Even though many European psychologists had studied mental processes, Cognitive Psychology as an alternative approach to Behaviorism did not emerge until later in the 20th century. During the Second World War, advances in computing and information technology provided psychologists with a model for cognitive processes. Perception and memory could then be explained as the way our minds classify and organize information, but so could Learning, providing a counter to Behaviorism’s view of conditioning.
The American psychologist Jerome Brainerd, who founded the Center For Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Georg Armitage Miller, is one of the earliest to have described learning as a cognitive process; he believed that to learn we need to understand information by actively participating in it. With the emphasis on learning as a form of cognitive activity, cognitive psychologists revived interest in the processes of memory and perceptual understanding as well as learning. Attention became an important topic in British psychology, especially after Donald Broadbent and others developed the concept.
