George Miller
The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two
You should look at Miller's (1956) article. George Miller (1956) in his influential article showed that people had a limited capacity for holding items in short term memory (see more about memory’s stages below) and that organizing items in some way made remembering easier. He called those larger units chunks and noted that words are chunks of phonemes. Sentences, of course, are chunks of words and paragraphs are chunks of sentences. Most people could easily remember seven items (words, numbers, syllables) but had trouble remembering more than nine. Miller’s work set the stage for a move to a new way to study memory, information processing.
The Slow Move to Cognitivism
The first psychologists were cognitivists too, but their methods were reliant on introspective reports. By the early part of the 20th century it was clear that such methods were faulty. As a result, Watson’s Behaviorism and later Neobehaviorism came to dominate American psychology during the last half of the 20th century. But, that domination was never complete. Greenwood (1999) argued that Neobehaviorism and the emerging modern cognitive psychology did not really compete with each other or claim exclusive control of psychology. Behaviorists for the most part, used operational definitions as a tool to understand behavior but overstated the importance of conditioning and were too strict in their prohibitions against any type of mental construct. Meanwhile, new topics such as sensory registers, types of memory, and heuristics were explored by the earliest modern cognitive psychologists.
Behaviorists and Cognitivists shared a passion for experimental data collection, its analysis, and interpretation but their goals were different. Behaviorists interpreted their results in the light of S-R theory while Cognitivists interpreted theirs as evidence of cognitive processes (Carroll, 2017). By the mid 1950s psychologists began to craft theories of cognition in the areas of memory, problem solving, and language. Many of those were based on the model provided by computers using such terms as inputs, outputs, and storage.
Miller (2003) described the cognitive revolution as a counterrevolution. He wrote (p. 142):
"Whatever we called it, the cognitive counter-revolution in psychology brought back the mind into experimental psychology. I think it important to remember that the mind had never disappeared from social or clinical psychology. Regardless if it was an evolution or a counterrevolution, the mind was back as a topic in experimental psychology. The new cognitive psychology was not a revolution in the usual sense as a rapid change over a short time period. Plus, it did not intend to replace Behaviorism. There was no rapid conversion from Behaviorism to Cognitivism. The mind was back in psychology but the pace was evolutionary not revolutionary."
Claude Shannon
How Claude Shannon Invented the Future
Describes how Claude Shannon's (1948) paper on information theory made possible the modern, digital world we live in. His theory makes it possible to send reliably any amount of information any distance. The secret is repetition. Nearly any digital device you can think of: computer, cell phone, or the internet owes its existence to Shannon's communication theory.
Questions
Still, it was a revolution in terms of its approach to some of psychology’s new questions:
• Is the brain a kind of computer?
• What was memory and how did it affect behavior?
• How did people solve problems?
• What was language and how was it acquired?
• What are the physiological underpinnings of cognition?
Those five areas, the computer model, memory, problem solving, language, and neurophysiology became the doors by which cognition re-entered psychology. But, those new areas, their methods, and their theories and did not displace Behaviorism. Rather, they became a parallel part of a larger and evolving psychology.
Thus, learning and memory are both old and new, both may be approached by a variety of methodologies. Both, however, are central to any full understanding of psychology.