Free Psychology Books: Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind Research and Everyday by E. Bruce Goldstein

Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind Research and Everyday

 

The decade of the 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution—a shift in psychology from the behaviorist’s stimulus-response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind. Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s book was only one of many events in the 1950s that reintroduced the mind to psychology. These events provided a new way to study the mind, called the information-processing approach—an approach that traces the sequence of mental operations involved in cognition. One of the events that inspired psychologists to think of the mind in terms of information processing was a newly introduced device called the digital computer.  

In this book, Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning. According to this idea, children imitate speech that they hear and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded. But in 1959 Noam Chomsky, a linguist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a scathing review of Skinner’s book, in which he pointed out that children say many sentences that have never been rewarded by parents (“I hate you, Mommy,” for example), and that during the normal course of language development, they go through a stage in which they use incorrect grammar, such as “the boy hitted the ball,” even though this incorrect grammar may never have been reinforced. 

Chomsky saw language development as being determined not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across cultures. Chomsky’s idea that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed, as opposed to being caused by reinforcement, led psychologists to reconsider the idea that language and other complex behaviors, such as problem solving and reasoning, can be explained by operant conditioning. Instead, they began to realize that to understand complex cognitive behaviors, it is necessary not only to measure observable behavior, but also to consider what this behavior tells us about how the mind works.

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