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Program Studi Psikologi

SEJARAH SINGKAT

1. The Origins of Cognitive PsychologyHuman thought processes have intrigued philosophers and other

theorists for more than 2.000 years. For example, the Greed philosopher

Aristotle proposed laws for learning and memory and emphasized theimportance of mental imagery (Mayer, 1983). As Hearnshaw (1987)notes, cognitive psychology is both the oldest and the newestcomponent in the history of psychology.

However, the year 1879 is usually celebrated as the birthday ofscientific psychology because it was then that Wilhelm Wundt(pronounced Voont) opened his laboratory in a small lecture room inLeipzig, Germany. Thus psychology emerged as a new discipline thatwas separate from philosophy and physiology. Within several years,students flocked from around the world to study with Wundt, whoeventually sponsored 186 PhD dissertation in psychology (Hearst,1979).

Wundt proposed that psychology should study conscious experience,using introspection. Instrospection, in this case, meant trainedobservers attending carefully to their own sensations and reportingthem as objectively as possible (Gardner, 1985; Posner, 1986). Theseobservers were encouraged to describe the sensations they felt, ratherthan the stimulus that produced the sensations. They were alsoinstructed to report thoughts and images without attempting to givethem meaning.

As Gardner (1985), stresses, Wundt worked continuously for 50 years

to promote the introspective technique through journals andconferences. His work emphasized careful training of observers, the useof relevant controls, and the replication of experiments. Thesetechniques have been incorporated in 20th century research on cognitiveprocesses. For example, most of the research papers discussed in thisbook include several replications, or experiments in which aphenomenon is tested under different conditions.

In many ways, Wundts careful, rigorous methods were similar topresent-day cognitive research. Wundt specifically wrote, however thathigher mental processes such as thinking, language, and problemsolving could not be appropriately investigated with the instrospective

technique.Not all of Wundts colleagues adopted the instrospective technique,

however. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1913), for example, devised his ownmethods for studying human memory. He constructed more than 2.000nonsense syllables (for example DAP) and tested his own ability to learnpairs of theses stimuli. Ebbinghaus examined a variety of factors thatmight influence performance, such as the amount of time between listpresentations. He specifically chose nonsense syllables rather thanmeaningful material so that the stimuli would not have previousassociations with past experiences. Ebbinghauss methods had a

greater influence on cognitive psychology and on other areas ofexperimental psychology than did Wundts introspection technique. For

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example, later researchers were more likely to conduct experimentstesting how selected variables influenced memory than to ask observesto report the sensations produced by a stimulus. However, Gardner(1985) remarks that Ebbinghauss methods encouraged decades ofexperiment psychologists to use meaningless material to study

memory. Unfortunately, they avoid investigating the very differentapproach that humans adopt when they must recall meaningfulmaterial.

Meanwhile, in the United States at the end of the 19th century,American psychologists were more influenced by William James, who isoften called the dean of American psychology. James was not muchimpressed with Wundts introspection technique or Ebbinghaussnonsense words. Instead, he preferred a more informal approach,emphasizing the kinds of psychological questions encountered in dailylie. His book Principles of Psychology (1890) give detailed descriptionabout the stream of human experience and emphasized that the humanmind is active and inquiring. Jamess most significant contributions tothe field of cognitive psychology were his theories about memory. Hisproposals about two different kinds of memory and the distinction hedrew between memory structure and memory process foreshadowedthe important memory models proposed about 80 years later byAtkinson & Shiffrin (1968).

In 1924, an American psychologist named John B. Watson, initiated amajor new force in psychology known as behaviorism. Behaviorism ia anapproach that relies only on objective, observable reactions. Thebehaviorism. Behaviorism is an approach that relies only on objective,

observable reactions. The behaviorists believed that introspection wasunscientific and that consciousness was far too vague to be investigatedproperly. In fact, their emphasis on observable behavior led them toreject any terms referring to mental events, such as image, idea, orthought. Behaviorists classified thinking as simply subvocal speech, andpresumably the tiny movements of the tongue (an observable behavior)could be detected with the appropriate equipment. In other words, ifyou are thinking as you red this sentence, some early behavioristswould have said that you are really just talking to yourself, but soquietly that you cannot be heard. Behaviorists did not believe that iswas necessary to propose a vague, invisible construct such as thought.

Although it is unfortunate that behaviorists refused to study mentalactivity, behaviorism still contributed significantly to the methods ofcurrent cognitive psychology. Behaviorists stressed that conceptsshould be carefully and precisely defined. For example, performancemight be defined as the number of trials that a rat required to completeit maze without error. Current cognitive psychology research alsoemphasized precise definitions. For example, a cognitive researchermust use a precise definition for memory. In addition, behaviorismstressed experimental control. As a result research psychologistsprimarily studied animals other than humans, because animals can be

reared under far more carefully specified conditions than human.



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Clearly, then, behaviorists rarely studied the kinds of human highermental processes that interest contemporary cognitive psychologists.

Behaviorism thrived in the United States for several decades, but ithad less influence on European psychology. An important newdevelopment in Europe at the turn of the century was Gestalt. Gestalt

psychology is an approach that emphasizes that humans have basictendencies to organize what they see and that the whole is greater thanthe sum of its parts. Consider, for example, the first seven notes of thesong Yankee Doodle. The melody that results is more than simplyseven tones strung together, it seems to have unity and organization. Ithas a Gestalt, or overall quality that transcends the individual elements(Gardner,1985).

The Gestalt psychologists strongly objected to the introspectivetechnique of analyzing experiences into separate components, becausethey stressed that the whole experience is inherently organized. TheGestalt psychologists constructed a number of laws that explain, whycertain components of a pattern seem to belong together. For example,the law of proximity or nearness states that items tend to be groupedtogether when they are physically close to each other.

Gestalt psychologists also emphasized the importance of insight inproblem solving. Initially, the parts of a problem seem unrelated to eachother, but with a sudden flash of insight, the parts fit together into asolution. Most of the early research in problem solving was conductedby Gestalt psychologists; their work represents an importantcontribution to cognitive psychology.

While the behaviorists were dominant in the United States and the

Gestalt psychologists were influential on the Continent, a Britishpsychologists named Frederick C. Bartlett was conducting his researchon human memory. His important book Remembering : AnExperimental and Social Study (Barlett, 1932), rejected theexperimental methods of Ebbinghaus. Instead, Barlett used meaningfulmaterial such a length stories, and examined how peoples mental setinfluenced their later recall of the material. Bartletts work was largelyignored in the United States during the 1930s, because Americanpsychologists were so enamored with the experimental methodology ofbehaviorism. However, his work was later discovered by Americanpsychologists and is quite similar to the schema-based approach to

memory that currently popular (Mandler, 1985).We have briefly traced the historical roots of cognitive psychology,

but when was this new approach actually born?. There is generalagreement that the birthdate should be listed as 1956 (Gardner, 1985;Simon, 1981). During this busy year, a large number of researcherspublished influential books and articles on attention, memory, language,concept formation, and problem solving. Some psychologists evenspecify a single day on which cognitive psychology was born. OnSeptember 11, 1956, many of the important researchers attended asymposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Enthusiasm for the cognitive approach grew rapidly, so that by about1960, there were major changes in methodology, approach, and



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attitudes (Mandler, 1985). Another important point was the publicationof Ulric Neissers book Cognitive Psychology (Neisser, 1967). In fact , theincreasing enthusiasm for the cognitive approach has sometimes beencalled the Cognitive Revolution. Several factors contributed to thedramatic rise in popularity of cognitive psychology :

1. Psychologists were becoming increasingly disappointed with thebehaviorist outlook that dominated American psychology. Is wasdifficult to explain complex human behavior using only the term andconcepts from traditional behaviorist learning theory such as astimuli, responses and reinforcement.

2. Linguists, such as Noam Chomsky (1957), rejected the behavioristapproach to language acquisition and emphasized the mentalprocesses necessary for language use. Specifically, these linguistsproposed that the structure of language was too complex to beexplained in behaviorist terms. Many linguists argued that humanshave the inborn ability to master language, and idea that clearlycontradicted the behaviorists emphasis on learning in the acquisitionof language.

3. Memory research began to blossom at the end of the 1950s.Researchers explored the possibility of different kinds of memory,examined its organization, and proposed models of it. Behavioralterms were of limited usefulness in the area.

4. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, had been constructing a new theoryof developmental psychology that emphasized how children come tounderstand concepts such as object permanence. His books began tobe appreciated by American psychologists and educators toward the

end of the 1950s.5. Perhaps most important, the information-processing approach wasdeveloped. This approach was developed from origins in thecommunication sciences and in computer science, and this viewappealed to many psychologists. Two important components of theinformation-processing approach are :a. that a mental process is interpreted as a flow on information

through various stages,b. a mental process can be better understood by comparing it with

the operations of computer

DAFTAR PUSTAKAMatlin, Margaret W. 1989. Cognition. Second Edition. Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, Inc, New York


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