Book Title: eTextbook: Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research,
and Everyday Experience
Chapter 1. Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Chapter Summary
Chapter Summary
1. Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the
scientific study of the mind.
2. The mind creates and controls mental capacities such as perception,
attention, and memory, and creates representations of the world that
enable us to function.
3. The work of Donders (simple versus choice reaction time) and
Ebbinghaus (the forgetting curve for nonsense syllables) are examples of
early experimental research on the mind.
4. Because the operation of the mind cannot be observed directly, its
operation must be inferred from what we can measure, such as behavior
or physiological responding. This is one of the basic principles of
cognitive psychology.
5. The first laboratory of scientific psychology, founded by Wundt in 1879,
was concerned largely with studying the mind. Structuralism was the
dominant theoretical approach of this laboratory, and analytic
introspection was one of the major methods used to collect data.
6. William James, in the United States, used observations of his own mind
as the basis of his textbook, Principles of Psychology.
7. In the first decades of the 20th century, John Watson founded
behaviorism, partly in reaction to structuralism and the method of
analytic introspection. His procedures were based on classical
conditioning. Behaviorism’s central tenet was that psychology was
