Important+Researchers+and+Contributions

=Important Researchers and Major Contributions =


 * Ulric Neisser **

 Ulric Neisser was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1931, he went to Harvard University where he earned his bachelors and doctoral degrees and his masters form Swarthmore. Ulric Neisser has contributed to the area of psychology in many ways. First of all his research was focused on human memory, mostly in real-world situations, on the self and intelligence testing. With his 1967 publication “Cognitive Psychology” Neisser gave this branch of psychology a whole new perspective making him earn the title of The Father of Modern psychology (Sage).


 * Herman Ebbinghaus **

Herman Ebbinghaus was the first psychologist whose main focus was learning and memory. He started conducting experiments on him-self to determine how much and how fast memories can be recalled. In 1885, he published the book “Memory” detailing the nonsense syllable. The nonsense syllable is a string of syllables that resembles a real word is in fact “nonsense” During his many studies, Ebbinghaus argued that to recalled things easier and faster everything needs to be involved with association. He then started to verify his work by recording how association can improve memory; he wanted to verify if memory followed a supportable pattern. This study later on became the Forgetting Curve. Since, Ebbinghaus was interesting in memory his findings on the forgetting curve study contributed to the area of cognitive psychology because he was able the determined that the information remembered after the first repetitions and that also they were most easy to remembered after time had passed. He also discovered that to forget the learned things it happens in the first hour ("Profile of a," 2012).




 * Jean Piaget **

Jean Piaget contributed to the area of cognitive psychology with his study on children’s cognitive  development. Piaget observed and talked to the children to try to figure out how their minds worked. During his study, Piaget suggested that cognitive development begins with an inborn ability to adapt to the environment. Piaget suggested that the cognitive growth occurs in three processes: > .
 * Organization: the creation of categories or systems of knowledge. According to Piaget, individuals create complex cognitive structures called Schemes. Schemes are the term for organized forms of thought and behavior used during different situations.
 * Adaption: Is how children adapt to new information about their environment. This adaptation can be achieved through the process off assimilation and accommodation.
 * Equilibration: it’s a term for the tendency to seek equilibrium between new mental and behavioral patterns the helps integrate the new experience (Papalia, Feldman & Olds, 2009).


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Gustav Theodore Fechner: **

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%;">Was a pioneer in psychophysics, he was concerned with how people perceive environmental stimuli. During his study <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%; line-height: 1.5;">, Fechner studied perception by measuring sensations in units, and noticing the differences between two sensations. His contribution to cognitive psychology was the Fechner law, which determines that the intensity of a sensation increases as the log of the stimulus (S = k log R). Because of his research he was one of the psychologists that helped create cognitive behavioral psychology <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 1.5;">("3. mind, brain,," 1996).
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Edward Tolman **

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%;">Made many significant contributions to the field of cognitive psychology. His major contribution to cognitive <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%;">psychology was the Cognitive Theory of Learning. Tolman believed that learning would develop from small pieces of knowledge and cognition about the environment and how individuals can relate to it. During his study, Tolman conducted many classical experiments. The most famous one was the maze running. The maze running experiment consisted on how rats could learn their way through the maze and determine what the role of reinforcement was. During this study he demonstrated cognitive maps in rats and ultimately led to the theory of latent learning.


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Noam Chomsky **

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%;">Chomsky made important contributions to the area of Cognitive Psychology and psycholinguistics. Chomsky main <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%; line-height: 1.5;">contribution was the link between human cognitive capacity and the use of language. According to him the minds of all human beings have a similar set of innate properties that define the way we think and learn <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 1.5;">("Noam chomsky, cognition,," ).