Contemporary cognitive psychology: what theories do

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to understand how a modern cognitive theory works, and to answer the question of what is reasonable to expect from "good" cognitive theories, and what is beyond the boundary of possible or necessary. Such metatheoretical work is needed both to clarify the criteria for analyzing research, and to fixate errors and shortcomings in theoretical work. A special task is to indicate, at least at the level of local examples, the metamorphoses that have occurred in theoretical work in our field over the past 30-40 years. The article describes three types of theoretical constructions that radically differ in their properties: high-, medium-, and low-level theories, and introduces the opposition of traditional theories and theories "from the method", which are used to conduct experiments. The changes in theoretical work over the past 30-40 years can be attributed to the increasing thematic diversity of theories, and a noticeable orientation of researchers to middle-level theories and distrust of high-level theories. This trend has led to the fact that the proposed explanatory models are becoming more and more numerous, but very local. Such an apparent weakness of psychological explanatory theories against the background of the rapid development of methods for studying the brain led to the active onset of "neurotheories" offering explanations based on the central nervous system. Another notable trend in theoretical work is the increasing authority of quantitative models that are not focused on explanation but offer quantitative predictions of the subject’s behavior in certain situations. Based on the analysis, the requirement of completeness of the theory in cognitive psychology is clarified.