ABSTRACT
Cognitivism is an approach to the mind and behaviour that, on the one hand, espouses an experimental, or more generally an empirical approach to understanding psychological functioning, and, on the other hand, claims that mental activity should be modelled as the processing of information using an internal symbol system, with discrete abstract symbols. Cognitivism as a major force in psychology has its roots in a computational metaphor for the mental processes and behaviour of people and other animals. Cognitive psychology, in its modern form, underpinned by cognitivism as an implicit and sometimes explicit philosophy, came into being in the 1950s. The cognitive science movement failed to entrench cognitivism’s position as the dominant movement in the study of psychological functioning. Pure cognitivism is also sometimes seen as being undermined by the results of imaging techniques, which, it might be thought, make it foolish to propose theories of cognitive functioning that are completely abstracted from brain mechanisms.
