Giving students a sense of the fervor surrounding cognitive psychology's rapid emergence between 1950 and 1970 is difficult when examining the discrete events presented in cognitive psychology textbooks. The following small-group activity requires students to tabulate the references in Neisser (1967) by decade of publication. The resulting frequency histogram visually portrays the explosive growth of cognitive research in the 1960s, provides students with a richer sense of cognitive psychology's recent history, and reflects Neisser's monumental achievement of publishing his seminal book.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AndersonJ. R. (1995). Cognitive psychology and its implications (4th ed.). New York: Freeman.
2.
BaarsB. J. (1986). A cognitive revolution in psychology.New York: Guilford.
3.
BonwellC. C.SutherlandT. E. (1996). The active learning continuum: Choosing activities to engage students in the classroom. In SutherlandT. E.BonwellC. C. (Eds.), Using active learning in college classes: A range of options for faculty (pp. 3–16). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
4.
BroadbentD. E. (1958). Perception and communication. London: Pergamon.
5.
ChomskyN. (1957). Syntactic structures.The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton.
6.
EllisH. C.HuntR. R. (1993). Fundamentals of cognitive psychology (5th ed.). Dubuque, IA: Brown & Benchmark.
7.
HassebrockF. (1990). Tracing the cognitive revolution through a literature search. Teaching of Psychology, 17, 251–252.
8.
HebbD. O. (1960), The American revolution. American Psychologist, 15, 735–745.
9.
HilgardE. R.BowerG. H. (1966). Theories of learning (3rd ed.). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
10.
LeaheyT. H. (1992). The mythical revolutions of American psychology. American Psychologist, 47, 308–318.
11.
MatsumotoD. (1996). Culture and psychology. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
12.
MillerG. A. (1956). The magical number seven plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.
13.
MonteiroK. P. (1995). Ethnicity and psychology. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
NelsonC. (1997). Tools for tampering with teacher's taboos. In CampbellW. E.SmithK. A. (Eds.), New paradigms for college teaching (pp. 51–78). Edina, MN: Interaction Book.
16.
RollinsJ. H. (1996). Women's minds/women's bodies: The psychology of women in a biosocial context. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
17.
SperlingG. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs, 74(11, Whole No. 498).
18.
WestbergJ.JasonH. (1996). Fostering learning in small groups. New York: Springer.
