In this chapter you learned about cognitive psychology and cognitive science.

Cognitive psychology is the movement in psychology which aimed to explain behavior as a function of mental processes (e.g., thinking, remembering, planning, attending) and representations. In this sense, cognitive psychology stood in direct contrast to behaviorism which focused on theorizing about observable behavior. However, the emphasis on rigorous experimental methods was very much in line with that espoused by behaviorists. Cognitive psychology gained importance and acceptance in psychology based on the analogy of information processing carried out by computers as well as associated new methods such as computational models that can be used to simulate human and animal cognition.

You also learned about cognitive science as a multidisciplinary endeavor that linked several disciplines. All these disciplines were interested in understanding knowledge on the basis of information processing and computation, including psychology, computer science, and linguistics. However, cognitive science seems to have been largely subsumed by cognitive psychology today, suggesting that this interdisciplinary program of research may have run its course and that the focus on computation and representation has not led to a large outside movement beyond psychology.

All in all, you saw how cognitive psychology was successful in rejecting a purely behavioristic approach to psychology in the second half of the 20th century, paving the way towards a discipline that considers both mind and behavior as its main objects of study.

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