ABSTRACT

Cognitive psychology evolved from work in linguistics, information theory, and computer science. Even though cognitive psychologists share fundamental assumptions, they nevertheless differ in their approaches, both methodologically and theoretically. Proponents of the ecological approach argue that cognitive psychologists must understand the physical environment if they are to understand cognition. Ecological psychologists are sometimes critical of mainstream research in cognitive psychology, arguing that many laboratory paradigms are too artificial and simplified to be informative about important cognitive mechanisms. The laboratory approach has been immensely successful. Without it, many cognitive phenomena would not be understood as well as they are today. The formal approach typically focus on the theoretical side of laboratory paradigms, striving to develop rigorous and elegant accounts of these relations between variables. Cognitive psychologists from the computational approach simulate cognitive phenomena on computers. On implementing this theory in a computational simulation, however, the theorist might discover that the theory lacks critical mechanisms.