In the 1950s and 1960s, scientific psychology underwent a major transformation. Behaviorist, Gestalt, and Freudian views were largely superseded by an approach called cognitive psychology, which treats the mind as a kind of information processor analogous to a computer. Cognitive psychology investigates the mental structures and processes that underlie perception, attention, learning, memory, language, inference, and problem solving. The field retains some behaviorist, Gestalt, and Freudian insights, but provides a coherent alternative that has been highly fruitful both experimentally and theoretically.

The Cognitive Revolution

The roots of cognitive psychology lie partly in the limitations of previous theoretical approaches to psychology, particularly behaviorism. Behaviorism attempted to make psychology scientific by avoiding reference to hypothetical mental entities such as thoughts and concepts. It tried to restrict psychology to the use of observed stimuli to predict observed behavioral responses. Behaviorism was fueled in part by a positivist philosophy of...