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Learning and Cognition

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Learning and Cognition
Cognitive Psychology and Definition Paper
Beth Maldonado
PSY 360
December 17, 2012
Devlin Crose

Cognitive Psychology and Definition Paper
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that examines mental processes dealing with how people think, remember, perceive, and learn. The center focal points of cognitive psychology are on how people obtain, process, and collect information. The growth of cognitive psychology is distinguished by several milestones in psychology. With the desire for change in methods and theories on how researchers study the mind, particular developments eventually lead to the growth of cognitive psychology. This paper will cover four of the milestones that guided and led to the development of cognitive psychology, and the importance of behavioral observation in cognitive psychology.

Development of Cognitive Psychology
The advancement of cognitive psychology happened by different achievements that paved the way for the cognitive perspective. “Many of the ideas in cognitive psychology grew out of older ideas, or in some cases, in direct opposition to older ideas” (Willingham, 2007, p. 5). Behaviorism is one of the four milestones that influenced the development of cognitive psychology. According to "Merriam Webster" (n.d), behaviorism is a school of psychology that takes the objective evidence behavior (as measured responses to stimuli) as the only concern of its research and the only basis of its theory without reference to conscious experience — compare. The ideology underlying behaviorism was interesting because it was so forthright (Willingham, p. 18, 2007).“Behaviorism also seemed to offer a promising start on the framework of a grand theory of behavior” (Willingham, 2007, p. 18). In the late 1950s, behaviorism began to collapse (Willingham, p. 18, 2007). Behaviorism as an outlook of psychology was unsuccessful because it was incapable to explain the data from the experiments brought in. Another



References: Willingham, D. T. (2007). Cognition: The thinking animal (3rd ed.). Retrieved from The University of Phoenix eBook Collectiondatabase.

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