Later, the goal became understanding the development of the different faculties that characterize cognition starting from birth. This goal has also opened the door to comparative studies. Piaget frequently discussed his observations of his three children. These procedures, which have been considered as barely scientific by other psychologists, have provided useful inspiration for further research.
Ethical reasons forbid experiments, which may perturb children. Moreover, conceiving experiments that have ecological validity is even more difficult to do with young children than with adults. Hence, the necessity of using different methods in order to produce data that cannot be collected using classic experimental procedures. Without using observational methods, for instance, it is not possible to assess the spontaneous appearance of a given phenomenon Airenti, Furthermore, some behaviors may appear only in specific situations and would go unnoticed if they were not observed by caregivers who may see children at different moments of the day and in different situations.
Thus, developmental psychologists have used different methodologies, classic experiments but also fieldwork, ethological observation, and parent reports. A key element was the elaboration of the habituation paradigm Fantz, ; Bornstein, Habituation allows us to understand if infants discriminate among different stimuli. In particular for language studies, nonnutritive sucking Siqueland and De Lucia, has been used. Currently, the most utilized technique with infants is preferential looking or reaching.
Specific types of this technique are used to claim surprise, anticipation, and preferences for novel or familiar stimuli and to evaluate preference over and above novelty or familiarity Hamlin, 5. Another technique presently used to investigate infant cognitive development is EEG recordings, even if creating infant-friendly laboratory environments, age-appropriate stimuli, and infant- friendly paradigms requires special care Hoehl and Wahl, The development of these experimental techniques has vastly enlarged the scope of infant studies.
In particular, a new research trend has emerged aimed at discovering what has been called the core knowledge Spelke, ; Spelke and Kinzler, The idea is that at the basis of human cognition, there is a set of competencies, such as representing objects, action, number and space, which are already present in infants and which underlie and constrain later acquisitions. Researchers have also been working on other possible basic competencies such as social cognition Baillargeon et al.
This debate also involves the relation between development and evolution. For Tafreshi and colleagues, for instance, the idea of core knowledge would involve a consideration of high-level cognitive capacities as biologically predetermined instead of constructed in interaction with the environment.
This is not the perspective of those who consider that development does exist in the social environment but is constrained by a number of basic competencies Hamlin, An important element of this perspective is comparing human and animal capacities. In fact, research has shown that such basic competencies also exist in some form in animals. For instance, numerous studies have shown that adult nonhuman primates have the core systems of object, number, agent representations, etc.
Spelke and Kinzler, These preoccupations have also informed work by Tomasello and the Leipzig group. Comparing experimental work on great apes and young children has led him to formulate the hypothesis that the factors marking the difference between these two groups are different aspects of social cognition.
Nonhuman primates have some basic capacities in these areas. In humans, the evolved capacity for shared intentionality transforms them in the species-unique human cognition and sociality Tomasello and Herrmann, In this case, the criticism is because his research, both with young children and primates, uses experimental methods and is carried out in a laboratory.
Fieldwork primatologists have claimed that primates in captivity, tested by someone of another species, cannot display the abilities that their conspecifics display in their natural environment Boesch, ; De Waal et al. In conclusion, in developmental psychology, a multiplicity of methods has been applied, and the debate over their respective validity and correct application continues. However, what is not in question is that development is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that must be analyzed as such and from different points of view.
A paradigmatic case in the present research is the study of the theory of mind. Discovering how subjects represent their own mind and other minds was proposed in by Premack and Woodruff as a problem of research on primates, and in a short time, it has become one of the main topics in developmental research Premack and Woodruff, It is currently being studied in groups of different ages, from infants to the elderly, both in typical and clinical subjects and using different methodologies, from classic experiments to clinical observation.
Moreover, a number of studies investigate individual and cross-cultural variation and its role in human-robots interactions. Philosophers have contributed to the definition of this phenomenon, and neuroscientists are working to discover its neural basis.
Some researchers have pursued the goal of constructing computational models of cognitive development using different computational approaches for a review, see Mareschal, However, she also remarks that connectionist models have modeled tasks, while development is not simply task-specific learning, as it involves deriving and using previously acquired knowledge 6. One result of the dissatisfaction with the results deriving from the relation between cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence and the concomitant increase in interest in embodied cognition has been the growth of developmental robotics Lungarella et al.
The aim of this field is to produce baby robots endowed with sensorimotor and cognitive abilities inspired by child psychology and to model developmental changes Cangelosi and Schlesinger, This approach has led to the comparison of results in experiments with robots and children.
In conclusion, some approaches within cognitive science have acknowledged the usefulness of studying children in order to understand the mechanisms of development.
Especially in the case of developmental robotics, this has allowed for studying the interaction of different capacities such as sensorimotor abilities, perception, and language. At the same time, the computational constraints do not allow for overcoming task specificity. I have argued that since their beginning, general psychology and developmental psychology have followed parallel paths that have only occasionally converged.
Psychology was founded with the ambition of becoming a science performed in laboratories and based on experimental work. However, as early as in , Vygotsky had already deplored the attempt to achieve scientific standards by limiting the importance of general issues.
The birth of cognitive science has taken important steps toward constructing links with other disciplines and also other ways to study cognition. However, this opening was soon transformed in the search for a unifying methodology, namely computer modeling, as a guarantee of scientific results.
Many interesting ideas have been generated. However, after four decades of work in this direction, it has become impossible to ignore that too many important aspects of the human mind and activity have been eluded. The relative isolation of developmental psychology came from the prejudice, also shared by eminent developmental psychologists like Piaget, that what characterizes human cognition are adult cognitive abilities.
It devoted attention to what makes development possible, including biological endowment and cultural transmission; whether an infant should be considered a blank slate or if one can define some pre-existent basic abilities; what makes humans different from animals and nonhuman primates; and how specific human abilities such as language have evolved.
At present, a rapprochement between adult and child studies is made possible by different factors. The possibility of using experimental methods to study infancy has allowed us to realize the complexity of young humans. Moreover, development is increasingly being considered as a phenomenon not only characterizing childhood but also present over the life span, including both the acquisition and the decay of mental abilities Bialystok and Craik, Studying the human mind means studying how the human mind changes in interaction with the external environment all life long.
In this sense, the study of human mind is inherently connected with the study of its development. An important question of method emerges here. We have observed that over the years, developmental psychologists have sought to construct methods that can be reliable and at the same time can adequately address the topics under discussion here.
The achievement of finding ways to carry out experiments with infants and nonhuman primates has been an important advancement in this perspective. This advancement has garnered both praise and criticism. To be reliable, experiments with infants require very rigorous procedures.
Frequently, a detailed analysis of procedures is necessary to explain divergent results. However, it can be noted that reproducibility is an open problem for psychological science in general Open Science Collaboration, For nonhuman primates, the ecological validity of laboratory experiments has been questioned. More generally, it has been shown that in the field of developmental psychology, experimental studies do not completely replace other methodologies, but rather should coexist with them.
The human mind is complex, and all the methods that have been proposed in different disciplines may be useful in advancing our knowledge of it. The explanation of this complexity was the main goal underlying the proposal of cognitive science and is the perspective we must pursue in the future. The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The reviewer MT declared a shared affiliation, with no collaboration, with the author to the handling editor at time of review.
William James was influenced by Darwin and this appears in particular in his conceiving the mind as a function and not as a thing Bredo, However, his book The Principles of Psychology , first published in and later revised several times, ignored child development.
In the chapter devoted to methods and snares in psychology, he adds to introspective observation and experimental method the comparative method. Putnam was actually the first to employ the term functionalism , and his aim in doing so was anti-reductionist. In his work he used the comparison with a computer program to show that psychological properties do not have a physical and chemical nature, even though they are realized by physical and chemical properties Putnam, Hewitt highlights the difficulties inherent in constructing artificial systems, which, like social systems, are founded on concepts such as commitment, cooperation, conflict, negotiation, and so forth.
Gaze and eye-tracking techniques are normally used in psychological research with adults Mele and Federici, but it is in developmental studies that they have had a dramatic impact on the possibilities of inquiry. A different approach that has given origin to formal models and simulations is the paradigm that views the developmental process as a change within a complex dynamic system.
Cognition in this perspective is embodied in the processes of perception and action Smith and Thelen, Airenti, G. The cognitive bases of anthropomorphism: from relatedness to empathy. Playing with expectations: a contextual view of humor development. Paris: Angkor , 17— Google Scholar. Arbib, M. Emotions: from brain to robot. Trends Cogn. Austin, J. How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baillargeon, R. Invited commentary: interpreting failed replications of early-false belief findings: methodological and theoretical considerations.
Psychological reasoning in infancy. Baldwin, J. Mental development in the child and the race. New York, NY: Macmillan. Murchison, Vol. Bialystok, E. Lifespan cognition: Mechanisms of change. New York: Oxford University Press. Bjorklund, D. Child Dev. Block, N. Troubles with functionalism. Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , — Boesch, C.
What makes us human Homo sapiens? The challenge of cognitive cross-species comparison. Bornstein, M. Gottlieb, and N. Krasnegor Norwood, NJ: Ablex , — Bredo, E.
The Darwinian center to the vision of William James. SanDiego, CA, April 13—17, Bruner, J. The ontogenesis of speech acts. Child Lang. In search of mind: Essays in autobiography. Child's talk: Learning to use language. New York: Norton. Acts of meaning. Burman, J. Updating the Baldwin effect. New Ideas Psychol. Cangelosi, A. From babies to robots: the contribution of developmental robotics to developmental psychology. Chalmers, D. Why Fodor and Pylyshyn were wrong: the simplest refutation.
Cognitive Science Committee. Report of the State of the Art, Ms. Darwin, C. The expression of emotions in man and animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
De Waal, F. Comparing social skills of children and apes. Science It is closely related to the highly interdisciplinary cognitive science and influenced by artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics , biology, physics, and neuroscience.
Cognitive psychology in its modern form incorporates a remarkable set of new technologies in psychological science. It was this last requirement, fundamental to cognitive psychology, that was one of behaviorism's undoings. For example, lack of understanding of the internal mental processes led to no distinction between memory and performance and failed to account for complex learning Tinklepaugh, ; Chomsky, Cognitive psychology became predominant in the s Tulving, ; Sperling, Since , more than sixty universities in North America and Europe have established cognitive psychology programs.
Cognitive psychology is based on two assumptions: 1 Human cognition can at least in principle be fully revealed by the scientific method, that is, individual components of mental processes can be identified and understood, and 2 Internal mental processes can be described in terms of rules or algorithms in information processing models.
There has been much recent debate on these assumptions Costall and Still, ; Dreyfus, ; Searle, Often, the predictions of the models are directly compared to human behaviour. With the ease of access and wide use of brain imaging techniques, cognitive psychology has seen increasing influence of cognitive neuroscience over the past decade.
There are currently three main approaches in cognitive psychology: experimental cognitive psychology, computational cognitive psychology, and neural cognitive psychology. As such, it involves some of the most complex topics in biology such as genetics and the immune function in regard to the effects of environment on personality, mood and behaviour of an individual.
In general, it deals with mechanisms through which the nervous system and the brain control behaviour. Moreover, decline of behaviourism on the discipline of cognitive psychology has enabled psychologists to overcome the most principal limitations of behaviourist. For instance, it is extremely deterministic; thus, it gives little free-will to the investigators because; its experiments are conducted in hypothetical manner, and the outcomes are pre-determined. Investigators are supposed to stick to the outlined procedure and avoid personal attitudes as much as possible for universality of the experimental procedure.
In behaviourism approach, the investigation procedures adopted by different behaviourists are expected to be homogeneous in nature to maintain replication of research approaches with different conditions and experimental animals. In a brief conclusion, cognitive psychology evolved from mainstream psychology, which relied heavily on behaviorism to become the most popular paradigm of psychology in the modern world. It has gained popularity in other disciplines, especially in the field of medicine where it has become a reliable element of disease management.
However, its emergence as a discipline led to a sudden decline of behaviorism upon which the discipline of psychology was formed, but this decline has favored the growth of cognitive psychology.
P K Patrick Kimuyu Author. Add to cart. KIMUYU Cognitive psychology is one of the core branches of psychology that is concerned with the study of mental processes.
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