Cognitive Psychology - from Hergenhahn Introduction to the History of Psychology Cognitive psychology includes such topics as memory,concept formation, attention, reasoning, problem solving, judgment, and language. Clearly cognitive psychology is very popular within contemporary psychology. However, in psychology’s long history some form of cognition has almost always been emphasized. The few exceptions included the materialistic philosophies or psychologies of Democritus, Hobbes, Gassendi, La Mettrie, Watson, and Skinner, which denied the existence of mental events. The schools of voluntarism and structuralism concentrated on the experimental study of cognition, and the school of functionalism studied both cognition and behaviour. The supposed sterility of the research on cognition performed by members of these schools prompted Watson to create the school of behaviourism. Thus to say, as is common, that psychology is becoming more cognitively oriented is inaccurate, because with only a few exceptions it has always been cognitively oriented. But there was a period from about 1930 to about 1950 when radical behaviourism was highly influential, and when it was widely believed that cognitive events either did not exist or, if they did, were simply by-products (epiphenomena) of brain activity and could be ignored. As long as these beliefs were dominant, the study of cognitive processes was inhibited. We mention here only a few of the people and events that helped loosen the grip of radical behaviourism, thus allowing cognitive psychology to gain its current popularity. Extremely valuable information. GET IT NOW!

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