable errors in language mastery. Abundant evidence has shown that all normal children proceed through essentially the same stages in the acquisition of language, progressing from cooing and babbling in infancy to word recognition and naming by the end of the first year. During the second year, words appear in combinations, accompanied by typical errors. Later still, sentences progress from simple to complex. Eventually, the child uses basically correct syntax and considerably longer sentences, though improvements continue for years (Fernald, 1997).

Between the ages of two and six years, most children increase their vocabularies by approximately 10 words per day, reaching more than 10,000 words, and this process continues at a slower rate well into adulthood.

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The larger vocabulary offers much greater potential for expressing thoughts. But does language shape our thinking?

An early study of the Inuit, living constantly in snow, indicated that they had many more words for snow than did people living in the upper Mississippi Valley and that Aztecs, in their hot climate, used only one word to speak of ice and snow (Whorf, 1956). This particular research has been called into question, but it brought forth the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, stating that language determines thought. Later studies of the Dani, in New Guinea, showed that they had only two words for colors, one representing warm colors and the other cold colors. But when tested for color recognition and color matching, they performed as well as speakers of English, who use almost a dozen basic words for different colors (Rosch, 1973). The hypothesis holds only to a limited degree; it is stated too strongly (Pullum, 1991).

Language does not determine thought, although it certainly shapes and influences it. This influence is readily evident when you learn new words, such as gestalt and morpheme, enabling you to think about things differently or more precisely. Studies have shown, for example, that people would rather pay taxes to “halt rising crime” than for “law enforcement,” although the funds go to the same places. And they are more favorably inclined toward “assistance to the poor” than toward “welfare” (Rasinski, 1989). The descriptive phrases have more appeal than the labels. People also prefer to support an endeavor with an 80% chance of success rather than one with a 20% chance of failure (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984). From the commercial world to social activism, people invent euphemistic expressions to induce favorable thoughts about their enterprises. A simple example appears in the abortion issue: “Pro Choice” and “Pro Life.”

In Bertha's day, the influence of language on thought became readily evident in the “woman question,” as the feminist movement was sometimes called. Moreover, all women were believed best suited for careers in the “maternal professions,” such as teaching and nursing. That language would offend both genders today. Language indeed influences thought, as testified by our efforts to degender English.

The expression “high daughters” ridiculed the upper-class young women in Bertha's Vienna. She knew of this derision, just as she knew about the “maternal professions,” career pathways that seemed far beyond her capabilities during her early illness. At that time, her prospects for a satisfying home life appeared dismal too, based on her sharp opposition to marriage and conventional family life.

Had she stayed in Vienna, she might have remained sick and distressed much of her life, plagued by a spectrum of disorders. If she then came to cognitive therapy, especially after the humanistic approach, she would have been in for a rude surprise.

The Cognitive Therapies

The major humanistic and cognitive therapies are distinctly different; in fact, they are opposed, for they begin with very different assumptions. In the humanistic, person-centered approach, therapists assume that patients know best, and they follow the patients' lead. In cognitive therapy, therapists assume that they, the experts, know best and request the patient to follow their instructions explicitly.

At the time of her father's illness, Bertha wore golden handcuffs. Her resentment of this status and the demands of her nightly nursing drove her into bed. She broke down, exhausted by too much work, the lack of career opportunities, and constant worry. But despite her effort, a modern cognitive therapist would have challenged her, perhaps even criticized her for her predicament. She brought it on herself through irrational thinking.

Research in cognitive psychology has focused mostly on memory, but cognitive therapy emphasizes thinking. In fact, cognitive therapy has relatively little to do with memory or perception, and its concern with thinking lies largely in faulty reasoning. Cognitive therapy owes almost nothing to research in cognitive psychology. It arose out of practical concerns for a quick, inexpensive treatment.

The therapist plays a dominant role in cognitive therapy, which assists people with personal problems by helping them change their ideas about themselves and the world. In this respect, most cognitive therapy

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stands in sharp contrast to person-centered therapy. The cognitive therapist, with greater experience than the patient in dealing with adjustment problems, takes charge of the sessions. The person-centered therapist allows the person in therapy to determine its course.

With its focus on conscious thought, cognitive therapy also stands in contrast to psychoanalysis. Cognitive therapy makes the assumption that adjustment problems begin with irrational thinking, which eventually leads to emotional disorder. Psychoanalysis reasons the other way around. Emotional disorder causes irrational thinking.

On these bases, treatment sessions in cognitive therapy proceed differently from those in person-centered therapy and psychoanalysis. The therapist is more active, changing the patient's conscious thought through instruction, persuasion, guidance, and homework assignments. The process is somewhat like traditional education or medical practice in Breuer's time. The therapist gives advice and the patient listens. Breuer, working the other way around, was an exception to that rule.

At the outset of cognitive therapy, Bertha might discuss “safe” topics, such as riding horseback and collecting antiques. But the cognitive therapist would not hesitate to identify instances of irrational thought and direct her attention to them. If she skirted certain topics, the therapist would call attention to them too, asking about her mother, her sex life, and gender issues, which are far easier to consider today than in Bertha's era. The emphasis would focus largely on clarification of thought and less on clarification of feelings—as in person- centered therapy.

One concern surely would be the nursing stint she undertook for her sick father. Vienna in that day, perhaps the most sophisticated city in Europe, boasted advanced medical practices and a corps of medical personnel available for in-home care. If the family employed a nightly caretaker, which was a normal practice for affluent families, Bertha could have been uniquely helpful by entertaining and supporting her father during the day (Noshpitz, 1984). Instead, she nursed all night, while he slept, and then slept herself during his waking hours.

Why did Bertha wear herself out so needlessly? Why did she take on this burdensome task at all? Why did she not cherish her father's waking moments? The cognitive therapist would ask such questions and seek rational answers.

Cognitive therapists assume that they, not their patients, are the best people to guide the therapeutic process. They ask questions and then offer advice just like lawyers, financiers, physicians, and other consultants.

Rational-Emotive Therapy

One cognitive approach, rational-emotive behavior therapy, states that emotional problems can be alleviated by identifying the irrational thoughts behind them, correcting these thoughts, and then practicing the new ways of thinking. In this method, traditionally known as rational-emotive therapy, the therapist offers advice in a very direct fashion, contradicting and even attacking the patient's irrational ideas, seeking the rigorous application of the rules of logic. The therapist becomes an instructor, challenging and encouraging the patient to develop straight thinking in everyday life (Ellis, 1999).

Sooner or later, the therapist teaches the patient the ABCs of better living. The ABC technique requires the patient to focus on three elements: A, the activating event; C, the consequences; and especially B, the patient's belief about the activating event. When B, the belief, includes irrational thinking, it produces C, the undesirable emotional consequences (Ellis, 1991).

In discussing Bertha's role in her father's illness, the rational-emotive therapist would ask her about B, her silent sentence. She might resist, claiming she said nothing to herself. But the therapist would insist, pointing out that she told herself something when her father became ill—something to the effect that she alone should be the nighttime caretaker. Only she would be adequate to the task. Or she told herself a different irrational thought—that she would be an irresponsible, ungrateful daughter if she did not take on this responsibility. In any case, Bertha said something to herself that eventually contributed significantly to her emotional disorder. The critical factor, according to the ABC technique, was B—whatever she believed and told herself about her

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father's illness. Without B, then C would not have occurred.

Bertha's father fell ill, the activating event, A. Bertha suffered dire emotional consequences, C. But she did so because of her belief, B. She told herself something like, “I must nurse him nightly.” “Only I can do it.” “It would be terrible for me to ignore this responsibility.” Those beliefs were irrational.

Irrational thinking contributed to another problem for Bertha. Again, a silent sentence lay at its roots.

At age 21, she had passed through puberty, a major transition in the life cycle, giving her a new body with its sexual characteristics. Physically, she possessed a feminine identity, but psychologically she showed no such signs (Noshpitz, 1984). She had not accepted her adult sexuality. The rational-emotive therapist would inquire directly about this failure. What did she say to herself about sex? What was B, Bertha's belief?

“Nice girls do not have sexual fantasies.” “Sex is bad.” “I should not be thinking about sex.” Irrational statements of this sort certainly would have delayed the social and emotional dimensions of her sexual development, contributing to adjustment disorders. The rational-emotive therapist would vigorously attack this illogical thinking and supply missing information.

In positive psychology, incidentally, a person simply seeking greater fulfillment in life presumably has no therapist. Therefore, instead of imagining what her therapist might say, she imagines someone she knows well making frank but friendly comments about her maladaptive thoughts. In this way, she moves herself through the traditional stages: A representing the activating event or adversity, B the belief, and C the consequences. Then, in D, she engages in disputation, disagreeing with her own irrational beliefs as vigorously as possible. Finally, E, for energization, draws her attention to the increased energy she feels after successful disputation. In this ABCDE way, a person may change her dejection into more cheerful ways (Seligman, 2002).

Therapy for Depression

In a more collaborative approach, cognitive therapy for depression, the therapist acts less as a critic and more as a colleague and collaborator, helping people discover the negative things they say about themselves, their world, and their future. In particular, the focus is on their negative views of themselves (Beck, 1991).

The therapist provides this assistance by using the Socratic method, a question-and-answer dialogue, which moves gradually toward a new understanding, one step at a time. Guided by the therapist, the patient makes her own discoveries about her susceptibility to the major modes of maladaptive thinking. In these categories of maladaptive thinking, people tend to distort information about themselves and their world through selective attention, overgeneralizing, and polarized thinking.

In the first category, selective attention, the depressed person thinks only about the negative aspects of her life. She ignores the positive, disconfirming factors—the confirmation bias again. In the second category, overgeneralizing, she extends negative thinking beyond reasonable limits. She applies some small negative detail to all or most of her life, making it overly important. And in polarized thinking, the third category, she interprets events only in terms of extremes. A mildly negative event becomes an awful event, a ghastly outcome. In all three instances, the individual overreacts to a negative circumstance (Beck, 1991).

The illness of Bertha's father certainly was a negative event, and she became depressed, unable to eat, talk, or even leave her bed. In cognitive therapy for depression, she would be encouraged to understand that she was overreacting even to this catastrophe. To combat her selective attention, the therapist would ask her to enumerate any favorable circumstances in her life. There were many. The family lived in a most comfortable home. Her father had the very best care. They could afford round-the-clock nursing. Friends offered support. To discourage overgeneralizing, the therapist might help her realize that her father's illness did not extend to all phases of her life—to riding horseback, dancing, collecting antiques, and so forth. And the therapist would try to dissuade her from polarized thinking by encouraging her to look between the extremes, noting that her father was not in great pain and that they had shared many good times.

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Examining maladaptive thinking in these ways, the patient is often surprised by the extent of her negative statements and by the lack of substantial support for them. The patient finds herself engaged in self-pity.

Then, too, Bertha had recently passed through adolescence, often a turbulent stage marking the transition from childhood to maturity. She found herself with a different body, new thoughts, and unexpected feelings. Such changes can contribute to an identity crisis, in which adolescents and young adults experience uncertainty and confusion about their places in society. The capacity for abstract thought reaches a new level in adolescence, evident in rebellious ideas about parents and schools, religion and society, politics and business. New causes are sought, new goals adopted. At the same time, the young adult has a special potential to be inspired and fulfilled (Noshpitz, 1984).

Despite her youthful potential, lively and talented Bertha found no outlet. Her irrational thinking was partly a developmental problem, reflecting identity issues. It was also a cultural problem; she resisted the golden handcuffs. And it was a family problem. After the deaths of her sisters, she had become a replacement child, clearly overprotected by her family (Bloch, 1984).

But in one important respect, her thinking was not irrational at all. Her thoughts on gender discrimination were well in advance of her culture, at least by today's standards. The effective cognitive therapist would not try to dissuade her from these viewpoints. Rather, he would assist her in living productively within these social constraints, constructively resisting and changing some while temporarily accepting others.

In doing so, he would use a procedure shared by rational-emotive and cognitive therapy for depression. Rational-emotive therapy becomes direct and demanding; cognitive therapy for depression offers a gentler exploration of irrational thought. But both therapies encourage reframing, also called cognitive restructuring. In reframing, the individual thinks about her circumstances differently, viewing them in a more positive, constructive manner. Both therapies imply that human beings control their own destiny through reason and judgment, and both require the patient to practice reframing in homework assignments—learning to detect silent sentences, avoid self-critical statements, and foster rational thought.

Bertha never experienced any form of cognitive therapy, but eventually she reframed her problem anyway, thinking about it differently. She perceived gender discrimination not as her prison but as her challenge. With this outlook and her struggles for reform, she found her calling.

According to cognitive therapy, Josef Breuer did not terminate the sessions too soon. Rather, he went about them the wrong way. If he had entered more directly and focused more precisely on Bertha's thinking, he could have helped her eliminate her irrationality about family responsibilities and nursing obligations. At the same time, he could have helped her understand that her ideas about gender discrimination were reasonable and rational and that, in this respect, she was living in an irrational society.

Advocating rationalism for alleviating disruptive behavior, cognitive therapy succeeds partly through empiricism. The therapist confronts people with factual evidence that contradicts their disruptive beliefs. Those in therapy encounter this evidence directly, through various homework assignments, and indirectly, in conversations with the therapist. In this way, they are helped to discover, test, and alter their maladaptive cognitive styles.

Commentary and Critique

Among all the perspectives, people view cognitive psychology as the most open and least restrictive. Protesting behaviorism's focus on topics outside the mind, it gathered supporters with all sorts of backgrounds in psychology, including those who resisted behaviorism and those who simply wanted to study the mind in one way or another. Many were prominent and creative in their goals, but no single, unifying leadership emerged. The revolutionary “army” was too scattered, the research interests too disparate.

During the early years, the bonds among the primary figures were strongest. Some leading experts—Bruner, Miller, and Simon, for example—united for a time. But after the revolution, cognitive psychologists tended to go their separate ways.

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For this reason, cognitive psychology has not yet promoted a highly integrative central concept, meaning some specific thought, idea, or notion essential and unique to a given perspective, providing a special focus for research. Information processing, the most widely cited core concept, is virtually synonymous with cognitive psychology. Broadly inclusive, information processing does not stimulate research in a particular direction; it does not create a focus comparable to unconscious motivation in psychoanalysis, the reinforcement principle in behaviorism, or the modularity doctrine in biological psychology. In fact, information processing carries much the same meaning as “the mind,” referring in a general way to all mental activities—an enormous sweep of topics in psychology. Increased focus may be forthcoming, perhaps through combined efforts with other perspectives, especially biological and evolutionary psychology. But a huge advantage of this less restrictive approach lies in the latitude it offers for the many interdisciplinary studies, which presumably will become even more vigorous in the future.

Moreover, cognitive psychology did gain focus when it adopted the computer metaphor, depicting the ways people process information. In a metaphor, one object or event suggests a similarity with another; knowing the former assists in understanding the latter. The computer model represented a substantial gain over the earlier flow charts, which used arrows and geometric figures to diagram the speculated flow of information in our mental life. Again, the parallel lies not with the computer hardware and anatomy of the brain but with the software and human information processing. But even so, critics call attention to the limits of the computer model. The human mind does not operate just like a computer. It responds more slowly and makes errors. With proper input, the computer responds rapidly and correctly. The human mind responds emotionally, which contributes to its errors; the computer has no feelings at all. In addition to these issues of speed and accuracy, both in favor of the computer, two major difficulties remain with the computer model.

First and foremost, the computer passively awaits input from the outside world. It does not actively seek information. In contrast, the human mind is a vigilant system, almost constantly gathering information about the world, about itself, and about the body it inhabits (Mandler, 1985). It aims to understand the objects and events impinging on its sensory apparatus, thereby enlarging its own capacities.

Second, the computer model largely ignores meaning-making—a cardinal capacity of the human mind, an outgrowth of its vigilance. Episodes of meaning-making constantly infuse daily life—through street talk, myths, magic, media, and countless other verbal and nonverbal ways (Donald, 1997; Pasqual-Leone, 1997).

In adopting the computer model, focusing on how we process information, cognitive psychology gained precision—and moved toward a mechanical reductionism. It examined narrower questions with increased controls. Had it elected instead to study how human beings make meanings, something the computer cannot do, cognitive psychology might have become broader, less reductionistic, and more relevant to everyday life (Bruner, 1990). But thereby it would have forfeited precision, a considerable loss.

An early leader in cognitive psychology, Jerome Bruner in particular has noted the limitations of the computer model for investigating the ways people construct meanings in their lives. Emphasizing systematic, logical thinking in the laboratory, the computer model often overlooks our freer, more imaginative, more personal, and more emotional ways of knowing our world. As co-founder of the first laboratory of cognitive psychology, Bruner believes that human beings make their lives meaningful largely through storytelling. We tell stories in school, while waiting for the bus, beside the water fountain, in the kitchen, everywhere in daily life. The human mind is a pattern-making, pattern-recognizing system. We develop many of these patterns by telling stories. Accordingly, a narrative metaphor might prove lucrative for cognitive psychology, bringing culture further into this research (Bruner, 1990).

In this context, a sustained criticism of cognitive psychology concerns the relatively little attention it devotes to the complex emotional factors in human thinking. These factors play a major role in cultural experience and in our self-narratives. Respected research has revealed the human mind as more emotional and less rational than typically viewed in lay and even psychological thought (LeDoux, 2002; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

Extensive use of laboratory experiments in the study of information processing has prompted the related problem of external validity. This issue is also loosely called generalizability, and indeed the two terms are almost synonymous. But generalization is often used in a nonspecific fashion, simply questioning whether

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certain research results apply in the everyday world.

With a more specific meaning, external validity assesses the extent to which the results from a specific investigation correctly reveal relationships among variables in some particular real-life setting, outside the research context. It does so by focusing on elements of the research design: the participants, setting, manipulations, observations, and so forth. For example, are laboratory findings obtained with a particular sample of college students applicable to certain college students elsewhere or to participants of other ages in other settings? Laboratory research in cognitive psychology confronts this question, as it does in the other perspectives as well.

Laboratory studies on memory, for example, employ students in controlled settings sometimes responding to unusual tasks that have no obvious meaning in their everyday lives. Does such research shed light on the cognitive capacities required of human beings in their highly complex daily environments, further complicated by diverse emotional factors? The issue of external validity becomes a special concern in laboratory studies.

Cognitive psychologists have accomplished important research with diverse methods, including naturalistic observation, case studies, and the survey. But the balance favors laboratory experiments, which can provide information not otherwise obtainable.

For example, using electronic laboratory equipment unavailable to Piaget, modern investigators have studied mental activities in infants too young even to reach successfully for an object. Rather than hiding a toy in the living room, they present the infant with detailed visual scenes, measure the infant's eye movements, and detect minute patterns of bodily activity. They examine the baby's eyes as a window into its mind, asking the speechless infant: “Can you make any sense out of this scene?”

In one series of experiments, 24 four-month-old infants observed a rolling ball on several occasions. After losing interest in this image, they were shown two follow-up scenes. In one, the ball rolled into a barrier and stopped. In the other, it somehow rolled through the barrier. Measures of gaze showed that the infants studied the impossible event significantly longer than the natural one, supporting the view that the perceptual experience of infants is more coherent than Piaget concluded (Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992).

Speaking broadly, these follow-up studies suggest that Piaget underestimated the capacity of infants in the sensorimotor stage and of children in preoperational thought. At the other end of the sequence, he overestimated adult progress into formal operations. Much of the former error lay with his homespun methods. Much of the latter occurred because he studied only Europeans, and culture clearly influences cognitive development.

As early investigators, Piaget and Freud have much in common. The work of both men is widely recognized and more susceptible than usual to investigator effects, owing to their informal research methods. Moreover, Piaget's stages, like those of Freud, are not as universal as he suggested, and the transitions from one to another now appear more gradual than he indicated. However, both men enormously influenced modern psychology. Freud brought child rearing and irrational thinking into greater focus; Piaget brought educational practices and the development of normal human thought into the spotlight (Rotman, 1977).

With these roots, psychology has returned to the study of the mind—not through introspection, as in earlier days, but through inference. For this reason, and with remarkably improved equipment, it has also turned toward brain and computer science.

Cognitive psychology today stretches from studies of imitation in birds and numerical ability in dolphins to the latest developments in human brain imaging. In fact, all the processes that take place between the input of some stimulus and the output of an organism's response can be included in the domain of cognitive psychology (Neisser, 2000). With these broad boundaries, it becomes difficult to say what is and is not part of contemporary cognitive psychology. It exists as a systematic perspective more in name than in fact and is perhaps more appropriately considered a large subfield today. Its major recent advances lie in our increased understanding of human memory in particular, as well as advances in perception, thinking, and

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use of language. Further progress can be expected with the steady development of ever-more sophisticated research methods, electronic instruments, and interdisciplinary investigations.

Summary

Foundations of Cognitive Psychology

Modern cognitive psychology emerged in the mid-20th century through investigations in language, computer science, and memory. The earlier work of Jean Piaget focused on children, using mostly observations and interviews. Modern cognitive psychology adopted the computer as a metaphor because the software, in restricted ways, is similar to human mental activities, involving three stages of information processing: input, storage, and output.

Key Terms: cognitive psychology, gestalt psychology, cognitive development, information processing, intelligence, general-purpose problem solver, domain-specific problem solver, parallel distributive processing

Sensation and Perception

Through sensation we become aware of stimulation, but perception includes the processes of recognizing, organizing, and interpreting this incoming information. The outcome of perception, some form of understanding, is influenced by the specific features of the stimulus, through bottom-up processing, and the schema or expectations held by the perceiver, through top-down processing. Both types of information are managed rapidly and simultaneously in the brain, a circumstance called parallel distributive processing.

Key Terms: perception, sensation, bottom-up processing, feature detectors, top-down processing, schema, set

Processes in Memory

Memory is an active process; human beings typically search for the elements or parts of their memories and reconstruct them. Memories are acquired in three stages: sensory, working, and long-term memory. Sensory memory, composed of fleeting, unprocessed information, promptly disappears without some effort at retention. Working memory prepares incoming information for storage; it involves rehearsal or more elaborate encoding through organization, chunking, and cueing. Long-term memory, which exists in several forms, involves storage for indefinite periods. Retrieval from this storage usually requires special encoding and cueing.

Key Terms: memory, sensory memory, short-term memory, working memory, encoding, long-term memory, explicit memory, implicit memory, forgetting, decay theory, interference theory, motivated forgetting, inadequate retrieval cues

Thought and Language

Among adults, reasoning commonly occurs in two forms, inductive and deductive, used jointly. Inductive errors occur because people overlook contradictory evidence; deductive errors arise from incorrect premises. Language aids thought, and the average child gains language rapidly, progressing through a universal, predictable sequence, showing that the process is significantly innate. Language does not determine thought, but it can be highly influential in adult thinking.

Key Terms: thinking, concept, propositional mode, imaginal mode, artificial intelligence, computer simulation, algorithm, heuristic, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, language, phoneme, morpheme, syntax, linguistic relativity

The Cognitive Therapies

The cognitive therapist aims to educate or indoctrinate the patient in more useful ways of thinking. The

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major premise is that most patients make themselves unhappy through their irrational thoughts. Rational- emotive therapy employs the ABC technique, emphasizing A, the activating event; C, the consequences; and B, the patient's irrational belief. Less confrontational, cognitive therapy for depression encourages the patient to examine maladaptive thinking in terms of three categories: selective attention, overgeneralizing, and polarized thinking.

Key Terms: cognitive therapy, rational-emotive therapy, ABC technique, cognitive therapy for depression, categories of maladaptive thinking, reframing

Commentary and Critique

Cognitive psychology does not have the coherence generally associated with a systematic perspective, partly because of the great breadth of its central concept, information processing. The mechanistic reductionism in its computer model has led cognitive psychology away from a more open, narrative approach, often viewed as the way people create meanings in their lives. A problem with external validity arises partly because much cognitive research takes place in laboratory settings with college students performing novel tasks.

Key Terms: central concept, computer metaphor, external validity

Critical Thinking

Suppose cognitive psychology had adopted a narrative metaphor. Describe how research on cognition might have developed differently. Focus on likely research topics or goals and also on research design, both experimental and observational. After a successful high-school career, an adolescent believes he cannot manage his new job as a store clerk. Make a case for cognitive therapy in this instance. On a long bus trip, would Jean Piaget prefer to ride with a behaviorist or a biological psychologist? Give reasons for your viewpoint.

• cognitive psychology • memory • problem solving • long-term memory • psychology • working memory • cognitive therapy • cognitive development • knowledge • language

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n7

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https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n7

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Psychology: Six Perspectives

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology
Foundations of Cognitive Psychology
Efforts in Gestalt Psychology
Piaget's Cognitive Studies
The Cognitive Revolution
Current Models of the Mind
Sensation and Perception
Figure 7.1 Information Processing in Perception. The solid circles and oval represent a plate, the dashed circles a plate in memory. That plate is round, but from an angle the sensation is an oval retinal image. And yet, with the contributions of memory and thinking, the plate is correctly perceived as circular. The combined influences of bottom-up and top-down processing create a perception that matches the object, despite the limited sensory impression
Processes in Memory
Sensory and Short-Term Memory
Memories in Long-Term Storage
Figure 7.2 Types of Long-Term Memory. These different memories are distinguished by the kinds of information involved and the most responsive areas of the brain. Generally speaking, explicit memories are located toward the front of the brain, implicit memories toward the back. Conditioned memories refer chiefly to classical conditioning; primed memories involve cues that prompt retrieval
Thought and Language
Components in Thinking
Figure 7.3 Components in Human Thinking. The solid, two-headed arrow indicates that human beings think with concepts and develop concepts by thinking. Words and images express concepts, embedded in the propositional and imaginable modes. The dashed, two-headed arrow shows that the relationship between these parallel modes remains unclear, awaiting further research
Approaches to Problem Solving
Language: Symbols of Thought
The Cognitive Therapies
Rational-Emotive Therapy
Therapy for Depression
Commentary and Critique
Summary
Critical Thinking