Cognitive Psychology

Reopening the Black Box

The Cognitive Revolution of the 1950s and 60s redirected psychology's attention back to internal mental processes — memory, perception, reasoning, language — that behaviorism had deliberately treated as an unobservable "black box" unworthy of study. A pivotal moment was Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior, arguing that children acquire language far too rapidly and creatively to be explained by simple reinforcement alone, and must instead possess some innate capacity for language.

The new field adopted the information-processing model, treating the human mind as analogous to a computer: information is encoded, stored, and retrieved, much as a computer processes data through defined stages. George Miller's 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" proposed that short-term memory holds only about seven discrete items at once, highlighting real capacity limits on mental processing. Ulric Neisser's 1967 textbook, simply titled Cognitive Psychology, gave the new field its name.

Jean Piaget applied a related developmental lens, describing how children construct an understanding of the world through four qualitatively different stages:

Common pitfall: treating the "black box" metaphor as behaviorism's insult to the mind. It was actually a methodological choice — behaviorists did not deny that internal states might exist, they simply argued science should study only what can be directly observed, which cognitive psychology's new methods (like reaction-time measures) eventually made it possible to challenge.

A memory slot-rack: an empty rack with numbered slots; items load in one at a time up to slot 7, each slot lighting accent as it fills; two more items attempt to load past slot 9 and visibly spill off the rack.

$$\text{Short-term memory} \approx 5 \text{ to } 9 \text{ items}$$