cognitive thinking

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please help i need to know what cognitive thinking is ?I do not understand how it fits into the big picture of psychology and what future developments there are in this field Please help with a description of structuralism Thanking you

[Mike later added...]

I have been given an assignment of 1) Defining what psychology is and 2) Comparing Titcheners structuralism to cognitive thinking as I understand it. Please correct me if I am incorrect but the way I understand it is Titchner tried to break all the experiences into pieces and did not take human emotions into consideration. Cognitivism is the analysis of conscious thinking with the emphasis focused on problem solving and how problems are solved. Please paint a big picture for me as it would appear both schools of thought treat the mind as a computer.

-- mike williams (mikewil@transnet.co.za), April 10, 2001

Answers

Hi Mike, to some cognitive thinking might be interpreted as a contrast to behavioral psychology (where things are kind of a correlation between the environment and the overt behavior of the person which you assume is being caused by the person reacting to the environment). Some thought (pun intended) there was something missing in that analysis, thinking (or cognation). So if I was going to just guess at an answer to your question, I'd say that "cognative thinking" is the idea that we have to taking into account that a person's thoughts maybe at least partically accountable for the behavior that you see and what they experience as they live & breath. So you might want to look at a book by Meichenbaum (cognative) and contrast it with one by Skinner (behavioral)? As for the future? who knows? There is a lot of research presently in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. You could look at some of the wellness studies the APA is funding, like attitude and recovery from illness outcome studies. Look at some of Langer's work in retirement homes. If it is just run of the mill structuralism you are concerned about, pick up a copy of An Introduction to the History of Psychology by Hergenhahn at your local college library. Hope this helps, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), April 13, 2001.

It is true that a significant portion of Titchener's scientific program was to break consciousness down into its elements: sensations, images, feelings. He did not, however, exclude emotion from his studies. Chapter 9 of his _Outline of Psychology_ (3rd ed., 1899) is explicitly about the topic. There was, of course, no reference to computers in Titchener's writings. He was working decades before computers were invented. Modern cognitive psychology, by contrast, uses the computer as its basic model for theory building, but by and large (though there are exceptions) makes little explicit reference to consciousness. Its main object is, rather, to explain the nature and function of mental representation ("intentionality" to use Brentano's 19th-century term). It is true that some cognitive scientists -- esp. Newell & Simon -- used verbal (and therefore presumably conscious) reports of people's problem-solving strategies in order to build computer models of problem-solving, but this is only one of many cognitive methodologies. Indeed, many cogintive scientists (see esp. Pylyshyn's _Computation & Cognition_, 1984) virutally define their subject matter by that which is "cognitively impenetrable" (i.e., not conscious).

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), April 13, 2001.

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