The school of cognitive psychology

Knowledge for cognitivism is functional. Cognition is the capacity we have to assimilate information (stimuli) and process it (recognize it, store it, interpret it, organize it) to transform it into knowledge. This is achieved through cognitive processes such as perception, attention, learning, memory, thinking and language.

Cognitive science studies how the mind works from a multidisciplinary perspective involving neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, linguistics, anthropology and of course cognitive psychology.

The school of cognitive psychology or cognitivism is one of the great theories of psychology whose influence is not only maintained but continues to evolve today.

The current of thought of this school applied to modern psychology therapies allows us to delve into how thoughts impact our actions and moods, and tries to correct faulty patterns to experience changes, achieve self-control and emotional stability.

Among the main exponents of the school of cognitive psychology we can find FC Barlett, Donald Broadbent, Jean Piaget, Ulric Neisser, Jerone Bruner, Howard Gardner, Jeffrey Sternberg, Lev Vigotsky, Erickson or David Ausubel and Aaron T Beck father of cognitive therapy, among others.

Emergence of the school of cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology emerged in the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century as a reaction to the shortcomings of behaviorism, which claimed that the mind could not be studied by the scientific method and that behavior was the result of associations between stimulus and response.

Its advocates, however, maintained that people had to process stimuli and compare them with a knowledge scheme before arriving at a response, so that the processing of the stimulus had a direct impact on behavior. And that new stimuli were interpreted according to what was learned, being able to adapt the schema if necessary. Defending the existence of unobservable internal mental processes such as beliefs, desires and motivations.

Stages of cognitive psychology

• Computational: the first stage (or paradigm) took place between the 1940s and 1950s. Under the influence of cybernetics and information processing theory. They proposed a metaphor in which the brain functioned as an information processing system and began to carry out their studies of the mind from this perspective. Under the assumption that there were intermediary processes that managed actions. It created a way for mental processes to play a role in behavior.

• Connectionist: emerged at the end of the 80s of the last century. Inspired by the properties of the brain. It simulates the functioning of schemes by means of neural networks. At this stage, the speed of cognitive processes is studied, examining patterns of activation and deactivation and their interconnection. Imitating real biological patterns where operations are distributed and are created through the transmission of signals that change with experience, for example, pattern recognition.

• Embodied: appeared in the 90s of the last century. It holds that the functioning of cognitive processes is also determined by the physical and biological properties of the body we inhabit. This new vision of cognition presupposes that the individual responds to the environment in an integral way by continuously constructing his perception. It also takes up the study of the subjective and of consciousness.

• One stage does not disappear when the other emerges; they are not successive. They complement each other according to the advances that burst onto the scientific scene in fields such as biology, technology or medicine. They coexist and maintain their influence, broadening our perspective on the mind.