Cognitive revolution

The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science.^[1] The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy.^[2] The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies^[3] and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science.^[4] By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm.^[5][6][7] Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.

A key goal of early cognitive psychology was to apply the scientific method to the study of human cognition.^[1] Some of the main ideas and developments from the cognitive revolution were the use of the scientific method in cognitive science research, the necessity of mental systems to process sensory input, the innateness of these systems, and the modularity of the mind.^[8][1][9] Important publications in triggering the cognitive revolution include psychologist George Miller's 1956 article "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"^[10] (one of the most frequently cited papers in psychology),^[11] linguist Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957)^[12] and "Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" (1959),^[13][14] and foundational works in the field of artificial intelligence by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon, such as the 1958 article "Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving".^[10] Ulric Neisser's 1967 book Cognitive Psychology was also a landmark contribution.^[15]