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Ivan Pavlov
Famous for the experiment of the dogs.This discovery made Pavlov to demonstrate that animals could be conditioned to do something through a previously learned stimuli. This fact sets the beginning of behaviourism. -
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Sigmund Freud
Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis which is a theory that explains human behaviour. Psychoanalysis is often known as the talking cure. Freud would encourage his patients to talk freely (on the famous couch) regarding what they feel and what's into their minds. -
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Edward Tolman
Edward thought that people and animals do more than responding to an stimuli, but act on beliefs, attitudes and goals. He created the term cognitive map. Individuals acquire large numbers of signals from the environment and could use them to build a mental image of the environment, in brief, individual can create cognitive maps. -
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Jean Piaget
His theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He believes that cognitive development is completely natural and occurs due biological maduration and interaction with others. Regarding teaching, he was not interested in how well children could count, learn or solve problems as a way of grading intelligence; he was more interested about the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number, time, quantity and so on emerged. -
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Lev Vygostsky
His most famoust theory is the Social Development Theory. All of his theories talk about the role of social interaction in the development of cognitition and he believed strongly that community plays a central role in the process of "making meaning". In his own words, "earning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological function" -
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Carl Rogers
He was a humanistic psychologist; he though that, for humans to learn, they need to grow in an environment that provides them with genuineness, acceptance, and empathy. He founded the theory of Unconditional Positive Regard which says that human beings have an innate urge towards socially constructive behavior which is always present and always functioning at some level. -
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Abraham Maslow
Abraham felt that Freud's psychoanalytic theory and Skinner's behavioural theory where very negative and neglected all the potential and creativity of individuals. He talks about hierarchy of needs that suggests that people have a number of needs and as these needs are met they are able to go on to pursue other needs. -
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Burrhus Frederic Skinner
Skinner believed that the classical conditioning (Pavlov) was not enough to explain the human behaviour. For him, the best way to understand behaviour is to look at the causes of an action and its consecuences. He called this approach as operant conditioning. There are actions that have effects on the surrounding environment. -
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Jerome Bruner
For Bruner, important outcomes of learning include not just the concepts, categories or procedures invented previously by the culture, but also the ability to "invent" these things for oneself. Cognitive growth involves an interaction between basic human capabilities and "culturally invented technologies that serve as amplifiers of these capabilities." Bruner would likely agree with Vygotsky that language serves to mediate between environmental stimuli and the individual's response. -
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Leon Festinger
Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger. This refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. For Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). -
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Howard Gardner
He's still alive.
Gardner is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences. He believed that the conventional concept of intelligence was too narrow and restrictive and that measures of IQ often miss out on other "intelligences" that an individual may possess. A very important fact: Gardner's theory had a particular impact in the field of education where it inspired teachers and educators to explore new ways of teaching aimed at these different intelligences.