Lecture
In terms of its problematics and its scientific achievements, the psychology of cognition occupies a central place in the structure of general psychology. Yet hardly anyone
doubts that Socrates' call "Know thyself" and Descartes' formula "I think, there-
fore I am" are just as relevant for us today. And, of course, no one can give an exhaustive answer to the question "What is truth?"
At the basis of the contemporary psychology of cognition lie the achievements of the natural-scientific thought of twentieth-century researchers, as well as the philosophical theory of knowledge. A turning point in the development of ideas about the human being as a knower of the world was the emergence and spread of the theory of
critical rationalism of Karl Popper and his students. The passive-reflective approach to human cognition was contrasted with a model of a human being who actively generates conjectures about the surrounding world
and processes the knowledge obtained in the course of exploratory activity in order to correct those conjectures.
Popper's theory of knowledge rests on a number of basic premises.
All people solve problems. Problems exist objectively.
For each problem an in principle infinite number of hypotheses is possible.
A problem is solved by eliminating hypotheses through trial and error, i.e. in the course of active experimentation.
A person does not know in advance which hypotheses are correct and which are erroneous.
Unsuccessful hypotheses are either eliminated or corrected, and the cycle of cognition begins anew.
Thus, Popper's position is the opposite of inductivism, whose representatives believe that the decisive role in cognition is played by
learning through repetition and the finding of a justification for a solution. He
proclaims the primacy of the deductive approach and of two basic mechanisms of cognition: the selection of conjectures and the critical elimination of errors.
The human being is active; he acts, and in the course of his activity he encounters problems (for example, an obstacle or the novelty of a situation).
A person conducts a constant search for information in order to solve problems, but in order to know what to look for, he puts forward conjectures.
A person possesses a psyche - a system that generates hypotheses about
the surrounding world ("versions of the world") and compares those hypotheses with the information obtained in the course of an active search.
A person generates his own subjective model of the world, or "image of the world" in A.N. Leontiev's terms [1975], which can never be fully adequate, since induction is always incomplete.
~" «A person behaves as though he were persistently trying to guess the rules of the game by which nature is "playing" with him» (V.M. Allakhverdov
[2000]).
For carrying out habitual, automatized actions in a familiar situation, psychic regulation and cognition are not needed. Only when a person encounters an obstacle, a new situation, in
the view of P.Ya. Galperin [1976], do the psychic mechanisms of orienting activity switch on. In higher animals, orienting, exploratory activity is autonomous and separated from executive activity.
Other preconditions of the contemporary psychology of cognition are the quantum-mechanical revolution in physics and the emergence of synergetics. A probabilistic description of events is regarded not as an acknowledgement of the incompleteness of our knowledge of the laws of the world, but as an adequate expression of processes, as
a measure of an object's propensity toward a certain behavior, inherent in the object itself. The spectrum of possibilities that an object actually possesses
is infinitely large, but in interaction with other objects (the environment, the observer, an instrument) only one possibility out of
many is realized. The future is objectively open and not fully predictable, change in the world is irreversible, the world is open to the appearance of new realities; stable systems arise within it as a result of the self-organization of chaos.
A person does not live in a world of separate objects: he is a complex system existing in interaction with another system - with the natural
and sociocultural environment. It is not stimuli that act upon a person; rather,
he himself actively interacts with the whole of the actual situation.
Finally, an enormous impact on the contemporary psychology of cognition has been exerted by the results of research in psychophysiology, neuropsychology and
neurophysiology obtained in the second half of the twentieth century. This period
is characterized by a revolution in the sphere of the brain sciences and the neural mechanisms of information processing. Thus, the psychology of human cognition
rests on information about:
"what is known" - knowledge about the structure of the world;
"who knows" - knowledge about the structure of the human being as a knowing system;
"how one knows" - ideas drawn from philosophy (the theory of knowledge).
Methodological principles and the subject matter of the psychology of cognition. Why does a person seek knowledge? Neither philosophy, nor natural science, nor psychology gives an answer to this question. The psychologist attempts to discover the laws, the "mechanisms", of individual human cognition. A person, as in a mirror, discovers himself in the products of his own creative work. The computer revolution, which has transformed the life of most of humanity,
has also changed psychologists' ideas about human knowledge and the mechanisms of its acquisition. The computer is the only psychic
system, the only implement of labor, intended to assist
a person in carrying out functions that have conventionally always been considered purely mental: deductive inference, calculation, the control of objects, the storage and transformation of information, and so on.
Psychologists, engineers and philosophers made use of the principle of structural-functional analogy: the similarity between the functions of the computer and those of "man the knower" made it possible to speak of a similarity between the structures that realize these functions. In this way the "computer metaphor" penetrated into psychology.
An enormous role in the formation of contemporary psychology was played by the development of mathematics and, in particular, of such branches of it as the theory of algorithms,
the theory of finite automata, information theory, mathematical linguistics and so on. Mention should also be made of the achievements of linguists, who broadened
our ideas about language and about grammatical and semantic structures.
It is not by chance that this book is entitled "Cognitive Psychology". The title may be misleading, since by cognitive psychology we
are accustomed to understand one of the schools within psychology that arose at the end
of the 1950s in the USA and that relies on the information-processing approach. The psychology of cognition, or the psychology of cognitive processes, is a traditional field that includes the psychology of sensation and perception, of memory, imagination, attention, and thinking, i.e. branches of general psychology.
The field of cognitive psychology, understood as a scientific school,
is considerably broader: from psychophysiology to social psychology and even
sociology. It is rather a general approach to solving problems that arise
in various sciences. But another understanding of cognitive psychology is also possible, namely, as the science of the processes by which a person acquires, stores, transforms, generates and applies knowledge.
Understood in this way, cognitive psychology encompasses, alongside the processes listed above, the processes of creativity, decision making, evaluation, semantic processes, the processes of comprehension and speech processes, and systemic cognitive processes (intelligence, metacognitive control, and so on). The sphere of cognitive psychology
inevitably includes the differential psychology of cognitive abilities and the psychology of cognitive development. Thus, cognitive psychology is the psychology of cognition at the present stage of its development.
Let us define which stage may be characterized as the present one.
The origins of the psychology of cognition, which initially developed, like all
psychological knowledge, within the bosom of philosophy, go back to antiquity, to
the works of Democritus, Plato and Aristotle. The formation of experimen-
tal psychology in the middle of the nineteenth century is likewise connected first and foremost with the solution of problems of cognition and consciousness.
However, despite the enormous contribution made to the development of psychology by its founders, their works are today of largely historical
interest. Let us give them their due.
A cardinal shift in the approach to human cognition occurred
in the 1930s-1950s. It was precisely by this time that a revolution had been accomplished in natural science and in the theory of knowledge, the first computers had been created, and psychology had attained a high level of development as an independent
discipline, equal in its capabilities to the other sciences.
However, inductivism is not a prejudice but a methodological foundation that many researchers still choose today. In the approach to human cognition, representatives of two main schools are in dispute. Representatives of the first hold that cognition
is carried out in a mediated way: a person puts forward hypotheses, poses questions to the world, and experiments; information about reality is incomplete from the outset and must be supplemented and rechecked; the psyche is "richer" than the perceived world, and not all knowledge is conscious. Representatives of the second school hold that the basis of our knowledge is direct perception: the person is passive, he reflects only what the world presents to him; the stimulation contains the full completeness of information; the psyche is "poorer" than the information coming from the world, and all knowledge is conscious.
Naturally, the division between these approaches is entirely conventional. Yet, as a first approximation, one may hold that the positions of the neobehaviorists, the cognitive psychologists, and the proponents of the activity approach, such as A.N. Leontiev [1975] and S.L. Rubinstein [1999], stand closer to the first direction. Correspondingly, the Gestalt psychologists (only in part!) and the ecological psychologists represent the second direction. The first position goes back to I. Kant, who maintained that perception, contrary to the claims of
the empiricists and associationists, is the result of the mind's active work in organizing the elements of experience into a unified structure. Correspondingly,
the empiricism of J. Locke and J. S. Mill and the psychology of consciousness are the forerunners of the second direction.
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