Several psychologists suggested a cognitive aspect to learning, but Edward Tolman is widely credited as one of the earliest to do so. In the 1930s and 1940s, Tolman demonstrated through maze experiments with rats that learning could happen internally, without any observable behavior change or reward. This directly challenged the dominant behaviorist view that learning was nothing more than stimulus and response. His work, along with contributions from Jean Piaget, Albert Bandura, Jerome Bruner, and others, built the case that what happens inside the mind is central to how we learn.
Why Cognition Was Controversial
For the first half of the 20th century, behaviorism dominated psychology. Behaviorists like B.F. Skinner argued that only observable behaviors mattered. Learning was defined by what you could see someone do: press a lever, repeat a word, avoid a shock. Internal mental states, if they existed at all, were considered irrelevant. Skinner went so far as to exclude even inner physiological processes from experimental analysis. The learner was treated as a “black box” where stimuli went in and behaviors came out, and whatever happened in between was off-limits for science.
This created a problem. A growing number of experimental findings simply couldn’t be explained by stimulus-response theories alone. Researchers began noticing that animals and humans clearly learned things they never outwardly demonstrated, that children developed understanding in predictable stages, and that people could pick up complex behaviors just by watching others. Explaining any of this required looking inside the black box.
Tolman and Latent Learning
Edward Tolman’s maze experiments in the 1930s and 1940s provided some of the strongest early evidence for cognitive learning. In a classic setup, rats were released into a large maze with no reward. They wandered around with no apparent purpose. Later, when experimenters placed food in a specific location, the rats that had previously explored the maze found the reward much faster than rats encountering the maze for the first time.
The implication was striking: the experienced rats had learned the layout of the maze even though they had no reason to, and even though their learning was invisible until they needed it. Tolman called this “latent learning” and proposed that the rats had formed a “cognitive map,” an internal mental representation of the maze’s structure. This map could be consulted later to drive flexible behavior, like finding a new route when the usual path was blocked. None of this fit neatly into behaviorist theory, which required a reward or reinforcement for learning to occur.
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget approached cognitive learning from a completely different angle: child development. Rather than studying rats in mazes, Piaget observed how children’s thinking changed as they grew. He proposed that children don’t simply absorb information passively. Instead, they actively build mental frameworks called schemas and constantly update them through two processes. Assimilation is fitting new information into an existing schema (a child who knows “dog” sees a new breed and calls it a dog). Accommodation is revising a schema when new information doesn’t fit (that child learns that not every four-legged animal is a dog).
Piaget divided development into four stages. In the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), children learn about cause and effect and discover that objects still exist when hidden. The pre-operational stage (ages 2 to 7) brings symbolic thought and language. During the concrete operational stage (ages 7 to 11), children begin using logic to solve problems. Finally, the formal operational stage (age 12 and older) introduces abstract reasoning. Each stage represents a qualitatively different way of thinking, not just more knowledge. This was a deeply cognitive view of learning: the mind isn’t a passive container but an active, developing system.
Bandura and Observational Learning
Albert Bandura added another cognitive dimension in the 1960s and 1970s by showing that people learn by watching others, not just through direct experience. His research revealed something that pure behaviorism couldn’t easily account for: there was a gap between what people learned and what they actually did. Observers could accurately describe a model’s behavior (showing they had learned it) without ever performing that behavior themselves. Learning and performance were separate things.
Bandura outlined four processes involved in observational learning. Attentional processes determine what you notice. Retention processes convert what you observed into a lasting memory. Motor reproduction processes translate that memory into action. Motivational processes determine whether you bother performing the behavior at all. The first two are purely cognitive, happening entirely inside the mind. Bandura and his colleagues found that individuals who verbally described every action of a model were the most successful at reproducing the behavior later, highlighting how internal coding and rehearsal (both mental activities) drove learning. This work helped establish what Bandura called social cognitive theory, which placed mental processes at the center of how people learn from their social environment.
The Cognitive Revolution of the 1950s
These individual contributions converged into a broader intellectual movement. Cognitive science as a recognizable field is largely a product of the 1950s, when several disciplines were reinventing themselves simultaneously. Noam Chomsky was redefining linguistics by arguing that language was too complex to be explained by reinforcement alone. Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy were inventing artificial intelligence. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon were using computers to simulate human problem-solving. The year 1956 is often cited as the birth of cognitive science.
In 1967, Ulric Neisser published “Cognitive Psychology,” a book that gave the movement its name and its identity. Neisser synthesized findings from experimental psychology into a coherent framework for studying mental processes, and the book is considered a founding text of the field. Neisser himself became known as the “father of cognitive psychology.” By this point, behaviorism’s grip on the field had loosened enough for cognition to regain scientific respectability.
How Cognitive Learning Theory Works
At its core, cognitive learning theory treats the learner as an active processor of information rather than a passive responder to stimuli. One of the most influential models, proposed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin, describes three stages of memory. Sensory memory briefly holds raw input from your senses. Working memory is where you actively process that information through problem-solving, reasoning, or decision-making. Long-term memory stores information for later retrieval. Learning, in this view, is the successful movement of information through these stages.
This framework has practical consequences. It explains why you can hear a lecture and forget it immediately (the information never made it past sensory memory), why cramming for an exam produces short-lived results (information stays in working memory but never consolidates), and why connecting new material to something you already know helps it stick (you’re building on existing long-term memory structures, much like Piaget’s schemas).
Bruner, Flavell, and Later Contributions
Jerome Bruner pushed cognitive ideas directly into education. He argued that children could be taught any subject at any stage of development, as long as the material was presented effectively and with gradually increasing difficulty. This became the concept of the “spiral curriculum,” where students revisit topics at higher levels of complexity over time. Bruner also helped establish the idea of “scaffolding” in education: a teacher provides structured support that is gradually removed as the learner becomes more capable. Both ideas treat learning as an active cognitive process that can be deliberately shaped.
John Flavell extended cognitive learning theory in the 1970s by coining the term “metacognition,” often translated as “thinking about thinking” or “learning about learning.” This added yet another layer: not only do mental processes drive learning, but your awareness of those processes matters too. A student who recognizes that they don’t understand a passage and rereads it is using metacognition. This capacity to monitor and regulate your own learning is one of the strongest predictors of academic success, and it’s an idea that only makes sense within a cognitive framework.