" Main directions

Cognitive psychology (cognitivism)

Cognitive psychology - the direction of modern psychological science studying cognitive processes. It originates from the writings of Wolfgang Köhler (1917) on the great apes and Jean Piaget's observations on the development of children's intelligence (1927).

As an independent industry, it took shape in the 1950s and early 1960s, when D. Miller, together with D. Bruner, created the first Center for Cognitive Research at Harvard University in 1960.

Famous representatives of cognitivism are also R. Atkinson, L. Festinger, D. Kelly and others.

The main prerequisites for its occurrence:

• the inability of behaviorism and psychoanalysis to explain human behavior without referring to the elements of consciousness;
• development of computing systems and cybernetics;
• development of modern linguistics.

The most famous achievements of cognitive psychology:

• causal attribution theory (the theory of how people explain the behavior of others);
• the theory of personal constructs by D. Kelly (claims that each event is recognized and interpreted different people differently because each individual is endowed with a unique system of constructs or schemas).

The word "cognitive" comes from the Latin verb coghoscere, to know.

Cognition is a collective designation of purposeful efforts made to find, recognize, recognize, understand, distinguish, classify, discuss objects, and also process them, that is, change them through mental operations (from concretization to abstraction).

Psychologists who have united around this approach argue that a person is not a machine that blindly and mechanically responds to stimuli (internal factors or events during outside world). On the contrary, much more is available to the human mind: to analyze information about reality, to make comparisons, to make decisions, to solve problems that arise before it every minute.

Thus, cognitivism is based on the interpretation of a person as a being who understands, analyzes, because he is in the world of information that needs to be understood, evaluated, used.

In other words, cognitive psychology differs from behavioral theories " stimulus - response the fact that it does not imply a unilinear direction of the causality of behavior, but is guided by the theory of self-regulation and self-organization of the systems under study. From here, other methodological paradigms of cognitivism are distinguished, aimed at complex systemic connections in the process of cognition.

The main objects of study are such cognitive processes as perception, memory, thinking, attention, imagination and speech. Pattern recognition, artificial and human intelligence are also areas of interest for cognitive psychology.

Cognitive psychology appeared in the 60s of the last century. This branch of psychology belongs to modern trends in the study of cognitive processes.

The word "cognitive" comes from (from the Latin cognition - "knowledge"), and in translation (from English cognitive - "cognitive"), thus, we can say that cognitive psychology is a part of psychological science that studies cognitive actions.

Research in cognitive psychology tends to be fraught with problems related to:

• with memory;
• emotions;
• attention;
• thinking (including logical;
• imagination;
• ability to make certain decisions.

Numerous statements of cognitive psychology are the basis of the current psycholinguistics. The conclusions of cognitive psychology are widely used in other segments of psychological science, such as social, personality and educational psychology.

At present, the formation of cognitive psychology is largely based on the establishment of similarities between the processes that are cognitive in nature in humans and the transformed data. computer technology. Thus, multiple design elements (blocks) were selected, the actions of which were aimed at cognition and execution, primarily in relation to memory (Richard Atkinson).

The theory that the psyche is a kind of device with a fixed ability to transform the received signals has gained maximum advancement in cognitive psychology. A significant place in this theory was given to the internal cognitive device of a person, which was a kind of system for storing, inputting and outputting data, taking into account its throughput. In this case, an analogy was drawn between the work of the brain and a personal computer.

A bit of history

This direction of psychology originated in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States of America. Before the emergence of cognitive psychology in the form in which it is now, specialists in the field of this science tried to work on the difficulties that arose in the process of cognition. A few centuries ago, scientists tried to study thinking not only from a philosophical point of view, but also from a scientific one.

The greatest concreteness in the psychology that exists today was brought by such the scholars of that time like:

• Descartes;
• Kant.

The concept of Descartes, namely the structure of psychological science he created, resulted in the study of his psyche experimental methods. Hume sought to define the laws of associative thinking and systematized mental processes. For Kant, in turn, consciousness is a system, and acquired skills (experience) are data that fill this system.

It would be wrong to believe that only these philosophers are considered the basis of cognitive psychology. Of course, not only they, but also other scientists from other fields of knowledge have made their own contribution to the formation and development of this area of ​​psychological science.

It is believed that the impetus for the emergence of cognitive psychology was a meeting held in 1956 at the Massachusetts University of Science and Technology. It was the beginning of a revolution in psychology, which is based on the emergence of interest in the features of human cognition and in the cognitive process itself.

The emerging new trend in psychology was aimed at:

• behavioral current;
• removal of the mental element from the assessment of behavior;
• ignoring actions aimed at the formation of cognitive processes and development.

The final foundation of cognitive psychology was neobehaviorism. Then, starting from the view of the human body as a system that is engaged in obtaining information with its subsequent processing, a new aspect was invented. This aspect is based on the concept that society has various kinds of impact on the information received.

Mankind processes the received data into a different configuration, selecting specific indicators with their further processing or complete elimination due to uselessness. During this period, cognitive psychology confidently stands on its own methodological platform, which is due to the rapid development computer technology and the emergence of new abstract studies in the field of psychology.

Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology

The main subject of research in cognitive psychology are such cognitive processes as:

• memory;
• speech;
• imagination;
• the senses;
• thinking.

As methods, chronometric methods are taken, based on a clear recording of the period of time that was required to solve an existing problem or the speed of reaction to a received signal. Introspective methods in this case are unacceptable, since they do not have the correctness and accuracy that is necessary in the study of marked objects.

All configurations of the human cognitive process and its activity are similar to the operations of a personal computer.

The problems of cognitive psychology include the following factors:

At the moment, in cognitive psychology, which has undergone a decline, a new experimental project is being formed that explores language as the main conditional concept used by the individual to solve various kinds of problems.

The student of cognitive, i.e. cognitive processes of human consciousness. Research in this area is usually related to issues of memory, attention, feelings, representation of information, logical thinking, imagination, decision-making ability. Cognitive psychology studies how people get information about the world, how this information is represented by a person, how it is stored in memory and converted into knowledge, and how this knowledge affects our attention and behavior.

Cognitive psychology as we know it today took shape over the two decades between 1950 and 1970. Three main factors influenced its appearance. The first was human performance research, intensively conducted during World War II, when data was desperately needed on how to train soldiers to use sophisticated equipment and how to deal with attention deficits. Behaviorism was of no help in answering such practical questions.

The second approach, closely related to the information approach, is based on advances in computer science, especially in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The essence of AI is to make computers behave intelligently. The third area that influenced cognitive psychology was linguistics. In the 1950s N. Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began to develop a new way to analyze the structure of a language. His work showed that language was much more complex than previously thought, and that many of the behaviorist formulations could not account for these complexities.

After the First World War and until the 60s. Behaviorism and psychoanalysis (or their offshoots) have so dominated American psychology that cognitive processes have been almost completely forgotten. Not many psychologists have been interested in how knowledge is acquired. Perception - the most fundamental cognitive act - has been studied mainly by a small group of researchers who followed the "Gestalt" tradition, as well as by some other psychologists who were interested in the problems of measurement and the physiology of sensory processes.

J. Piaget and his collaborators studied cognitive development, but their work was not widely recognized. Attention work was missing. Memory research never completely stopped, but it was mainly focused on the analysis of the memory of "nonsense syllables" in well-defined laboratory situations, in relation to which only the results obtained made sense. As a result, in the eyes of society, psychology turned out to be a science dealing mainly with sexual problems, adaptive behavior and behavior control.

In the past few years, the situation has changed radically. Mental processes again found themselves in the center of lively interest. A new field has emerged called cognitive psychology.

This course of events was due to several reasons, but the most important of them was, apparently, the appearance of electronic computers (computers). It turned out that the operations performed by the electronic computer itself are in some respects similar to cognitive processes. The computer receives information, manipulates symbols, stores elements of information in “memory” and retrieves them again, classifies input information, recognizes configurations, and so on.

The advent of the computer has long been a necessary confirmation that cognitive processes are quite real, that they can be investigated and even, perhaps, understood. Along with the computer also appeared new dictionary and a new set of concepts related to cognitive activity; terms such as information, input, processing, coding, subroutine have become commonplace.

As the concept of information processing evolved, trying to follow the flow of information in a "system" (i.e., the brain) became the primary goal in this new field.

When analyzing the historical conditions that prepared the emergence of cognitive psychology, the fact that this was preceded by an intensive development of work on measuring the reaction time of a person, when he, in response to incoming signals, must press the corresponding button as soon as possible, remains in the shade. Such measurements were carried out a long time ago, even in the laboratories of W. Wundt. But now they have taken on a different meaning.

It is impossible to get around one more undeservedly forgotten circumstance that preceded the emergence of cognitive psychology and influenced its formation " appearance". A feature of the scientific product of cognitivists is its visible and strict outlines in the form geometric shapes, or models. These models consist of blocks (R. Solso often uses the expression "boxes in the head"), each of which performs a strictly defined function. Links between blocks indicate the path of information flow from the input to the output of the model. The representation of work in the form of such a model was borrowed by cognitivists from engineers. What engineers called flowcharts, cognitive scientists called models.

What is cognitive psychology for? The basic mechanisms of human thought that cognitive psychology seeks to understand are also important for understanding the various types of behavior studied by other social sciences. For example, knowing how people think is important for understanding certain thought disorders (clinical psychology), the behavior of people when they interact with each other or in groups ( social Psychology), processes of persuasion (political science), ways of making economic decisions (economics), reasons for the greater efficiency of certain ways of organizing groups (sociology), or features of natural languages ​​(linguistics).

Cognitive psychology is thus the foundation on which all other social sciences stand, just as physics is the foundation for other natural sciences.

Concepts of individual representatives of cognitive psychology. The theory of personality constructs George Kelly (1905-1967)

The main provisions are set out in the work "Psychology of Personal Constructs" (1955):

human behavior in Everyday life reminiscent of research activities;

The organization of a person's mental processes is determined by how it anticipates (constructs) future events;

Differences in anticipation of people depend on the characteristics of personality constructs.

A personal construct is a standard of classification and evaluation of phenomena or objects created by the subject according to the principle of their similarity or difference from each other (for example, Russia is similar to Belarus and Ukraine, and is not similar to the United States on the basis).

Personal constructs function on the basis of the following postulates:

The postulate of constructivity: a person anticipates events, constructing his behavior and reactions, taking into account external events;

The postulate of individuality: people differ from each other by the nature of personal constructs;

Postulate of dichotomy: constructs are built in polar categories (white - black);

Postulate of order: the construct ensures the perception of only those phenomena that fall under its characteristic (for example, cheerful);

Postulate of experience: the system of personal constructs changes depending on the experience gained;

The postulate of fragmentation: an individual can use subsystems of constructs that are in conflict with each other;

Generality postulate: under the influence of the same events, similar constructs are formed in people;

The postulate of sociality: a person understands another person as much as he can discover his internal constructs.

People, according to Kelly, differ from each other in how they interpret events.

On the basis of constructs, a person interprets the world around him.

The system of personal constructs is characterized by such a parameter as cognitive complexity (the term was proposed by W. Bayeri). Cognitive complexity reflects the degree of categorical differentiation of human consciousness. Cognitive complexity is characterized by the number of classification bases that a person consciously or unconsciously uses when analyzing the facts of the surrounding reality (the opposite quality is cognitive simplicity).

Kelly developed the “role construct repertoire test” (or the “repertory grids” method), with the help of which the system of human personality constructs is diagnosed.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance

The main provisions are set out in the works "Theory of cognitive dissonance" (1957), "Conflict, decision and dissonance" (1964).

Cognitive dissonance is a tense uncomfortable state of a person, due to the presence in his mind of conflicting knowledge (information) about the same object (phenomenon) and prompting a person to remove this contradiction, that is, to achieve consonance (compliance). In addition, the existence of dissonance encourages a person to avoid situations and information that lead to an increase in this dissonance.

Sources of dissonance:

Logical inconsistency ("people are mortal, but I will live forever");

Inconsistency with cultural patterns (for example, when a teacher yells at students, there is a dissonance with ideas about the image of a teacher);

The inconsistency of this cognitive element with a more general, wider system of cognitions (Mr. "X" always leaves for work early in the morning, but this time he went in the evening);

Inconsistency with past experience of new information.

Theory of causal attribution

The theory of causal attribution (from the Latin causa - cause, attribuo - I attach, endow) is a theory of how people explain the behavior of others. The foundations of this direction were laid by Fritz Heider, continued by Harold Kelly, Edward Johnson, Daniel Gilbert, Lee Ross and others.

The theory of causal attribution proceeds from the following provisions:

People, observing the behavior of another person, seek to find out for themselves the reasons for this behavior;

Limited information encourages people to formulate probable reasons for another person's behavior;

The reasons for the behavior of another person, which people determine for themselves, affect their attitude towards this person.

Haider believed that it was necessary to study the "naive psychology" of the "man in the street" who is guided by common sense explaining the behavior of others. The scientist came to the conclusion that the opinion of a person ( good man — bad person) automatically extends to all his behavior (does the right thing - does the wrong thing).

In the process of attribution (the term was proposed by Lee Ross in 1977), a person often has a fundamental error, that is, a tendency to underestimate situational causes and overestimate dispositional (intrapersonal) causes that affect human behavior. At the same time, a person explains his own behavior mainly from the point of view of the influence of the situation.

The Swiss Jean Piaget (1896-1980) became the creator of the most profound and influential theory of the development of intelligence.

Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896. in Switzerland. in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature. In 1907, when he was 11 years old, his small scientific note was published in the journal of natural history. Piaget's first scientific interests were in biology.

Piaget received his PhD from the University of Neuchâtel. At this time, he begins to get involved in psychoanalysis, a very popular area of ​​\u200b\u200bpsychological thought at that time.

After receiving his degree, Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris, where he taught at a school for boys directed by Alfred Binet, the creator of the IQ test. While helping to process the results of the IQ test, Piaget noticed that young children constantly give incorrect answers to some questions. However, he focused not so much on the wrong answers, but on the fact that children make the same mistakes that are not typical of older people.

This observation led Piaget to theorize that the thoughts and cognitive processes characteristic of children differ significantly from those characteristic of adults. Later, he created general theory stages of development, which states that people who are in the same stage of their development show similar general forms cognitive abilities. In Paris, he worked a lot in the clinic, studied logic, philosophy, psychology, conducted experimental studies on children started without enthusiasm. However, Piaget soon found his own field of study. This was the end of the theoretical and the beginning of the experimental period in the work of Piaget as a psychologist.

Already the first facts from the field of psychology, obtained by Piaget in experiments with children on the standardization of the so-called "reasoning tests" by C. Bert, confirmed this idea of ​​his. The facts obtained showed the possibility of studying the mental processes underlying logical operations. Since then, Piaget's central task has been to study the psychological mechanisms of logical operations, to establish the gradual emergence of stable logical integral structures of the intellect.

In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland and became director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. 1921-1925 - Piaget, using the clinical method, established new forms in the field child development. The most important of them are the discovery of the egocentric nature of children's speech, the qualitative features of children's logic, and the child's ideas of the world that are unique in their content. This discovery - the main achievement of Piaget, which made him a world-famous scientist - the discovery of the child's egocentrism.

In 1929, Piaget accepted an invitation to become director of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education, at the head of which he remained until 1968.

Working in psychology for almost sixty years, Piaget wrote over 60 books and hundreds of articles. He studied the development of a child's play, imitation, speech. In the field of his attention were thinking, perception, imagination, memory, consciousness, will. In addition to psychology, Piaget conducted research in the field of biology, philosophy, logic, turned to sociology and the history of science. In order to understand how human cognition develops, he studied the development of the intellect in the child.

He transformed the basic concepts of other schools: behaviorism (instead of the concept of reaction, he put forward the concept of an operation), gestaltism (gestalt gave way to the concept of structure). The main idea developed in all Piaget's works is that intellectual operations are carried out in the form of integral structures. These structures are achieved through the equilibrium towards which evolution strives.

Your new theoretical ideas Piaget built on a solid empirical foundation - on the material of the development of thinking and speech in a child. In the works of the early 1920s, Speech and Thinking of a Child, Judgment and Inference in a Child, and others, Piaget, using the method of conversation (asking, for example: Why do clouds, water, wind move? Where do dreams come from? Why does a boat float? and etc.), concluded that if an adult thinks socially (i.e., mentally addressing other people), even when he is alone with himself, then the child thinks selfishly, even when he is in the company of others. (He speaks aloud to no one. This speech of his was called egocentric.)

The principle of egocentrism (from the Latin "ego" - I and "centrum" - the center of the circle) reigns over the thought of a preschooler. He is focused on his position (interests, inclinations) and is not able to take the position of another (“decenter”), critically look at his judgments from the outside. These judgments are ruled by the "logic of a dream", which takes away from reality. Egocentrism is the main feature of thinking, the hidden mental position of the child. The peculiarity of children's logic, children's speech, children's ideas about the world are only a consequence of this egocentric mental position. The verbal egocentrism of the child is determined by the fact that the child speaks without trying to influence the interlocutor, and is not aware of the difference between his own point of view and the point of view of others.

These Piagetian conclusions, in which the child looked like a dreamer ignoring reality, were criticized by Vygotsky, who gave his own interpretation of the child's egocentric (not addressed to the listener) speech (see below). At the same time, he highly appreciated the works of Piaget, since they did not talk about what a child lacks compared to an adult (knows less, thinks shallowly, etc.), but about what a child has, what is its internal mental organization. Responding many years later to the critical remarks of L. S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget recognized them to a large extent as fair. He, in particular, agreed that in his early work he "exaggerated the similarities between egocentrism and autism."

Piaget singled out a number of stages in the evolution of children's thought (for example, a kind of magic, when a child hopes to change an external object with a word or gesture, or a kind of animism, when an object is endowed with will or life: "the sun moves because it is alive").

Piaget introduced the concept of grouping into psychology. Before the child establishes logical operations, he performs groupings - combines actions and objects according to their similarity and difference, which, in turn, generate arithmetic, geometric and elementary physical groups.

Being unable to think in abstract terms, to correlate them, etc., the child relies in his explanations on concrete cases. Piaget further identified four stages. Initially, a child's thought is contained in objective actions (up to two years), then they are internalized (pass from external to internal), become pre-operations (actions) of the mind (from 2 to 7 years), at the third stage (from 7 to 11 years) concrete operations, on the fourth (from 11 to 15 years old) - formal operations, when the child's thought is able to build logically sound hypotheses, from which deductive (for example, from general to particular) conclusions are made.

Operations are not performed in isolation. Being interconnected, they create stable and at the same time mobile structures.

The development of a system of mental actions from one stage to another - this is how Piaget presented a picture of consciousness. At first, Piaget was influenced by Freud, believing that the human child, being born, is driven by one motive - the desire for pleasure, not wanting to know anything about reality, which is forced to reckon with only because of the demands of others. But then Piaget recognized as the starting point in the development of the child's psyche the child's real external actions (sensory-motor intelligence, i.e., the elements of thought given in movements that are regulated by sensory impressions).

To identify mechanisms cognitive activity child, Piaget developed a new method psychological research- a method of clinical conversation, when not symptoms are studied ( external signs phenomena), but the processes leading to their occurrence. This method is extremely difficult. It gives the necessary results only in the hands of an experienced psychologist.

According to Piaget, the S → R formula is not sufficient to characterize behavior, since there is no one-sided influence of the object on the subject, but there is an interaction between them. Therefore, it is more correct to write this formula as follows: S↔R or S→(AT)→R, where (AT) is the assimilation of the stimulus S to the structure T. In another version, this formula is written as S→(OD)→R, where (OD) is the organizing activity of the subject.

The limitation of the formula S → R is determined, according to Piaget, by the following circumstance. In order for a stimulus to elicit a response, the subject must be sensitive to that stimulus.

What does Piaget's genetic psychology study? The object of this science is the study of the origin of the intellect. It studies how fundamental concepts are formed in a child: object, space, time, causality. She studies the child's ideas about natural phenomena: why the sun, the moon do not fall, why clouds move, why rivers flow, why the wind blows, where does the shadow come from, etc. Piaget is interested in the features of children's logic and, most importantly, the mechanisms of the child's cognitive activity, which hidden behind the outer picture of his behavior.

The essence of cognitive psychology boils down to the fact that in order to understand the motives that prompt a person to act, it is necessary to study the processes taking place in the human mind. This current in psychology is engaged in the study of the human psyche, the very process of human perception of information or knowledge. Psychologists seek to understand how information is perceived, thinking, the process of memorization, logical thinking, etc.

As a rule, the study of behavior occurs in cognitive psychology through laboratory experiments. The cognitive approach in psychology is scientific, which is why it requires laboratory research or experiments. For example, in laboratory conditions tested the memory of the subjects who were in a strict framework created by scientists.

Empirical results are often criticized by opponents in the psychological community. It is pointed out that the conditions created artificially are far from everyday reality. From this, the result loses its purity (there is no ecological validity).

Cognitive psychology received a particularly strong impetus in the development in the middle of the last century. Several factors contributed to this.

Firstly, the behavioral approach, focused on the study of the external behavior of a person, began to lose supporters. Scientists were increasingly inclined to the need to know the internal processes.

Secondly, it became possible to conduct better experiments and obtain more accurate results.

Thirdly, there is something to compare human thinking with, thanks to the development of computer technology.

With the advent of a technical device, the possibilities of scientists - psychologists have expanded. They adopted part of the technical terminology to explain the processes under study. Comparing the processes occurring in the machine and in the human mind, when solving the same task, the researchers have made significant progress in the knowledge of the area under study.

History of cognitive psychology

1948 - Norbert Wiener publishes "Cybernetics" - a work that deals with the relationship between machine processes and human thinking. Since that time, the terms "entrance" and "exit" have taken on a meaning different from the traditional entrance and exit to the premises.

In the same 48th, another American, Edward Tolman, experimenting on rats, obtained evidence of the internal representation of animal behavior. The scientist called them a cognitive map.

1956 - George Miller experimentally revealed the "size of short-term memory" of a person. This discovery is framed in his famous work "The Magic Number 7 Plus or Minus 2".

1960 - Opening of the Center for Cognitive Research at Harvard. The center, where the processes of thought were studied, was created by the joint efforts of University Professor George Miller and Dr. Jerome Bruner. Since 1962, the latter became the director of the Center.

1967 - the publication of Ulrich Neisser's book "Cognitive Psychology", which marked the beginning of the rapid development of a new direction in the study of human psychology.

1968 - Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin developed a model of human memory. Their model, consisting of three components, was called: "multi-storey memory model".

Relation to the cognitive approach

American psychologist Carl Ransome Rogers who is a supporter humanistic psychology, also did not recognize the method of the cognitive approach. His opinion boiled down to the fact that the results of laboratory experiments should not be accepted as true due to the fact that they have too little ecological validity. Artificial Environment, in which the subjects are placed, does not correspond real life. Rogers emphasizes the need for a holistic approach in the study of human behavior.

Burres Frederick Skinner, a well-known American psychologist, an adherent of behaviorism, criticized the cognitive approach. He believed that reliable facts can only be obtained through the study of the visible reactions of human behavior. He pointed out that it is impossible to notice and measure the influence of a stimulus on a response. Skinner found support for his theory and inconsistencies in the cognitive approach. In particular, the statements of the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who tried to decompose the human mind into its constituent parts, were criticized.

By completely relying on the comparison of human thinking with the processes occurring in a computer, advocates of cognitive psychology miss a number of factors. For example, computers do not experience feelings, they cannot get tired, upset, angry, or, on the contrary, experience joy and fun. All of the above is unique to humans. From emotional state much depends on the actions of a person. A person is not a computer and will never be able to think according to the rules established by the program.

Other articles on this topic:

Humanism in psychology Main directions in psychology Development of creativity in children Psychological characteristic personalities The main differences between an introvert and an extrovert Sayings of great people

Basic provisions of cognitive psychology.

Prerequisites for the emergence of cognitive psychology.

Lecture 29. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY.

Lecture questions:

Prerequisites for the emergence of cognitive psychology. Since the end of the 40s. in Western psychology, primarily in American psychology, there is a growing interest in the problems of consciousness. This is expressed in a change in the nature of publications, in an increase in the number research work in this direction and the growth of concepts associated with it; as well as in the popularity of this topic among students of psychological faculties.

At the same time, within psychological science, the prerequisites for the emergence of a new direction, focused on the study of cognitive processes, are taking shape. Within behaviorism, E. Tolman contributed to the rejection of the rigid scheme S - R and introduces the concept of cognition into psychology as an important determinant of behavior. Gestalt psychology also introduces significant changes in the methodological and conceptual aspects of psychological science. Modern cognitive theories are closely related to Gestalt theories both in terminological and methodological terms. Finally, the work of J. Piaget contributed to the growth of research interest in the problems of intelligence and cognition.

The cognitive direction in psychology does not have a “founding father”, like, for example, psychoanalysis. However, we can name the names of scientists who laid the foundation of cognitive psychology with their work. George Miller and Jerome Bruner founded the Center for Cognitive Research in 1960, where they developed a wide range of problems: language, memory, perceptual and concept formation processes, thinking and cognition. Ulrik Neisser in 1967 published the book Cognitive Psychology, in which he tried to constitute a new direction in psychology.

Basic provisions of cognitive psychology. Modern cognitivism is difficult to define as a single school. A wide range of concepts related to this orientation combines a certain commonality of theoretical sources and the unity of the conceptual apparatus, through which a fairly well-defined range of phenomena is described.

The main purpose of these concepts is to explain behavior by describing predominantly cognitive processes that are characteristic of humans. The main emphasis in research is on the processes of cognition (cognition - knowledge), "internal" characteristics of human behavior. Main areas of research:

d) studying the construction of a cognitive picture of the world;

The main method for this scientific direction is a laboratory experiment. The main methodological guidelines of the researchers are as follows:

1. source of data - mental formations;

2. knowledge determines behavior;

3. behavior as a molar (holistic) phenomenon;

The main premise: an individual's impressions of the world are organized into some coherent interpretations, as a result of which certain coherent ideas, beliefs, expectations, hypotheses are formed that regulate behavior, including social behavior. Thus, this behavior is completely in the context of mental formations.

The main concepts of the direction: cognitive organization - the process of organizing a cognitive structure, carried out under the influence of an external stimulus (or a perceived external stimulus); frame of reference - “conceptual frame”, the scale of comparison (consideration) of perceived objects; the concept of an image (whole), the concept of isomorphism (structural similarity between material and mental processes), the idea of ​​the dominance of “good” figures (simple, balanced, symmetrical, etc.), the idea of ​​a field - the interaction of an organism and the environment.

The main idea of ​​the direction: the cognitive structure of a person cannot be in an unbalanced, disharmonic state, and if this still takes place, a person immediately has a desire to change this state. A person behaves in such a way as to maximize the internal fit of his cognitive structure. This idea is related to the concepts of "logical man", "rational man" or "economic man".

Main scientific theories cognitive psychology. Fritz Heider's structural balance theory . The main tenet of this theory is that people tend to develop an orderly and coherent view of the world; in this process, they build a kind of "naive psychology", seeking to understand the motives and attitudes of another person. Naive psychology strives for an internal balance of objects perceived by a person, internal consistency. Imbalance causes tension and forces that lead to restoration of balance. Balance, according to Haider, is not a state that characterizes the real relationships between objects, but only the person's perception of these relationships. The main scheme of Heider's theory: P - O - X, where P is the perceiving subject, O is the other (perceiving subject), X is the object perceived and P and O. The interaction of these three elements constitutes a certain cognitive field, and the task of the psychologist is to to reveal what type of relationship between these three elements is stable, balanced, and what type of relationship makes the subject (P) feel uncomfortable and his desire to change the situation.

The Theodore Newcomb theory of communicative acts extends Heider's theoretical propositions to the area of ​​interpersonal relations. Newcomb believed that the tendency towards balance characterizes not only intrapersonal, but also interpersonal systems of relations. The main position of this theory is as follows: if two people perceive each other positively, and build any relationship to a third person (person or object), they tend to develop similar orientations regarding this third. The development of these similar orientations can be enhanced by the development of interpersonal relationships. The consonant (balanced, non-contradictory) state of the system arises, as in the previous case, when all three relations are positive, or one relation is positive and two are negative; dissonance occurs where two relationships are positive and one is negative.

The theory of cognitive dissonance by Leon Festinger is perhaps the most well-known cognitive theory to a wide range of people. In it, the author develops Haider's ideas regarding the relationship of balance and imbalance between the elements of the subject's cognitive map of the world. The main point of this theory is the following: people strive for some internal consistency as a desired internal state. In the event of a contradiction between what a person knows, or between what he knows and what he does, a person experiences a state of cognitive dissonance, subjectively experienced as discomfort. This state of discomfort causes behavior aimed at changing it - a person seeks to achieve internal non-contradiction again.

Dissonance can occur:

1. from logical inconsistency (All people are mortal, but A will live forever.);

2. from the discrepancy between cognitive elements and cultural patterns (The parent yells at the child, knowing that this is not good.);

3. from the inconsistency of this cognitive element with some broader system of ideas (a Communist votes for Putin (or Zhirinovsky) in presidential elections);

4. from the inconsistency of this cognitive element with past experience (always broke the rules traffic- and nothing; And now they've been fined!

The way out of the state of cognitive dissonance is possible as follows:

1. through a change in the behavioral elements of the cognitive structure (A person stops buying a product that, in his opinion, is too expensive (poor quality, unfashionable, etc.);

2. through a change in cognitive elements related to the environment (A person continues to buy a certain product, convincing others that this is what you need.);

3. through the expansion of the cognitive structure in such a way that it includes previously excluded elements (Collects facts indicating that B, S and D buy the same product - and everything is fine!).

The theory of congruence by Ch. Osgood and P. Tannenbaum describes additional ways out of the situation of cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, other options for getting out of the state of dissonance are possible, for example, through a simultaneous change in the attitude of the subject to both another subject and the perceived object. An attempt is made to predict changes in attitudes (attitudes) that will occur in the subject under the influence of the desire to restore consonance within the cognitive structure.

The main provisions of the theory: a) the imbalance in the cognitive structure of the subject depends not only on the general sign of the relationship, but also on their intensity; b) the restoration of consonance can be achieved not only by changing the sign of the subject’s relationship to one of the elements of the triad “P, O, X”, but also by simultaneously changing both the intensity and sign of these relationships, moreover, simultaneously to both members of the triad.