Lecture
The emergence of cognitive psychology as a scientific direction is dated
to the 1950s—1960s. Historians of psychology consider it a revolution
in the science, connected with the return of researchers' interest to the problems of con-
sciousness, cognition, mental processes, and so on. Since the history of psy-
chology is written mainly by American authors, the following cor-
rection may be made: the revolution took place only in American psychology,
since the representatives of the European psychological tradition, which
goes back to the school of W. Wundt and German psychophysiology (H. Helmholtz,
T. Miller, G.T. Fechner, and others), had always retained an interest in consciousness and cog-
nition. The «cognitive revolution» in the views of the American behavior-
ists was connected first of all with the transplanting of the German psychologi-
cal school onto American soil in the period between the two world
wars. What is meant is the mass emigration to the USA of the most prominent leaders
of Gestalt psychology. In addition, American researchers became acquain-
ted with the works of J. Piaget and his school. Finally, within the mainstream of the most ortho-
dox behaviorism itself the preconditions matured for a revision of the para-
digm. E. Guthrie, one of the pillars of behaviorism, harshly criticized the ortho-
dox approach. In his view, psychologists ought to be concerned with
describing perceptual and cognitive processes in order to understand the mean-
ing of stimuli for the organism.
An important role was played by the research of E. Tolman. Edward Chace Tolman
was the founder of the system of purposive behaviorism.
In his view, an acting organism has a certain goal, that is, a certain psy-
chical (mental) formation, which is utterly incompatible with the dog-
ma of classical behavioral psychology. Since any behavior
is purposive, the «stimulus—response» scheme does not explain its
The principal theoretical approaches in cognitive psychology
emergence. Having said «A», Tolman was compelled to say «B», and, in order to
explain behavior, he introduced a set of unobservable factors which were
called intervening variables. By these he meant
internal «mental» processes which determined behav-
ior alongside stimuli, mediating their action. Investigating the phenomenon of la-.
tent learning, as well as the formation of the classic skill by which
rats find the exit in a cross-shaped maze, Tolman came to the conclusion
that the organism does not memorize a combination of stimuli and responses but for-
ms an internal «cognitive map». Its presence makes it possible to reach the goal
by various routes, regardless of where the starting point of the
search was. The intervening variables could not be observed di-"
rectly; they were «constructed» by the researcher in order to explain
behavior, but they could be measured indirectly, through the parame-
ters of behavior and its dynamics in different situations. The «naive» concep-
tions psychologists held about the scientific method (more precisely, the natural-scientific one) were
overcome.
In the end, the activity of a theoretical psychologist explaining the re-
sults of a behavioral experiment by invoking «intervening
variables» is in no way different from the work of a physicist explaining the re-
sults of a physical experiment. He too is compelled to introduce theore-
tical constructs which are not directly measurable at the given
moment but which explain changes in the object's characteristics under study. Naive
positivism was overcome by psychology somewhat later than by theoreti-
cal physics. The revolution in natural science in the 1920s—1930s, the emer-
gence of quantum mechanics and its «Copenhagen interpretation» (Niels
Bohr and his students) led to the introduction of the observer as a constituent
part of any physical experiment and, as a consequence, revived in-
terest in consciousness and cognition.
And yet the decisive contribution to the revision of the traditional study of human
cognition was made by the representatives of a new direction of psychologi-
cal thought — the cognitive psychologists, who used the «com-
puter metaphor» to describe the human psyche.
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