George Berkeley

Berkeley's most influential essay is A Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge. It was this that earned Berkeley the title of "subjective
idealist,' imaterialist," "Spiritualist," and these are what helped to make his
small book one of the more misunderstood essays in philosophy. What Berkeley set
out to achieve was the removing of validity from materialism and to do this by
refuting the latent or explicitly materialistic content both in Locke's Essay
and in Descartes' and Hobbes' "geometric " theories" of man and society.
David Hume (1711-1776)

Hume published a Treatise of Human Nature. He emphasized Locke's notion of the
compounding of simple ideas into complex ideas, developing and making more
explicit the notion of association. He abolished mind as a substance and said
that it is a secondary quality like matter. The mind is observable only through
perception. More importantly, is the distinction he drew between two kinds of
mental contents: impressions and ideas. Impressions are the basic elements of
mental life. Impressions are kin to sensation and perception. Ideas are the
mental experiences that we have in the absence of any stimulating element. The
modern equivalent is image. Hume did not define these two concepts in
psychological terms or in reference to any external stimulating object. These
mental contents differ not in terms of their source or point of origin, but in
terms of their relative strength and vivacity. Impressions are strong and vivid,
whereas ideas are but weak copies of impressions. He proposed two theories about
association: 1) resemblance or similarity, and 2) contiguity in time and place.
His work fits into the categories of empiricism and associationism. He believed
that just like the astronomers determine the laws of the universe through which
the planets function, it is also possible to determine the laws of mental
universes
James Mill (1773-1836)

James Mill believed that the human mind was totally passive. He felt that the
mind was a machine functioning in the same way as a clock, acting upon external
stimuli. His most important work and contribution to psychology is his book,
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, written in 1829. Mill states that
the mind must be studied through its reduction or analysis into elementary
components. Mill believed that ideas and sensations are only certain kinds of
mental processes. He felt that ideas result as a process of sensations that have
occurred at the same time in a certain order. Thus, James Mill was considered a
British empiricist, focusing on the primary role of sensation processes and the
relationship between conscious processes and association. John Stuart Mill, who
believed in Mental Chemistry, was the son of James Mill.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

John Stuart Mill was a British empiricist who was concerned with Associationism.
Associationism studies how ideas can be hooked together and how many laws of
association there should be. Mill believed the mind to be active, which is
opposition to his father's belief that the mind was passive. He developed the
idea of mental chemistry in which he believed the sum of two ideas compounded
together is greater than the sum of the individual ideas. Along with Mill's
research, he wrote several books which also influenced the work of James,
Gestalt, and Wundt.
19th CENTURY

Psychology broke away from philosophy and began to form its own discipline based
upon empirical results rather than on speculation. "Only in the last 100 years
has it been realized that human cognition could be the subject of scientific
study rather than philosophical speculation" (Anderson, 1995).
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

Wilhelm Wundt was born on Aug. 16, 1832 in Neckarau Baden, Germany. Wundt
established the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in 1879 and
published the first journal, Philosophische Studien, that contained a report of
experimental results. Wundt taught at the University at Leipzig from 1875 to
1917. Wundt founded the psychological institute at the University of Leipzig.
Wundt is regarded as the founder of psychology as a formal academic discipline
and the first person in history to be designated as a psychologist. Wundt
believed that psychology is based on the observation of experience. Wundt taught
many psychologists, such as Tichener. His method of inquiry was largely
introspection (having highly trained observers report on the contents of their
consciousness under carefully controlled conditions according to Anderson,
1995).
Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894)

Hermann Helmholtz was born it 1821 in Potsdam, Germany. Helmholtz was know for
his research in physics and physiology and he is regarded as one of the greatest
scientists of the nineteenth century. Helmholtz is known for his theory of
unconscious inference, for example visual perception of space. Helmholtz was an
advocate of the natural sciences. He had a particular interest in the speed of
neural impulses. His research was one of the first to demonstrate that it is
possible to experiment on and measure a psychophysiological process. Helmholtz
developed the Young-Helmholtz theory of color vision.

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)

Hermann Ebbinghaus was educated at the University of Bonn. As a young doctor of
philosophy, he was determined to study higher mental processes and examine these
processes that were neglected by Wundt. The experiment began in 1879 with
Ebbinghaus as his only subject. The result was Memory in 1885. Memory utilized
the first use of nonsense syllables to discover the fundamental laws of
learning. The nonsense syllables were meaningless, therefore uninfluenced by
previous learning. He also used nonsense syllables because any one nonsense
syllable is not easier to learn than another. Ebbinghaus also studied
forgetfulness. He would memorize lists of nonsense syllables, 13 in each list,
and measure how long it took him to forget the syllables. His results have been
summarized in the forgetting curve.

Sir Frances Galton (1822-1911)

Galton is considered the founder of eugenics which is controlled breeding to
improve the condition of mankind. Galton did not believe the environment
determined human character. He believed there existed innate social worth. He
was interested in a small portion of the population, the exceptional. Galton
published Hereditary Genius which "proposed to show that a man's natural
abilities are derived by inheritance". Galton's statistical methods made
possible the comparisons of individuals. He devised a number of important
methods used today. He was the first to systematically apply statistics to
psychological data, and he invented the correlation coefficient. He also did
substantial research about the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, and invented the
free-association technique.

Edward Titchener (1867-1927)

Born in 1867, Edward Titchener was a follower of the psychological teachings of
Wilhelm Wundt. He attended school at Malvern College and Oxford on scholarships
because his family was very poor. He spent most of his career teaching at
Cornell University in New York state. Titchener's view was based on his belief
that all consciousness was capable of being reduced to three states: sensations,
which are the basic elements of perception; images, which are the pictures
formed in our minds to characterize what is perceived; and affections, which are
the constituents of emotions. By 1915 Titchener had formulated his context
theory of meaning. According to his theory, core referred to raw experiences
such as sensations of light, sound, touch, and smell; context consisted of
associations brought on by raw experiences. Context is what gives meaning to the
core. Titchener also believed that emotions are intensified feelings arising
from sensations inside the body. Titchener died in 1927.

William James (1842-1910)

William James wrote the first psychology textbook, Principles of Psychology,
which was the central work of his career. The concept of functionalism is
expressed in James' psychology which he treats as a natural science.
Functionalism is the adaption of living persons to their environment. James also
contributed to the James-Lange theory. This theory states that we feel an
emotion because of the action in which we choose to engage. For example, we
infer are afraid because we run.
EARLY 20TH CENTURY


Edward Tolman

Edward Tolman was known for "his work that centered around demonstrating that
animals had both expectations and internal representations that guided their
behavior." (Galotti, 1994) He believed that rats used a cognitive map in order
to complete the maze instead of memorization. He showed this by putting rats in
different places on the maze than ones where they had been trained. The rats
reached the goal point without going to the learned place. This supported the
notion that they had created a cognitive map.

Wolfgang Kohler

Wolfgang Kohler was known for his early criticism of the characterization of
problem solving. His famous study involved an ape in a cage, Sultan, that was
given two hollow bamboo sticks. A banana was placed outside the cage out of
range for the sticks to reach it. For a certain amount of time the ape tried to
reach the banana with the sticks, failing each time. At a certain point Sultan
was observed to sit quietly for a time, after which he put the two sticks
together. Kohler called the sudden solution that followed the quiet time
"insight" and concluded that it was a typical property of problem solving.

Sir Frederick Bartlett

Sir Frederick Bartlett was known for his study of memory. He placed his emphasis
on studies under natural conditions. Therefore, he rejected laboratory research.
He felt that past experiences helped reconstruct the material able to be
retrieved. He used a method called serial reproduction. This method allowed
subjects to recall stories on more than one occasion with varying retention
intervals. He focused on information that was remembered and " misremembered".
His results showed that overtime the subjects' recall was progressively more
distorted. Therefore "He rejected that the idea of long term memory where
material is stored unchanged until retrieval". He saw memory as an active and
often inaccurate process. The famous story he used was "The War of the Ghosts."

Skinner, B. F. (1904-1995)

Born in Subsequenna PA, Skinner is famous for his theory of operant
conditioning. He believed that behaviors and language were learned through
reinforcement (Solso, 317-318). He invented the Skinner box, which was used to
control and measure learned animal behavior. He believed that behavioral changes
resulted from responses of the individual to environmental stimuli. He believed
that the cognitive revolution was a backward, rather than a forward, step in the
history of psychology (Murray, 415). Among his main scientific works were The
Behavior of Organisms (1938) and Verbal Behavior (1957). Behaviorism caused the
study of mental events to be put aside. In many ways it was a reaction against
introspection. There was a behavioral revolution in America. Behaviorists
believed that psychology should be only concerned with external behavior and
"should not try to analyze the workings of the mind that underlay this behavior"
(Anderson, 1995). Watson (1930) said that "Behaviorism claims that consciouness
is neither a definite nor a usable concept." " The behaviorist program and the
issues it spawned all but eliminated any serious research in cognitive
psychology for 40 years....Perhaps the most important lasting contribution of
behaviorism is a set of sophisticated and rigorous techniques and principles for
experimental study in all fields of psychology, including cognitive psychology."
(Anderson, 1995)
REEMERGENCE OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

According to Anderson (1995), cognitive psychology first emerged in the two
decades between 1950 and 1970. The modern development of cognitive psychology
was due to the WWII focuss on research on human performance and attention,
developments in computer science, especially those in artificial intelligence,
and the renewal of interest in the field of linguistics.

Noam Chomsky (1928-)

Noam Chomsky's review of Skinner's book on language (Verbal Behavior) in the
1959 journal Language is considered the famous turning point for Cognitive
psychology. Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
argued that language cannot be explained through a stimulus response process as
Skinner explained, because this does not account for some of the common facts
about language. The creative use of language can be better explained as a
central process than a peripheral process. Language is a way to express ideas,
and the way that these ideas are turned into language is a cognitive process.
Chomsky's critique stimulated much more interest in the cognitive processes of
all types of human activity (Benjafield, p.41). He showed that language was much
more complex than anyone previously believed and that behavioral explanations
could not reasonably explain the complexities of language. Chomsky's language
model included two types of structures: surface structures and deep structures.

David Rumelhart & James McClelland

Rumelhart and McClelland are prime examples of modern cognitive psychologists.
Their names are associated with Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP). This
model stresses that information processing happens simultaneously (parallel) as
opposed to serially (one at a time). Their theory suggests that many simple
processing units are responsible for sending excitatory and inhibitory signals
to other units. By understanding these basic features, they believe that the
complex system can be explained. The idea that processing involves
interconnected elements and the reference to neural models, makes up their
Connectionist Theory.

George Miller

George Miller is a professor at Princeton University. He studies information
processing and focuses his studies on the capacity of Short-term Memory (STM).
His name is associated with the "Magic Number 7." This theory suggests that most
people can remember 7 plus/minus 2 bits of information using their STM. Miller
also found that recall of information is better when it is chunked together.

Allen Newell

Newell is a mathematician who applied cognitive psychology to the design of
computer systems. He spent forty years at CMU educating cognitive psychologists
on the implications of artificial intelligence. Newell saw cognitive activities
as problem solving activities. Some of his other work focused on expert vs.
novice differences in memory. Newell and Simon worked on artificial intelligence
at Carnegie Mellon University.
Cognitive psychology has grown rapidly since the 1950's. A very important event
was the publication of Ulric Neisser's book, Cognitive Psychology, in 1967. It
gave a new legitimacy to the field and consisted of six chapters on perception
and attention and four chapters on language, memory, and thought. Following
Neisser's work, another important event was the beginning of the Journal
Cognitive Psychology in 1970. This journal has done much to give definition to
the field. More recently a new field, called cognitive science, has emerged
which attempts to integrate research efforts from psychology, philosophy,
linguistics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. This field can be dated
from the appearance of the journal, Cognitive Science in 1976 (Anderson, 1995).

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/cognitiv.htm

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