The term ‘cognitive psychology’ is nowadays associated mainly with the approach to psychology which became predominant after the Second world war, focusing on mental processes instead of behavior. But from the very early days of psychology as a science, psychologists...
Psychology
Home » Psychology »
Behaviourism vs. instinct
While Skinner had come up with the idea that we have a genetic predisposition towards learning behavior through operant conditioning, Lorenz went even further to suggest that at least some animal behavior may be genetically programmed. Other psychologists argued that...
Memory
One of the pioneers in the field of cognitive psychology was the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), whose experiments helped establish memory capacity limits and provided an early foundation for modern theories of learning and forgetting. While his...
Memorizing and recalling
In the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus decided to investigate how people learn new information. He was interested in memory because they thought that if they could understand how human beings stored knowledge then they would be able to design better teaching methods....
Forgetting
One of the things that Ebbinghaus discovered would not come as a surprise to any student who had ever tried cramming the night before an exam. After studying for a few days, we forget about 75% of what we studied. However, there was one thing he found that could...
The Zeigarnik effect
Ebbinghaus identified a distinct pattern of memory and forgetting from his experiments. He found that people can recall items that they encounter early on, but forget them if they aren't re-encountered. The same effect occurs with lists; people tend to remember the...
Long-term and short-term memory
When psychologists studied how people were able to remember things, they realized that it wasn't simply a matter of holding on to information for a short period of time. In actuality, there appeared to be two types of memory storage: Short term memory (STM), and Long...
‘Assemblies’ of brain cells
The concept of “memory storage” gave rise to the idea of a physical location in the brain where memories are stored, which led to the belief that there is a physical site in the brain where memories reside. In the 1940s Karl Lashley demonstrated that memory is not...
Learning language
Until the 1950s our understanding of how we learned was based almost entirely on behaviorist theories of the stimulus-response model of conditioning. Some psychologists weren't convinced, however, and starting in 1955, American Noël Chomsky presented an alternative...
Problem-solving
Behaviorist psychologists had been influenced by Pavlov's experiments and tended to study human behavior in terms of stimuli and responses. The German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, however, felt that this approach missed much. Kohler was a co-founder of the Gestalt...
Connect
Latest posts:
An objective approach
The major obstacle in recognizing psychology as a legitimate field of study was the abstract nature of human thought. To gain acceptance within the scientific community, psychologists had to employ scientific methods, including observation and experimentation, to...
Classical conditioning
The impetus for the most US behaviorist movement was neither American nor psychologist. Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist researching the salivating response to stimuli. The dogs in his experiment salivated when presented with stimuli such as food, but he noticed...
Puzzle boxes
Edward Thorndike, an American psychologist, was a pioneer of experimental behaviorism. He broke new ground in designing devices such as puzzle boxes to study animal behavior. In these studies, he followed in Pavlov’s footsteps but interpreted the principle of...
Positive and negative conditioning
Thorndike‘s experiments provided a base structure for almost all subsequent behaviorism experiments. The model of administering an experimental subject with a particular stimulus or task under controlled circumstances came to be known as instrumental conditioning — as...
The Law of Effect
In 1905, Thorndike formalized the findings from his experiments into what we know today as The Law of Effect. This states that behavior that results in a pleasant outcome is more likely to be repeated, whereas behavior that leads to an unpleasant outcome is less...
Free Course in Semiology
A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
