Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is a discipline of psychology that studies the internal mental processes of a human being. Example of mental processes that are cognitive psychology looks at include memory, problem solving and language development. There are many scholars who have contributed to the development of cognitive psychology, for example, Jean Piaget, Kurt koffka and Chomsky. The discipline has developed over a long period. The part of history of cognitive psychology that has influenced the development of modern psychology is the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. This is the time when Naom Chomsky conducted a critical review of B.F Skinner book verbal behavior.

This is the point whereby Chomsky offered criticism of stimulus response ideology propagated by Skinner. He held that the theory by Skinner did not offer an explanation of creativity and the language learning process (Chomsky, 2000). These are fundamental aspects that effective modern psychology cannot be studied without looking at them. This acted as a crucial point in the development of cognitive psychology and hence offered an opportunity for more studies and theories to be developed in this field. This led Chomsky to develop the theory of rationalism. This theory gave momentum to the development of modern psychology and the theory that the mind of a human being contains small sections and that each of the part specializes for a certain cognitive process (Dupoux & Mehler, 2001). With the development of this theory, cognitive psychological theories gained reputation and dominance in the discipline of psychology. This is the same period when Donald Eric Broadbent conducted a research that helped to fill the gap that existed between the approach of applied psychology used before the Second World War and the developmental approach in applied psychology used during and after the war (Goldstein, 2007). After this research, cognitive psychology became a significant part of the modern psychology.