Ulrich Neisser

5 Key excerpts on "Ulrich Neisser"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing

  An Introduction

  • R. Lachman, J. L. Lachman, E. C. Butterfield(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  esprit de corps among many of the psychologists who eventually identified with the information-processing paradigm resulted from their common rejection of, and often downright hostility toward, neobehaviorism. Neobehaviorists, in turn, had great difficulty accepting the new commitments of information-processing psychology; many never have. However, several generations of psychologists have received their graduate education in the period following the neobehaviorists' loss of dominance. They are not particularly interested in the paradigm clash that preceded their own professional training, and consequently the clash between the two paradigms has muted as the balance has tipped toward the new cognitive psychology. It is not clear whether information processing will become as prevalent as neobehaviorism was in the 1950s, permeating other areas such as social psychology, industrial psychology, and child psychology. However, it is currently in a period of normal science, guiding the research activities of a large community of psychological scientists whose primary area is human cognition.

  III. The Contributions of Verbal Learning

  During the heyday of neobehaviorism, verbal learning was already a clearly defined psychological subdiscipline with many highly productive practitioners. Even though their subject matter was the learning of verbal materials by human subjects rather than animal learning, verbal-learning psychologists shared many commitments with neobehaviorism. However, the relationship between verbal learning and information processing developed quite differently from that between information processing and neobehaviorism. For reasons we give presently, many verbal-learning psychologists found it relatively easy to accept the new commitments of the information-processing approach. Today, most verbal-learning researchers consider themselves information-processing psychologists as well.

  We have already mentioned the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus, the indisputable father of the study of verbal learning. This master scientist brought the best traditions of Newton and Galileo to the study of learning and memory. He not only learned many thousands of nonsense syllables and tested his own memory for them, but also devised new quantitative measures of memory and new ways of eliminating errors from memory experiments. He advocated the use of constant experimental conditions and rigorous statistical analyses of the resulting data, and he invented procedures to accomplish these objectives. Many of his methods are still in use today, which gives his writing a strikingly modern tone. His influence has been altogether profound.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

  Processes and Disorders

  • David Groome(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)
• Cognitive psychology is the study of how information is processed by the brain. It includes the study of perception, learning, memory, thinking, and language.
• Historically there have been four main strands of research which have all contributed to our present understanding of cognitive psychology. They are experimental cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive neuropsychology, and computer modelling of cognitive processes.
• Experimental cognitive psychology has provided theories to explain how the brain interprets incoming information, such as the schema theory which postulates that past experience is used to analyse new perceptual input.
• Computer modelling has provided models of human cognition based on information-processing principles, and it has introduced important new concepts such as feature-detector systems and processors of limited channel capacity.
• Cognitive neuropsychology provides knowledge about brain function, based on the study of people who have suffered cognitive impairment as a result of brain injury.
• Cognitive neuroscience makes use of brain-imaging techniques to investigate the relationship between brain function and cognition.
• Scientific studies of cognitive psychology have generated new concepts and theories, such as the distinction between top-down and bottom-up processing, and the distinction between automatic and controlled processing.
• The study of consciousness has yielded some interesting findings, but at present we have no real understanding of what consciousness is, or how it arises from neural activity.

Further reading

Eysenck, M.W., & Groome, D. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies. London: Sage. For this book we selected what we considered to be the 14 most important and influential studies of cognitive psychology ever published, and we then asked leading researchers in those fields to explain the impact those classic studies have had on subsequent research.

Eysenck, M.W., & Keane, M.T. (2020). Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook