PSYC85H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 15: Language Acquisition Device, Cartesian Linguistics, Eugene Galanter
Document Summary
Like humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology emerged in part as a reaction to behaviourism. The tender-minded constituency that had been attracted to humanistic psychology was quite different from the one that initiated and developed cognitive psychology. The study of cognition appealed to academic psychologists who regarded themselves as. They regarded behaviourism as too narrow and wanted to replace it with an approach that not only integrated aspects of psychology that behaviourism appeared to leave out, but that was genuinely scientific. The emergence of information theory and computer science after ww2 provided a framework for cognitive psychology, as did chomsky"s revolutionary theory of language. Cognition is a complex area of psychological inquiry that contains a large number of topics. The oxford english dictionary defines cognition as the action or faculty of knowing . Thus, cognitive psychology investigates those processes by which we understand ourselves and our environment: these processes include attention, memory, concepts, imagery, problem-solving, reasoning, judgment, and language.
