Behaviorism and Information Processing.

According to Kuhn, the first paradigmatic revolution gives rise to the appearance
of behaviorism, as a response to subjectivism and the abuse of the introspective
method by structuralism and functionalism. And the second revolution would
constitute information processing.
Behaviorism is based on the studies of learning through conditioning, considering
the study of higher mental processes unnecessary for the understanding of human
behavior.
The central core of behaviorism is constituted by its associationist conception of
knowledge and learning. Some of the fundamental features of the program are:
-Knowledge is achieved through the association of ideas according to the
principles of similarity, spatial and temporal contiguity and causality.
-anti-mentalist reductionism, that is, the denial of mental states and processes.
-The principle of correspondence, the mind of existing is just a copy of reality.
-his anti-constructivism.
-Its elementalist and atomistic character: all behavior is reducible to a series of
associations between simple elements, such as stimulus-response.
-its environmentalism: learning is always initiated and controlled by the
environment.
-its equipotentiality: the laws of learning are equally applicable to all
environments, species and individuals.
In the middle of the century, multiple empirical anomalies and external factors
such as new cybernetic technologies and Communication and Linguistics Theories
cause the behaviorist paradigm to enter into crisis and be replaced by information
processing that relies on the metaphor of the computer. , makes possible the
study of the mental processes that behaviorism marginalized. In this way, a new
period of normal science is entered, under the domain of cognitive psychology,
which continues to this day.
For Cognitive Psychology, the subject's action is determined by its representations.
For information processing, these representations are constituted by some type of
computation. The conception of the human being as an information processor is
based on the acceptance of the analogy between the human mind and the
functioning of a computer. In recent decades, psychological research has shown
increasing attention to the role of cognition in human learning. , freeing itself from
the most restrictive aspects of behavioral approaches. Emphasis has been placed
on the role of attention, memory, perception, recognition patterns and the use of
language in the learning process.
"The cognitive approach has insisted on how individuals represent the world in
which they live and how they receive information, acting in accordance with it.
"The subjects are considered to be preparers or processors of the information."
(Johnson-Laird, 1980)
For the constructivist current, the human being acquires knowledge through a
process of individual and subjective construction, so that the perception of the
world is determined by the subject's expectations.
Higher mental processes, such as concept formation and problem solving, are
difficult to study. The best-known approach has been that of information
processing, which uses the computational metaphor to compare mental
operations with computer operations, investigating how information is encoded,
how it is transformed, stored, retrieved and transmitted to the outside, as if the
human being was designed similarly to a computer. Although the information
processing approach has proven very fruitful in suggesting explanatory models of
human thinking and problem solving in highly defined situations, it has also
proven difficult to establish more general models of the functioning of the human
mind following such computer models.
In the transition from behaviorism to information processing, although the same
central core is preserved, its protective belt has been modified.
Behaviorist reductionism is replaced by the acceptance of causal cognitive
processes. Instead of the environmentalist position, information processing
defends the interaction of the subject's variables and the variables of the
environmental situation that the subject is facing. The passive and receptive
subject of behaviorism is transformed into an active information processor.
In contrast to behaviorism, information processing provides a constructivist
conception of the human being.
According to many authors, information processing does not constitute a
progressive program regarding behaviorism and has received many criticisms due
to its insufficiencies and limitations. According to Siegler and Klahr, the
abandonment of research on learning by information processing is equivalent to
the abandonment of mental processes by behaviorism.
The Learning Theories provided by both behaviorism and information processing
do not fit well with Kuhn's description of scientific progress. The relativity of the
explanations makes the existence of a hegemonic paradigm difficult.