Cognitive Theories

What Distinguishes Cognitive Theories

The cognitive approach deals mainly with the psychological aspects of human behaviour, putting the nature of complex mental processes back on the agenda. Where behaviourists focus purely on observable stimulus-response connections, cognitive theorists take into account internal processes like perception, concept formation, problem-solving, attention, and memory.

The Insight Learning Theory of Gestalt’s School

The learning theory known as ‘Learning by Insight’ is the contribution of Gestalt Psychologists — Wertheimer, Kohler, Koffka, and Lewin, all originally German, who eventually settled in America and are historically the leaders of Gestalt Psychology. Insight means the sudden grasping of the solution to a problematic situation — a flash of understanding that comes all at once, the sudden awareness or perception of the essential relationships in a total situation.

Basic Concepts of Insight Learning

• Learning is a purposive, exploratory, and creative enterprise, in which the total situation is taken into account by the learner.
• A learning situation is a problem situation, and the learner deduces a solution by insight when they perceive the situation as a whole.
• The learner perceives the situation as a whole, evaluates the relationship between its parts, and makes an intelligent decision.
• The learner always responds to the proper relationship rather than to specific stimuli.
• Learning occurs spontaneously and suddenly through the development of insight.

Insight development is facilitated by previous experience with similar problems and is closely related to a learner’s intellectual level — the higher the intellect, the quicker insight tends to occur. Insight also involves a bit of trial-and-error behaviour, and involves understanding and reasoning about the problem.

Steps in Insight Learning

Lewin’s Field Theory

According to Lewin, learning is a change in cognitive structure — a change in the structure of the individual’s ‘life-space.’ A change in life-space structure occurs when a person moves from one region of life-space to another, and that movement is decided by the valence (attracting or repelling force) of the goal: a positive valence attracts the person toward a region, a negative valence repels them from it. A person in life-space is always under the influence of psychological forces called vectors — it’s the vector force that controls movement toward a goal.

Because a person is influenced by several valences at once, conflicts arise. There are three types:

Field theory ultimately treats learning as a change in the cognitive structure of life-space, resulting from a person’s movement (locomotion) from one region to another — changes caused by the vector forces operating in the psychological field: needs, aspirations, valences, and conflicts.

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Learning

Social cognitive learning, proposed by Albert Bandura, a Canadian psychologist, emphasises that learning occurs observationally, through modelling. Modelling is a process in which a child learns by keenly observing the behaviour, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others — most commonly people nearest to them, like parents, family members, teachers, and older members of society. From observing others, the child forms an idea of how new behaviours are performed, and this coded information later guides imitated action. Because learning occurs through observation and imitation, this is also called observational learning.

What Bandura first called social learning theory, he later renamed social cognitive theory: one learns through observation, incorporating and imitating the behaviours of models within one’s social environment. The modelling process includes four steps: