ABSTRACT
The middle of the last century bore witness to seminal developments in psychological science, as black-box behaviorism gave way to distinctly cognitive paradigms. Several forces contributed to the cognitive revolution. The first nudge came from learning theorists, like Hebb (1949) and Lashley (1942), who argued that behaviorism, in its purest form, failed to account for unrewarded learning in rats. A second, more pragmatic influence was wartime demands for efficient communication (information theory) and operation of increasingly sophisticated machinery (human engineering). A third major influence was Chomsky’s (1957, 1959, 1965) treatises emphasizing linguistic creativity, transformational grammar, and the universal “language organ.” The final push came from the advent of computers (e.g., Newell & Simon, 1956), offering not just models for human cognition, but also suitable tools for its investigation. The cognitive revolution took psychology from the science of behavior to the science of the mind, a transformation no other development in psychology is likely to eclipse.
