ABSTRACT
Cognitive psychology is committed to the study of cognition, a domain traditionally considered as the ‘home base’ of functions like perception, attention, memory, language and consciousness. The rationale of behaviorism was that knowledge of the laws of behavior of laboratory animals could also be useful to gain insight into cognitive learning in humans. The central mission of the new cognitive psychology or ‘cognitivism’ was to fill the mental vacuum created by behaviorism: cognitive psychology re-opened the black box by paying attention to the higher mental processes as the hidden causes of behavior. Cognitive neuroscience has also profited from computer modeling of neural networks and methods that aimed at describing complex processes at the computational level, and validating assumptions derived from empirical methods like functional imaging. Both cognitivism and neuroscience became dominated by theoretical models of neural architectures known as connectionist networks.
