Cognitive psychology

Influencial period:

        1950s-present

Contributors:

   Jean Piaget

    Noam Chomsky

    Herbert Simon

Subject matter:

       Thoughts and mental processes 

Basic premises:

         Human behavior cannot be fully understood without examining how people acquire,store and process information.

  In the 1960s  cognitive psychology replaced behaviorism as the leading philosophy in education . Because there are three primary criticisms of behaviorism. 

1. behaviorism did not explain language learning how language is learned ,how young people learn language their mother tongue.
2.  it did not explain why people respond differently to the same stimulus when a group of people or individuals are exposed to the same stimulus .
3. it did not explain reinforcement can reduce motivation.behaviorism is heavily dependent on reinforcement, positive or negative whichever one but the more reinforcement you give how does motivation set in a young person's life how is reinforcement motivating a student to do better because in real life really you do not get rewards for doing good work.

Bandura as we saw a little while ago was the instrument to bridge and bring about the transition from behaviorism to cognitive. According to him learning is social by observation, modeling and imitation. Bandura 's work deals with behaviorism and cognitive psychology. 

So that behaviorism led to the rise of cognition and cognitive psychology. Two cognitive theorists are piaget and vygotsky whose work in the 1950s and 60s brought about the popularity of this new science or new field in psychology called cognitive psychology.