This study of psychology began in America and Russia. Animal research was widely used in America during early 1900’s.While in Russia; Ivan Pavlov’s work brought a new perspective on animal behaviors. He found that dogs salivated when his lab assistants brought them food. Later he found the dogs also salivated when assistants arrived with no food. They had come to almost “expect” food when they came. Their minds connected the food and the lab assistants together. With this, they came to react to both the exact same. Edward Thorndike advanced behaviorism by suggesting animal research can describe human behavior. However as behaviorism proved successful tensions between psychoanalytic and behaviorists. John Watson, who is known for introducing this school, agreed with Thorndike’s methods. Likewise he disagreed with Psychoanalytic ideas. To advance behaviorism he continued Pavlov’s work to children. He was able to show that researches can constraint children to react to different things. B.F. Skinner appeared as the primary behaviorist after the World War II, although he recognized that internal mental processes might be at work sometimes. But his …show more content…
It goal was to measure mental processes effectively. George A. Miller said that at that time cognitive psychologists were seen as “fuzzy, hand-waving, imprecise people who really never did anything that was testable”. Donald Hebb served as president of the APA. During this time he advised the psychological community to use the standards used by the behaviorists. Ulric Neisser, who was a student of millers’, wrote Cognitive Psychology. In this he said cognition is “ all the processes by which…sensory input is transformed reduced elaborated, stored, recovered, and used “ . He later went on to define Cognitive Psychology as the study of information processing. These Psychologists compared the mind to a computer. The mental processes were the software and the nervous system was the hardware. Under this model cognitive psychologists focused on the functions rather than the content. During a controlled experiment researchers were able to observe “inputs” and “outputs” of the mental system. This led them to believe internal mechanisms must be the key to mental functioning. This field continues to be influential in the study of memory, perception, and consciousness. A new study called cultural psychology studies how cognitive process varies across populations. This study uses experimental methods to separate mental process that are common to humans from the ones that are shaped by a person