The cognitive lens

The lens in brief

Cognitive psychology studies mental processes: attention, perception, memory, language, reasoning and expectation. It grew quickly from the late 1950s, partly as a reaction against behaviourism. Its basic image is the person as an information processor who takes in information, stores it, interprets it and uses it to act. The key questions are what the person noticed, what they remembered and how they made sense of it.

How this lens reads the study

Copying later means storing first. The children saw the model in one room and acted in another, minutes later, with the model gone. To reproduce the model's punches and phrases such as "Pow!" they had to hold a mental record of them. The cognitive lens says this record, called a mental representation, is the real finding of the study. The paper did not measure it, but its results are hard to explain without it.

Deferred imitation. The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described copying an action some time after seeing it as deferred imitation. He treated it as a sign that a young child can represent events in the mind. Seen this way, the Bobo children were showing a well-known cognitive skill, applied to aggressive acts.

Bandura's own turn. Bandura himself moved in this direction. In his 1977 book Social Learning Theory he described observational learning as four processes:

1. Attention: the child must notice what the model does.
2. Retention: the child must store it, often in words or images.
3. Reproduction: the child must be able to perform the act.
4. Motivation: the child must have a reason to perform it.

The first two are cognitive processes. By 1986 Bandura renamed his approach social cognitive theory.

The children were judging as well as copying. The paper reports some of the children's comments. About the female model, one child said: "That's not the way for a lady to behave. Ladies are supposed to act like ladies." About the male model, another said: "Al's a good socker, he beat up Bobo." These children were comparing what they saw with their ideas about men and women. Cognitive psychologists call such organised ideas schemas. Gender schema theory, developed in the early 1980s by Sandra Bem and by Carol Martin and Charles Halverson, proposes that children use gender schemas to decide what to attend to and copy. This offers a cognitive explanation for why the male model's aggression was copied more: it fitted the children's schema of how men behave.

What this lens values in the study

It values the separation of copied acts from other aggression. Exact copies of new phrases cannot be explained by a general rise in aggression, so they point to specific stored information. It also values the delay and change of room, which show that the information was carried in memory, not prompted by the scene.

What it would question

• Learning versus doing. A child who did not copy may still have learned. The test counted only what children chose to do. Bandura's 1965 study later showed that when children were offered rewards to show what the model did, many could reproduce acts they had not performed before. So the 1961 study measured performance, not learning.
• Interpretation. The study never asked what the children thought was going on. Did they see the model as angry, playful, or demonstrating a game? The meaning a child gives to a model is a cognitive event that shapes copying.
• No measure of attention or memory. Children differ in what they notice. Without measuring this, the study cannot say why some children copied a lot and others hardly at all.

Evidence from this tradition

Later cognitive models of aggression build on the Bobo findings. L. Rowell Huesmann's script theory (1988) proposes that children store "scripts", mental sequences for how a situation goes and how to act in it. Watching aggression repeatedly makes aggressive scripts easier to recall. Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman's General Aggression Model (2002) combines scripts, beliefs, emotions and arousal into one account.

Kenneth Dodge's work on hostile attribution bias shows that more aggressive children are more likely to read an ambiguous act, such as being bumped in a queue, as deliberate. This points to something the Bobo study left out: aggression usually happens between people, and how a child interprets another person's intentions matters a great deal.

A study this lens would design

A cognitive researcher would separate what children learn from what they do, and measure the thinking in between.

1. After watching the model, ask each child to show the experimenter "everything the grown-up did", with a small reward for each correct act. This measures learning.
2. Separately, observe free play to measure performance, as the original did.
3. Ask the child, in simple words, what the grown-up was doing and whether it was allowed.
4. Vary attention, for example by giving some children a distracting task while the model acts.

The prediction is that recall will be high in many children who do not perform the acts, and that children who describe the model's acts as "allowed" will perform more of them.

Try this

Two boys watched the same aggressive male model. In the test room, Ravi punched the doll and shouted 'Pow!' many times. Arjun played with the tea set and never touched the doll. Afterwards the researcher asked each boy to show what the man did, and Arjun copied almost every act perfectly.

What does Arjun's case tell us about the 1961 study's measure, and which cognitive idea explains it?

Show the reasoning

Arjun learned the model's behaviour just as well as Ravi, but he chose not to perform it in free play. The 1961 study counted only performance, so it would have scored Arjun as showing no imitation, which underestimates learning.

The cognitive idea is the distinction between acquisition and performance, which Bandura tested in 1965. Learning is stored as a mental representation. Whether it is used depends on motivation and expectations, such as whether the act seems allowed or likely to be rewarded. (These two boys are invented to illustrate the point.)