ABSTRACT
It is appropriate to move directly from Gestalt to Cognitive Psychology, for the past quarter century the most prominent school in experimental Psychology. Unlike behaviourism this arose more or less simultaneously in the US and Britain, although the role of British figures such as Kenneth Craik, Frank George, W. Grey Walter and the late Donald Broadbent as well as Alan Turing’s work – notably his ‘Turing Machine’ and ‘Turing Test’* concepts – has been largely overlooked in US-authored histories, for a long time virtually the sole sources of historical information on its origins. R. Hayward (2001) has helped redress this imbalance, eliciting the distinctive character of the British work. It would be quite wrong to imagine that Psychologists previously ignored cognition. As we saw, the Gestaltists paid it much attention, while in 1923 Charles Spearman had published The Nature of ‘Intelligence’ and the Principles of Cognition and in Switzerland Jean Piaget began studying the cognitive development of children in the 1920s. One could go back further to papers by Alfred Binet from the 1890s, R. Jardine’s forgotten The Elements of the Psychology of Cognition (1874), and even Herbert Spencer (1855). Traditional philosophy, moreover, commonly treated logic and cognition as nearly synonymous (e.g. G. Boole, 1854). Why then did Cognitive Psychology appear so revolutionary in the 1950s – a view sustained by most of its historians? Certainly it was not the choice of cognition as a subject matter that was new.
