Cognitivism

Cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind. It models the mind as an information processor acting on mental representations according to algorithms. This is the theoretical basis of Cognitive psychology.

Cognitivism was formed as part of The cognitive revolution. Cognitivists believe that reinforcement informs mental representations but doesn’t compel behavior. We make decisions and inferences through theories and expectations, not simple associations with past experiences.

Cognitivism on behaviorist data

• Learning-performance distinction: not everything learned is immediately manifest in behavior (Ebbinghaus’s data shows this!)
  • Implies there can be representations of knowledge in the mind even if it isn’t represented in behavior.
• Expectancy hypothesis: behavior depends on a person’s expectations for a situation, not just on what’s reinforced
  • e.g. Estes (1969) gave college students a test where they had to predict the values of different kinds of cards, and they would often choose the theoretically-highest-reward type of cards even when the experiment was manipulated so that they were never rewarded for that behavior.
• Hypotheses and rule learning: people learn rules by evaluating hypotheses, not just through reinforcement
  • e.g. Levine (1971) asked students to learn rules about geometric shapes and found that students more readily learned the complex rules, irrespective of how much the simple rules were reinforced.
  • Behaviorism struggles here because the student the subject should form simple paired association in the case of the simple rules.
  • He suggested this was because students formed and tested hypotheses about these complex rules (but not the simple ones).