COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MILLER & JEROME BRUNER

(Lecture Series-1), B.A. IInd (Honors)

(Paper-IVth Systems in Psychology)

By
Dr. Masaud Ansari
Department of Psychology,
A.P.S.M. College, Barauni
L. N. M. University, Darbhanga 1 5 th O C T O BE R 2 0 2 0
Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as "attention,

language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking". Much of the work

derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern disciplines such as:

i. Cognitive science
ii. Educational Psychology
iii. Social Psychology
iv. Personality Psychology
v. Abnormal Psychology
vi. Developmental Psychology
vii. Linguistics, and
viii. Economics.
Conti…

In retrospect (survey), history identifies two scholars who are not founders in the formal
sense but who contributed groundbreaking work in the form of a research center and books now
considered milestones in the development of cognitive psychology. They are:

1. George Miller and

2. Ulric Neisser.

Their stories highlight some of the personal factors involved in shaping new schools of thought.
1. George Miller (1920-2012)

George Miller majored in English and speech at the University of

Alabama, where he received his master’s degree in speech in 1941. While there, he
expressed an interest in psychology and was offered an instructorship to teach 16
sections of introductory psychology, even though he had never taken a course in the
field. He said that after teaching the same material 16 times a week, he began to
believe in it.

Miller went on to Harvard University, where he worked in the psychoacoustic

laboratory on problems in vocal communication. In 1946, he received his Ph.D. Five years
later he published a landmark book on psycholinguistics, Language and Communication
(1951). Miller initially accepted the behaviorist school of thought, noting that he had little
choice because behaviorists held the leadership positions in major universities and
professional associations.
Conti…
The power, the honors, the authority, the textbooks, the money,
everything in psychology was owned by the behavioristic school.
those of us who wanted to be scientific psychologists couldn’t really
oppose it. You just wouldn’t get a job. (Miller, quoted in Baars,
1986, p. 203)
By the mid-1950s, after investigating statistical learning theory, information theory, and
computer-based models of the mind, Miller concluded that behaviorism was not, as he put it, “going
to work out.” The similarities between computers and the operation of the human mind impressed
him, and his view of psychology became more cognitively oriented. At the same time, he
developed an annoying allergy to animal hair and dander (dandruff), so he could no longer conduct
research with laboratory rats. Working only with human subjects was a disadvantage in the world of
the behaviorists.
Conti…

In 1956 Miller published an article, which has since become a classic, titled “The Magical
Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information.” In
this work, Miller demonstrated that our conscious capacity for short-term memory of numbers (or,
similarly, for words or colors) is limited to approximately seven “chunks” of information. That is all we
are able to process at any given point.
Three main influences arose that inspire and shape cognitive psychology
i. With the development of new conflict technology during WWII (world war-II), the need for a greater
understanding of human performance came to prominence. Problems such as how to best train soldiers to use
new technology and how to deal with matters of attention while under duress (pressure) became areas of need for
military personnel. Behaviorism provided little if any insight into these matters and it was the work of Donald
Broadbent, integrating concepts from human performance research and the recently developed information
theory, that forged the way in this area.

ii. Developments in computer science would lead to parallels being drawn between human thought and the
computational functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas of psychological thought. Allen Newell and
Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and later worked with cognitive
psychologists regarding the implications of AI. This encouraged a conceptualization of mental functions patterned
on the way that computers handled such things as memory storage and retrieval, and it opened an important
doorway for cognitivism.
Conti…

iii. Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of behaviorism, and empiricism more generally, initiated what
would come to be known as the "cognitive revolution". Inside psychology, in criticism of behaviorism, J.
S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow & G. A. Austin wrote "a study of thinking" in 1956. In 1960, G. A. Miller, E.
Galanter and K. Pribram wrote their famous "Plans and the Structure of Behavior". The same year,
Bruner and Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, which institutionalized the
revolution and launched the field of cognitive science.
Jerome Bruner (1915-2016): The Center for Cognitive Studies

With Jerome Bruner (1915–2016), his colleague at Harvard, Miller

established a research center to investigate the human mind. Miller and Bruner
asked the university president for space, and in 1960 they were given the
house in which William James had once lived. This was considered an
appropriate site because James had dealt so exquisitely (beautifully) in his
Principles book with the nature of mental life. Choosing a name for the new
enterprise was not a trivial matter. Being associated with Harvard, the center
had the potential to exert an enormous influence on psychology. They selected
the word “cognition” to denote their subject matter and decided to call the
facility the Center for Cognitive Studies: Jerome Bruner (1915–2016)
Conti…
In using the word “cognition” we were setting ourselves off from
behaviorism. We wanted something that was mental—but “mental
psychology” seemed terribly redundant. “Common-sense psychology”
would have suggested some sort of anthropological investigation, and
“folk psychology” would have suggested Wundt’s social psychology.
What word do you use to label this set of views? We chose cognition.
(Miller, quoted in Baars, 1986, p. 210)

Miller did not consider cognitive psychology to be a true revolution, despite its differences from
behaviorism. He called it an “accretion (layer),” a change by slow growth or accumulation. He saw the
movement as more evolutionary than revolutionary and believed it was a return to a commonsense
psychology that recognized and affirmed psychology’s concern with mental life as well as behavior.