Cognitive Psychology

Modern psychology may be dated from the first successful attempts to bring the mind from the philosopher’s den into the laboratory, where the preferred method of the physical sciences, the experimental method, could be applied to discover the functional relations governing mind and behavior. Its development can be charted by the dates of the founding of experimental psychology laboratories at universities and colleges throughout the world. Subsequently, laboratory methods have dominated the study of sensation, perception, memory, learning, motivation, and thinking for more than one hundred years. The success of the experimental approach is marked by the fact that it is still a fundamental area of psychology today. However, the contemporary experimentalist must attempt to straddle the boundaries between physiology, psychology, computer science, and mathematical modeling of neural processes.