Philosophical Antecedents Of Cognitive Psychology
Rationalism versus Empiricism
Historians of psychology generally trace the earliest roots of psychology to two approaches to considerate the human mind:
- Philosophy: pursues to understand the overall nature of several aspects of the world,in part through introspection which is basically the examination of inner ideas and experiences.
- Physiology: pursues a scientific study of life sustaining functions in living matter,
mainly through empirical.
There is a separate difference between rationalism and empiricism. Actually, they are very plainly the straight opposite of each other. Rationalism is usually the belief in natural ideas, reason and deduction. While Empiricism is simply defined as the belief in sense perception, induction, and that there are no natural ideas.
Antecedents of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology has roots in several different approaches and ideas. The approaches that will be inspected contain early approaches such as structuralism and functionalism.
- Structuralism: Seek out to understand the structure which is about formation of elements of the mind and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into their basic components such as affection, attention, memory, sensation, and so on.
- Functionalism: Pursues to understand what people do and why they actually do it.
- Associationism: Inspects how elements of the mind, like ideas or events, can become associated with one another in the mind to result in a form of learning for example, associations might result from:
- Contiguity: connecting things that tend to happen together at about the same time.
- Similarity: relating things on the basis of similar features or properties.
- Contrast: relating things that show polarities, such as hot or cold, light or dark, day or
night etc.
In 1800s, Associationism Hermann Ebbinghaus form 1850–1909. He was the first pseudoscientist to apply associationist principles systematically. Specifically, he studied his own mental processes. He prepared lists of nonsense syllables that contained of a consonant and a vowel followed by another consonant such as “zax”. Then he took suspicious note of how long it took him to memorize those lists. He calculated his errors and recorded his response times. Concluded his self-observations, he studied how people learn and remember material by rehearsal and the conscious repetition of material to be learned as shown in the figure below:
Amongst other things, he found that regular repetition can fix mental associations more firmly in memory. Therefore, repetition aids in learning.
Behaviorism: it focuses on the relation between environmental events or observable behavior.
Cognition and Intelligence
Cognition is already defined above let’s talk about intelligence it is basically a concept that can observed as tying together all the cognitive psychology.
Three-Stratum Model of Intelligence
According to the three-stratum model of intelligence, intelligence includes a hierarchy of cognitive abilities involving three strata (Carroll, 1993):
• Stratum I contains several narrow, specific abilities e.g., spelling ability, speed of reasoning.
• Stratum II contains many broad abilities e.g., fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, short-term memory, long-term storage and retrieval, information processing speed and so on.
• Stratum III it is just a single general-intelligence sometimes called as g.
Acceding to the theory of Sternberg which is named as “The Thriarchic Theory of Intelligence” intelligence covers three aspects: creative, analytical, and practical.
• Creative: abilities that are used to generate novel ideas.
• Analytical abilities that are ascertain whether your ideas and those of others are good ones.
- Practical abilities are those which used to implement the ideas and motivate others of their value.
