Cognitive Psychology CIA 1 Submitted by Bhavana S 1214295 BA Psychology (Honours) C Historical Roots of Cognitive Psychology 140th Annual American Psychological Academy Meet Lecture by Ms. Bhavana Shiv Shankar 11/1/2014 Historical Roots of Cognitive Psychology Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes which include key processes such as perception, thinking, memory, language, attention, identifying and classifying objects, problem solving, decision making, etc. The establishment of a branch of psychology named cognitive psychology occurred during the 1900’s, but the historical roots of this subject can be traced back to much earlier time period, and being aware of the history behind any concept under the sun is extremely essential to appreciate the growth and evolution of …show more content…
Some of the major 20th century gestalt psychologists are Wolfgang Kohler, who gave the concepts of Phi Phenomenon and insight learning; Kurt Koffka, known as the spokesperson of Gestalt psychology and Max Wertheimer, who proposed the concept of productive thinking which meant the production of new ideas and breakthroughs. They focus on various mental laws that guide human perception and suggested that human beings, during perception, look at either the figure or ground of a stimuli that would in turn give rise to different perceptions. Their primary focus was on perception. They studied the organization of visual stimuli. The most popular notion of the gestalt psychologists is that ‘The whole is greater than sum of its parts’. The laws of proximity, closure, similarity, continuity, symmetry, etc. suggest that perceptions are complex interactions among different kinds of stimuli. Gestalt psychologists state that when different elements of an experience are combined in a particular fashion, new perception