The History of Psychology: Learn It 3—The Cognitive Revolution and Modern Psychology

The Cognitive Revolution

A photograph shows a mural on the side of a building. The mural includes Chomsky's face, along with some newspapers, televisions, and cleaning products. At the top of the mural, it reads “Noam Chomsky.” At the bottom of the mural, it reads “the most important intellectual alive.”
Figure 1. Noam Chomsky was very influential in beginning the cognitive revolution. In 2010, this mural honoring him was put up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (credit: Robert Moran)

Shifting Back to the Mind

Behaviorism’s focus on observable behavior had dominated psychology for decades, pushing the study of the mind to the side. By the 1950s, however, new insights from linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science began to redirect attention back to internal mental processes. This movement became known as the cognitive revolution (Miller, 2003).

In 1967, psychologist Ulric Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, the first textbook of its kind, which helped establish the field in universities across the United States (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Noam Chomsky’s Influence

Although the revolution did not have a single founder, Noam Chomsky (1928–), an American linguist, was especially influential. Chomsky criticized behaviorism as too narrow and argued that psychology must study mental functions—such as language, memory, and thought—if it hoped to explain human behavior meaningfully (Miller, 2003).

cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology: The scientific study of internal mental processes such as thinking, memory, language, and problem-solving.

Key features of cognitive psychology:

  • Accepts the scientific method, while generally rejecting introspection.

  • Explicitly acknowledges internal mental states such as beliefs, desires, and motivations.

  • Studies problem-solving strategies such as algorithms, heuristics, and insights.

Major areas of research in cognitive psychology include perception, memory, categorization, knowledge representation, numerical cognition, language, and thinking.

Broader Impact

The cognitive revolution reconnected American psychology with European traditions, which had never been as heavily dominated by behaviorism. It also encouraged collaboration with other disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience. Together, these fields formed the cognitive sciences, a perspective that continues to shape modern psychology.