PSY 402 Topic 1 DQ 1: Cognitive Psychology

The verb that matters here is prompted. A timeline of the 1950s and 1960s answers a question nobody asked; what the prompt wants is the pressure that made the change necessary. Behaviourism was a methodological commitment before it was a theory: only observable stimulus and response counted as data, because introspection had proved unreliable and psychology wanted the standing of a natural science. That commitment paid for itself for decades, and then met problems it could not absorb. Language acquisition was the sharpest of them — children produce sentences they have never heard and could not have been reinforced for, which reinforcement schedules cannot explain. Latent learning, where rats that had explored a maze without reward performed immediately once reward appeared, showed that something was being stored between the stimulus and the response. Name the anomaly, then name the response to it. Give each anomaly in enough detail that a reader sees why it was fatal.

What is significant about the shift is that psychology allowed itself internal states as explanations again, but with a new constraint: they had to be specified precisely enough to be modelled and tested. The computer metaphor did that work, giving encoding, storage and retrieval as terms with definite meanings. That is the real break, and it is epistemic rather than topical. The third question then asks what neuroscience adds, and the honest answer is timing, localisation and dissociation. Reaction times tell you a process took longer; imaging and lesion evidence tell you which structures were involved and whether two abilities can be damaged independently, which is how you show they are separate systems rather than one system used two ways. Be careful not to overclaim. Imaging shows correlation with a task, and a coloured region is not an explanation of the behaviour. Say which of the three questions each part of your post answers.