The 'cognitive revolution', and the decline of behaviourism (1956-1967). The shift within psychology from an emphasis on observable behaviour to mental processes occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. For the first half of the twentieth century, psychological research was dominated by Behaviourist principles. Behaviourists initially ruled out considering any 'mental events' occurring between stimulus and response. When psychologists such as Tolman in 1932 described experimental animals as showing 'purpose' in their behaviour, and Bartlett spoke of 'remembering', the 'empty mind', the radical version of behaviourism began to run into problems.\nWithin a decade, applied psychological research began to investigate cognitive functions like attention, vigilance and decision making during the Second World War. The rapid development of computer technology (for instance, Alan Turing's Colossus computer designed to decode German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park) during the war, and information theory shortly after, provided additional impetus to those psychologists who were interested in how humans processed information, rather than just observable behaviour. \nInformation theory was developed by Claude Shannon during his time working at Bell Labs in the USA. He published the major part of his 'Mathematical theory of communication' in 1948. The main aim of information theory was to predict the capacity needed on any one network to transmit different types of information. Shannon defined information as something that contains unpredictable news the predictable is not information (and so does not need to be transmitted). For instance, consider the sentence 'only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd. English speakers can read it easily because the regularities in English make some information in sentences so predictable that it is redundant. Information depends on uncertainty what is certain is redundant. Shannon also argued that symbols (e.g. words, icons, mathematical equations) are used to transmit information between people. Once the information is coded into the appropriate symbols, it is transmitted (e.g. spoken, drawn, written) and decoded at the other end. To decode these symbols, the receiver must match them against his or her own body of information to extract the data. In September of 1956, the twenty-seven-year-old Noam Chomsky delivered a paper entitled 'Three Models for the Description of Language' as part of a three-day MIT symposium on information theory. This contained contained the germ of Chomsky's cognitive approach to language. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon also presented work on problem solving with a 'logic machine,' and there were papers on signal detection and human information processing. This symposium and these papers in particular have been considered by some to mark the launch of the study of cognitive science. Although the battle was essentially played out between traditional linguists and supporters of Chomsky's model of generative linguistics, it had implications well beyond linguistics. This was because traditional structural linguistic theories were grounded in behaviourism and learning theory, while Chomsky's work directly challenged both the intellectual and political underpinnings of traditional structural approaches to grammar, and by implication, Behaviourism. At the same time, George Miller's work on the 'magic' number seven (the supposed limit of short term memory) began work on 'chunking' and memory from an information processing perspective.Chomsky's savage review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) appeared in the influential journal Language in 1959. In a letter to Robert Barsky, the author of Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent, Chomsky explains that: It wasn't Skinner's crazy variety of behaviorism that interested me particularly, but the way it was being used in Quinean empiricism and 'naturalization of philosophy,' a gross error in my opinion. That was important, Skinner was not. The latter was bound to collapse shortly under the weight of repeated failures. (31 March, 1995). \n\nCognitive psychology has grown rapidly since the events of the late 1950s. Ulric Neisser's 1967 textbook, Cognitive Psychology, gave a new legitimacy to the field, with its six chapters on perception and attention and four chapters on language, memory, and thought. Following Neisser's work, another important event was the beginning of the Journal Cognitive Psychology in 1970. This journal has done much to give definition to the field. Of course, just as cognitive psychology didn't begin in 1956, but can trace its roots much earlier, so Behaviourism didn't stop being an influential approach in psychology at the same time. Quite apart from the lasting legacy of experimental methodology, behavioural research is still widely conducted in psychology departments today, although radical behaviourism is largely dismissed.\nIt should also be noted that some psychologists have claimed that a second cognitive revolution occurred in the 1990s, with the rise in prominence of models of situated cognition, distributed cognition, and socio-cultural and social constructionist approaches that stress the role of artefacts or tools and social interaction, as well as meaning in cognitive processes and hence the importance of language in human interactions. \n\nSources: Barsky, R. (1997) Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent. Available electronically at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/chomsky/Baars, B.J. (1986). The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology, New York, The Guilford Press Written by: Course Team 
Face perception. This refers to our capacity (from quite a young age) to distinguish individual and unique faces.
Modelling theoretical, cognitive, neurological. A psychological model is a theoretical construct which aims to help psychologists understand psychological phenomena through simplification. This is done by developing a representation that aims to represent important aspects of the phenomenon through reducing it to its essential features. By ignoring the less central aspects of the phenomenon, and focussing on a few, important aspects, the model can then help psychologists think about and explain the key processes involved in the phenomenon. This definition would apply to any kind of theoretical modelling, though models can often take a mathematical form, sometimes in the shape of a computer program. In this way, computers can be used as a tool in studying psychological processes in particular, they are often used to study cognitive processes, such as perception. \nResearchers can use models in several ways: firstly, they would use their existing knowledge to try to identify the essential features of, for example, perception or problem-solving. Initially, this might simply be put in the form of a 'flow diagram', representing the essential stages of the psychological process being studied, with arrows to show the flow of information etc. This theoretical model could then be taken a stage further through being represented mathematically, and perhaps even written as a computer program. The program could then be run to examine predicted performances, for any given input. Researchers then compare the performances of the program with human cognitive processes, to see how closely they match. Research using such models has advantages over research directly on the brain in that it is much simpler, and is also appropiate for detailed analysis (in a way we simply cannot do with the enormous complexity of the brain's network).\nThe need for precise specification in a computer program, arguably has the merit of forcing the cognitive scientist to explain clearly exactly how every aspect of their theoretical model actually operates. This has often shown just how sophisticated apparently 'simple' human activities are such as perceiving a cup of tea and picking it up. Modelling these activities is a considerable challenge for cognitive scientists, and has been a valuable source of insight into some of the processes involved in such typical human activity.\nThe principles of psychological modelling have also been used to develop mathematical models that represent and simplify the complex interactions withina system of neurons in the brain (referred to as neural nets). Models of neural networks work on a quite different mathematical basis from cognitive models based on a precisely specifying every action taken. Models of neural networks use a more 'associative' type of model, where the patterns of interactions between different 'neurons' leads to an output which varies according to the stimulus. By being exposed to a range of stimuli, the model can go through stages of 'learning', which may shed some light on, for example, the ways in which human language is learnt.
Social cognition. This field of psychology examines the processing of social knowledge - perceiving, thinking, judging and explaining objects, events, relationships and issues in the social world. As a broad topic it involves some attempt to integrate cognitive and social psychology. It tends to depend on the experimental methods of cognitive psychology and thus is a substantial part of EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
