Cognitive Psychology – from Hergenhahn Introduction to the History of Psychology, 2000

Cognitive psychology includes such topics as memory,
concept formation, attention, reasoning, problem
solving, judgment, and language. Clearly cognitive
psychology is very popular within contemporary
psychology. However, in psychology’s long history
some form of cognition has almost always been emphasized.
The few exceptions included the materialistic
philosophies or psychologies of Democritus,
Hobbes, Gassendi, La Mettrie, Watson, and Skinner,
which denied the existence of mental events. The
schools of voluntarism and structuralism concentrated
on the experimental study of cognition, and
the school of functionalism studied both cognition
and behavior. The supposed sterility of the research
on cognition performed by members of these schools
prompted Watson to create the school of behaviorism.