The Rise of Cognitive Psychology: Mentalism Revisited :

The experiments engendered by the debates among the different approaches to learning and behavior continued to dominate the literature of experimental psychology at midcentury. However, the traditional methods and research topics of the psychological laboratory also flourished; although the era of the schools had ended, they left a legacy of influence on the research conducted within psychology. Introspection as a source of psychological data lost its primacy with the end of structuralism; introspective reports resumed their more limited role in assessing the quality and/or intensity of sensory experience in psychophysical experiments. Articles reporting on experiments on perception, stimulated in part by gestalt psychology’s emphasis upon perceptual organization, continued to appear in psychological journals, together with studies of the higher mental processes of thinking and problem solving (e.g., Wertheimer, 1959). Functional psychology, more of an attitude than a systematic position, characterized American psychology generally and fostered experiments on serial list and paired associate learning and the interference theory of forgetting, continuing the research tradition emanating from the laboratories of Ebbinghaus and G. E. Müller (McGeoch, 1942). Although research on higher mental processes in animals had not been entirely neglected (Dewsbury, 2000), behaviorism left a legacy of animal research that focused on stimulus-response interpretations of the results of maze learning studies, classical conditioning experiments, and, increasingly, of behavior in operant conditioning chambers. Psychology redefined itself from the science of mind to the science of behavior. References to mind or mental processes were found only infrequently in textbooks and journals. The molecular, elemental, and mechanistic analyses of behaviorism, emphasizing peripheral sensory-motor relations,
were not limited to research on learning. Child psychology, for example, was strongly influenced by studies of the conditioned reflex (e.g., Mateer, 1918) and Watson’s admitted premature claim that, given a dozen healthy infants, he could make of them anything he chose (J. B. Watson, 1924). Emphasis on the study of sensory-motor and nervous-system development in young children led to an emphasis on developmental
norms that were postulated to follow relatively fixed maturational principles (e.g., Gesell & Ilg, 1946). These principles and norms were challenged by research that combined behavioral and maturational approaches in examining motor development in children (e.g., McGraw, 1935; 1943). In the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, the language and models that stimulated psychological research began to change. Explanations of behavior derived from experiments on maze learning and classical and operant-conditioning research came under attack from those studying more complex
behavior patterns (e.g., Harlow, 1953). Rote learning of serial lists and verbal paired associates were acknowledged to represent only a limited domain of human learning (Melton, 1956). Information theory, developed during World War II as a tool for measuring the capacity of humans as processors and transmitters of information, provided a new measure of human performance and implied capacities for making judgments and choices (Attneave, 1959). Information theory offered fresh interpretations of choice reactiontime experiments (e.g., Hick, 1952) and the limits of human attention and immediate memory (Miller, 1956). Discussions of human capacities to reduce, transmit, or create information renewed interest in cognitive capacities of decision making and problem solving that suggested analogies to the recently developed technology of the computer. Interest in cognitive development revitalized child psychology in moving from a focus on sensory-motor development
to a focus on thinking, the formation of concepts, and the child’s understanding of the world. The theories of Jean Piaget (1896–1980) that describe the development of language and cognition in childhood had appeared in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe (e.g., Piaget, 1929) but had an impact in the United States only decades later (Flavell, 1963). Experimental research that explored cognitive and social development
in children came to dominate the field of developmental psychology, no longer simply child psychology but soon to cover the life span. This shift in emphasis in the study of human development paralleled changes in research on adults and on animals.
Psychologists appeared to be less self-consciously concerned with the status of psychology as a science and more concerned with the kind of science psychology was to be. The behavioral view of a largely passive organism whose mechanical behavior was governed by environmental events became an increasingly less satisfactory model. Calls for a humanistic, rather than a mechanistic, science of psychology (Giorgi,
1970; Maslow, 1966) called for a view of human beings as actively engaged with the environment, thinking and deciding rather than simply responding to external events. The results of Pavlovian conditioning experiments began to be interpreted in terms of cognitive events (e.g., Rescorla, 1966) and signaled the increasing willingness to consider the role of mental processes that determined behavior in both humans and animals. The journals Cognitive Psychology (1970) and Memory and Cognition (1973) were founded to provide an outlet to the burgeoning research in human memory that was
less characteristic of traditional associationistic theories (Warren, 1921; Robinson, 1932/1964) and more influenced by analogies to computers and conceptions of information processing. Topics of the older mentalistic psychology, such as attention, concept formation, and thinking, became more prominent in psychological research. The term mind, banished from the psychological lexicon in the heyday of behavioral theories, began to reappear in textbooks and, more significantly, in developing theories of human and animal cognitive capacities. The magnitude of the shift in research agendas and theoretical constructs suggested that psychology
had undergone a revolutionary change, while others regarded the shift as part of the normal historical development of the discipline (Leahey, 1992). Nevertheless, these developments in scientific psychology represent the continuing vitality of the discipline as psychologists address traditional problems of mind and behavior in forging the science of psychology. These efforts inform the content of the volumes and chapters that follow and properly belong to contemporary psychology.