COGNITIVISM PERSPECTIVE

Functionalism; Memory; Gestalt

Cognitive Psychology is the approach that studies information processing and ways in which information
is extracted, stored, and retrieved and how this guides behavior. These include attention (selecting
important information), using it to solve problems (thinking/perception), storing it in memory and
retrieving it when needed.
Much of the work derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern
disciplines of psychological study including social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal
psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and economics.

 William James(1890s) emphasizes the role of consciousness and mental processes in his “Principles
of Psychology.”
 Hermann Ebbinghaus(1912) publishes “Uber das Gedachtnis,” pioneering research on memory and
paving the way for cognitive studies.
 Gestalt Psychology(1920s) emerges, challenging behaviorism by focusing on how the mind organizes
and interprets information.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
- publishes “Uber das Gedachtnis,” pioneering research on memory and paving the way for cognitive
studies
-his work in memory, learning and verbal intelligence serves as a model for further studies on cognitive
abilities and psychological evaluations.
-Forgetting Curve shows us that memory declines the sharpest within 20 minutes of initial learning, and
then after an hour, our memory loses about half of the new information. After 24 hours, the curve flattens
out. Human memory declines if there are no attempts to review previously learned information. Still,
Ebbinghaus also noted that difficulty and presentation of material, relevance, stress, and sleep could
influence the forgetting curve.
-Learning Curve, the rapid increase happens in the first repetition. Subsequent attempts, however, show
an evening out of the curve because memory retention of new information declines after each repetition.
The good news is that Ebbinghaus also mentioned in his learning that relearning is easier and strengthens
memory, thus increasing retention to following subsequent relearning.
-he also showed the benefits of spacing effects in learning through his experiments, which means studying
information at different times instead of trying to learn it all at once.
-Ebbinhaus’s experiment involved memorizing 2300 nonsense syllables under particular conditions while
recording and tracking the average time and number of repetitions to perfectly recite the syllables in their
original order.
-The experiment data suggested that, in the course of learning a series of syllables, associations are
formed not only between immediately adjacent syllables but also among remote ones.
-forward, backward, and remote association
-Recall depends more on the features of the information to be recalled such as its length and familiarity.
Edward C. Tolman
 He originally started his academic life studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry, at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). After reading William James’ Principles of
Psychology, he decided to shift his focus to the study of psychology.
 In addition to being influenced by James, he also later said that his work was heavily influenced
by Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin.
 Although a behaviorist, Tolman, had a different opinion. Tolman’s experiments with rats
demonstrated that organisms could learn even if they do not receive immediate reinforcement.
Perception
- Is the method by which the brain takes all the sensations a person experiences at any given
moment and allows them to be interpreted in some meaningful fashion.
- The Constancies: Size, Shape, and Brightness
~Size Constancy is the tendency to interpret an object as always being the same size, regardless
of its distance from the viewer.
~Shape Constancy is the tendency to interpret the shape of an object as constant, even when it
changes on the retina.
~Brightness Constancy is the tendency to perceive the apparent brightness of an object as the
same even if the light conditions change.
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
 Focuses on how our minds organize and interpret visual data.
 It emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts.
 Illusion of movement became a basis for gestalt psychology.
 The phi phenomenon is a type of perceptual illusion that tricks your eyes into thinking that still
images are actually moving. Perceptual illusions are part of a field of psychology known as
Gestalt Psychology.
 Based upon this belief, Wertheimer along with Gestalt psychologists Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt
Koffka, developed a set of rules to explain how we group smaller objects to form larger
ones(perceptual organization).
 Figure-Ground Relationships refer to the tendency to perceive objects or figures as existing in a
background.
 Reversible Figures, in which the figure and the ground seem to switch back and forth.
Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization
 Law of Similarity
~states that similar things tend to appear grouped together. Grouping can occur in both visual and
auditory stimuli.
 Law of Pragnanz
~is sometimes referred to as the law of good figures or the law of simplicity. This law holds that
when you are presented with a set of ambiguous or complex objects, your brain will make them
appear as simple as possible. For example, when presented with the Olympic logo, you see
overlapping circles rather than an assortment of curved, connected lines.
 Law of Proximity
~things that are close together seem more related than things that are spaced farther apart.
 Law of Continuity
 ~holds that points are connected by straight or curving lines are seen in a way that follows the
smoothest path. In other words, elements in a line or curve seem more related to one another than
those positioned randomly.
 Law of Closure
~we perceive elements as belonging to the same group if they seem to complete some entity. Our
brains often ignore contradictory information and fill in gaps in information.
 Law of Common Ground
~law of common region says that when elements are located in the same closed region, we
perceive them as belonging to the same group.
 Law of Symmetry
~captures the idea that when we perceive objects, we tend to perceive them as symmetrical
shapes that form around their center. Most objects can be divided into two more or less
symmetrical halves and when for example we see two unconnected elements that are
symmetrical, we unconsciously integrate them into one coherent object (or percept).
PURPOSIVE BEHAVIORISM
~Tolman’s theorizing has been called Purposive Behaviorism and is often considered the bridge between
behaviorism and cognitive theory.
~He believed individuals do more than merely respond to stimuli; then act on beliefs, attitudes, changing
conditions, and they strive toward goals. Tolman is virtually the only behaviorist who found the stimulus-
response theory unacceptable because reinforcement was not necessary for learning to occur. He felt
behavior was mainly cognitive.
~Learning is always purposive and goal oriented.
Latent Learning
-is learning that is not reinforced and not demonstrated until there is motivation to do so.
- is a form of learning that is not immediately expressed in an overt response. It occurs without any
obvious reinforcement of the behavior or associations that are learned.
-is not readily apparent to the researcher because it is not shown behaviorally until there is sufficient
motivation.
-broke the constraints of behaviorism, which stated that processes must be directly observable, and that
learning was the direct consequence of conditioning to stimuli.
-Children may learn by watching the actions of their parents but only demonstrate it at a later date, when
the learned material is needed.
~Tolman argued that the rats had formed a “cognitive map” of the maze but did not demonstrate this
knowledge until they received reinforcement.
~Tolman’s Maze Experiment shows that between stimulus(the maze) and the response(reaching the end
of the maze) a mediational process was occurring the rats were actively processing information in their
brains by mentally using their cognitive map(which they had latently learned).
-According to Tolman’s theory of sign learning, an organism learns by pursuing signs to a goal, i.e.,
learning is acquired through meaningful behavior. Tolman emphasized the organized aspect of learning.
“The stimuli which are allowed in are not connected by just simple one-to-one switches to the outgoing
responses. Rather the incoming impulses are usually worked over and elaborated in the central control
room into a tentative cognitive like map in the environment. And it is this tentative map, indicating routes
and paths and environmental relationships, which finally determines what responses, if any, the animal
will finally make.”
-Tolman(1932)proposed five types of learning: 1. Approach Learning 2. Escape Learning 3. Avoidance
Learning 4. Choice-Point Learning 5. Latent Learning. All forms of learning depend upon means-end
readiness, i.e., goal-oriented behavior; mediated by expectations, perceptions, representation, and other
internal or environmental variables.
-Tolman’s theory of learning is known by several names such as “sign significance theory”, “expectancy
theory”, “purposive behaviorism” or simple “sign theory”.
-Tolman’s version of behaviorism emphasized the relationships between stimuli rather than stimulus-
response.
-According to Tolman, a new stimulus(the sign) becomes associated with already meaningful stimuli(the
significate) through a series of pairings; there was no need for reinforcement in order to establish
learning. For this reason, Tolman’s theory was closer to the connectionist framework of Thorndike than
the drive reduction theory of Clark Hull that suggests that human motivation is rooted in biological needs
that lead to drives that motivate behavior.
-He challenged these assumptions by proposing that people and animals are active information processes
and not passive learners as Behaviorism had suggested. Tolman developed a cognitive view of learning
that has become popular in modern psychology.
Wolfgang Kohler (1887-1967)
-Another exploration of the cognitive elements of learning came about almost by accident.
-was a Gestalt psychologist who became marooned on an island in the Canaries(a series of islands off the
coast of North Africa) when WWI broke out. Stuck at the primate research lab that had first drawn him to
the island, he turned to studying animal learning.
-In one of his more famous studies, he set up a problem for one of the chimpanzees. Sultan the chimp was
faced with the problem of how to get to a banana that was placed just out of his reach outside his cage.
Sultan solved this problem relatively easily, first, he tried to reach through the bar with his arm, then
using a stick that was lying in the cage to rake the banana into the cage. As chimpanzees are natural tool
users, this behavior is not surprising and is still nothing more than simple trial-and-error learning.
Insights
-But then, the problem was made more difficult. The banana was placed just out of reach of Sultan’s
extended arm with the stick in his hand. At this point there were two sticks lying around in the cage,
which could be fitted together to make a single pole that would be long enough to reach the banana.
Sultan first tried one stick, then the other(simple trial and error). After about an hour of trying, Sultan
seemed to have a sudden flash of inspiration. He pushed one stick out of the cage as far as it would go
toward the banana and then pushed the other stick behind the first one. Of course, when he tried to draw
the sticks back, only the one in his hand came. He jumped up and down and was very excited, and when
Kohler gave him the second stick, he sat on the floor of the cage and looked at them carefully. He then
fitted one stick into the other and retrieved his banana. Kohler called Sultan’s rapid “perception of
relationships: insight and determined that insight could not be gained through trial-and-error learning
alone.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY
-The theory of Cognitive Development by Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, suggests that children’s
intelligence undergoes changes as they grow. Cognitive development in children is not only related to
acquiring knowledge, but children also need to build or develop a mental model of their surrounding
world(Miller,2011). His work is regarded as the cornerstone in the field of developmental psychology and
learning.
-In the 1920s, Piaget was working at the Binet Institute and his main responsibility was to translate
questions written in English intelligence tests into French. He became interested to find out why children
gave incorrect answers to questions needing logical thinking(Meadows, 2019).
-Piaget believed that these wrong answers revealed significant differences between the thinking of
children and adults.
-Piaget focuses on changes in how people think over time and stresses that thoughts and expectations
profoundly affect action.
-Piaget proposed new set of assumptions about the intelligence of children:
1. Children think differently and see the world differently from adults.
2. Children are not passive learners; they actively build up their knowledge about the surroundings.
3. The most effective way to understand children’s reasoning is to think from children’s point of view.