Psychology I / Cognitive Psychology
Practice question · Sort into groups

Sort each research approach as behaviorist or cognitive.

Groups: Behaviorist (study only the observable) · Cognitive (infer internal processes)

Hints
  1. Cognitive methods INFER unseen mental processes; behaviorist methods stick to observable behavior.
  2. Reaction times and information-processing models are cognitive; counting responses is behaviorist.
Show the answer

Behaviorist (study only the observable): Counting lever-presses following reinforcement, Explaining behavior purely by stimulus-response history

Cognitive (infer internal processes): Measuring reaction times to infer hidden mental steps, Modeling memory as encoding, storage, and retrieval

Why

Reaction-time inference and information-processing models are cognitive (they reason about unseen mental steps); counting reinforced responses and pure stimulus-response accounts are behaviorist. The cognitive revolution reopened the 'black box' the behaviorists left closed.

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