Psychology [addendum]
In the 1950s and 1960s, scientific psychology underwent a major transformation. Behaviorist, Gestalt, and Freudian views were largely superseded by an approach called cognitive psychology, which treats the mind as a kind of information processor analogous to a computer. Cognitive psychology investigates the mental structures and processes that underlie perception, attention, learning, memory, language, inference, and problem solving. The field retains some behaviorist, Gestalt, and Freudian insights, but provides a coherent alternative that has been highly fruitful both experimentally and theoretically.
The Cognitive Revolution
The roots of cognitive psychology lie partly in the limitations of previous theoretical approaches to psychology, particularly behaviorism. Behaviorism attempted to make psychology scientific by avoiding reference to hypothetical mental entities such as thoughts and concepts. It tried to restrict psychology to the use of observed stimuli to predict observed behavioral responses. Behaviorism was fueled in part by a positivist philosophy of science that failed to recognize that explanation in natural science abounds with hypothetical entities such as atoms and genes. By the 1950s it was becoming apparent that stimulus-response relations were inadequate to account for human verbal behavior and even for learning in rats.
The emergence of an alternative explanatory framework came from several sources.
