The Cognitive Revolution and Scientific Study of Psychology Essay

The cognitive revolution in psychology was a head during the 1950s and 1960s which involved radical changes to two major concepts in psychology which are consciousness and causality. It was also a period that saw to the abolition of traditional science values of dichotomy and the worship of atomisation in science, replacing reductive micro deterministic views of personhood with holistic top-down view (Overskeid, 2008)The target area of this essay is to give an account of what constitutes the cognitive revolution, and also assess the contributions that the cognitive revolution has made to the scientific subscribe of psychology. The cognitive revolution represents a opposite turn around in the centurys old treatment of mind and consciousness in science, such as the contents of conscious experience, whose congenital qualities were being discarded as mere causal epiphenomena (Sperry 1993). This paradigm shift brought with it alternative beliefs about the ultimate nature of things th ereby bringing forth radical answers to some of humanities deepest questions. The key assumption of cognitivism is that people have divergent mental states each of which can lead to a different response. The manipulation of these different states can be described in terms of algorithms all of which has become the defining paradigm of psychology (Sperry 1993)One major contribution that cognitivism had on the study of psychology as a science came in the form of psychological theories. It returned the conditioning theory as well as comparative psychology endure to a position where they recognized the there were a number of qualitative differences between the psychological processing of humans and animal (Greenwood, 1999). This is as a leave alone of the empirical prob... ...an Psychology. American psychologist, 47(2), 308-318Robins R.W, Gosling S.D & Craik R.H (1999) An Empirical Analysis of Trends in Psychology. American psychologists, 54,(2), 117-128Vosniadou S. (1996) TOWARDS A REVISED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY FOR NEW ADVANCES IN LEARNING AND INSTRUCTION. Learning and instruction,6( 2), 95-109.Sperry R. (1993) The shock absorber and Promise of the Cognitive Revolution. American Psychologist 48 (8) 878-885Overskeid, Geir. (2008, January 1). They should have survey about the consequences the crisis of cognitivism and a second chance for behavior analysis The Free Library. (2008). Retrieved January 01, 2011 from http//www.thefreelibrary.com/They should have thought about the consequences the crisis of...-a0175445637Newell, A., Shaw, J. C., & Simon, H. (1958). Elements of a theory of problem solving. Psychological Review, 84, 231259.