Comment la psychologie expérimentale française est-elle devenue cognitive ?

Abstract

The French cognitive psychology derives from naturalistic branch of psychology, which defines itself at the end of XIXth century as physiological psychology and during the XXth century as experimental psychology. A brief historical reminder of institutionalization of psychology in France, of its different theoretical orientations and of the reattachment of the scientific psychology to the CNRS‘s life sciences department is followed by an evaluation of the french experimental psychology before the growth of the cognitive sciences. It emerges that in France, where, unlike the United States, behaviourism has never been hegemonic, we cannot describe cognitive revolution, since « gestaltist » and « piagetic » trends, often quoted as cognitivist before the concept had been invented, were well represented. However, if we refer to a definition of cognitive psychology that allows notions as information processing and storage to intervene in France, it is mainly at the end of 1960’s that this psychology is born alongside the development of Chomsky’s psycholinguistics. Actually, on the one hand, the generative grammar gives a formal description of mental abilities, that psychologists will try to validate, and on the other hand, psycholinguistics constitutes a first model of the cooperation between two disciplines that will be afterwards concerned in the cognitive sciences structuring. In 1975, a seminar about the question of relations between cognitive and biological structures brought together, around Piaget and Chomsky, specialists coming from various disciplinary fields. This seminar, that was memorable, prefigures the interdisciplinary collaboration that is pointed up by cognitive sciences. It is only in the early 1980’s that laboratory psychology moved up from cognitive processes study to definition of a cognitive psychology field ; this one was based on the problematics of information processing and on cooperation with other disciplines within the cognitive research association. Afterwards, as in cognitive sciences, will the opposition spread out the cognitive psychology between computational approach supporters and those who back up an approach based on working of brain. Since early 1990’s, because of functional cerebral imaging progress, a certain number of experimental psychology or cognitive psychology laboratories endeavor to develop cognitive neuropsychology. So they renew with the beginning of french psychology traditions, that indissolubly ties up psychology and nervous physiology.