Cognitive Theories

Historical Background

Cognitive science is a broad, interdisciplinary enterprise that draws from numerous intellectual [Page 112]traditions, among them philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and communication. The systematic, empirical investigation of mental processes dates to the late 19th century, with the work of Wilhelm Wundt and others, but some authors have suggested that the actual inception of cognitivism as we know it today did not occur until the mid-1950s. Prior to that time, experimental psychology had been dominated by various versions of behaviorism that gave little heed to unobservable mental processes. Nevertheless, other fields of study, including social psychology and developmental psychology, had made ready use of mentalistic concepts at least since the 1920s and 1930s. In that same period, early researchers in speech departments began to focus on topics such as attitude change and the processing of persuasive messages.

By 1970, incorporation of the assumptions, models, and methods of cognitivism into social psychology had led to the development of social cognition—an area of study focused on how people acquire, store, and use socially relevant information, especially information about themselves and others. These topics, quite naturally, were of interest to communication scholars, and during the decade of the 1970s, cognitive models of various symbolic and social processes began to appear in the field of communication. By the time Michael Roloff and Charles Berger's edited book, Social Cognition and Communication, was published in 1982, the cognitive perspective was firmly ensconced as a way of theorizing about communication processes. The impact of cognitivism in advancing understanding of communication phenomena extends to the present, as evidenced by the work reported in David Roskos-Ewoldsen and Jennifer Monahan's recent volume, Communication and Social Cognition.

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