A fundamental principle of cognitive psychology is that the mind is a system that constructs and manipulates symbols. Cognitive psychologists seek to understand how these symbols are represented and used, and how they relate to human activity, particularly with complex mental functions, problem-solving, and the acquisition of new knowledge.
Cognitive psychology and its dominant framework, the information processing theory, trace their origins to the analogy of the mind as the program of a computer. The reason that the computer played a significant role in the development of cognitive psychology is that it legitimized a return to mental processes and attempted to provide a solution to the problem of dualism.
While the analogy of the computer has proven extremely fruitful for generating hypotheses about how the human mind operates, a significant part of the evolution of cognitive psychology can be described as the correction of faulty analogical transfers between the two types of systems.
The use of the computer as a model to describe the human mind has resulted in the neglect of motives and emotions as factors influencing human behavior, an emphasis on the individual and internal processes, a diminished role for the environment, and a loss of interest in the characteristics of biological systems and the neurobiology of the brain. These are some of the topics developed in the essays of this book.
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
