Relatore: Professor Bruno OSIMO - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni ...

processes. Due to the built-in limitation of the introspective method,
psychologists turn away from it and from all associated theories. But
introspection was a central method in studying cognitive processes and
consequently psychological research turned away from cognitive processes too
(Someren, Barnard and Sandberg 1994).
Understandable counter-reactions followed. One of them was the
behaviorist paradigm (1930s) which promoted psychology as a hard positivist
science. Its purpose was to limit psychological research to objectively
observable behavior. This entailed abandoning subjective research methods
like introspection, because “the objective, i.e. scientific, study of the human
behavior could only be based on the analysis of the relationship between
external stimuli and behavioral responses” (Jääskeläinen 1999: 55).
Behaviorism dominated American psychology, while European
researchers, particularly representatives of the Gestalt Psychology school of
thought, had a slightly different view of how to do psychology. Although they
also rejected classical introspection as a research method, they wanted to
study thought and not just behavioral responses to stimuli. They also
developed more sophisticated methods of data collection on the thought
process: phenomenological observation, phenomenological introspection, and
the method of thinking aloud (Börsch 1986). The beginnings of the cognitive
paradigm are usually dated in the mid 1950s and picked up where Gestalt
Psychology left off (due to the beginning of the Second World War)
(Jääskeläinen 1999).
3. 2. ERICSSON AND SIMON’S MODEL
Thinking aloud as a method for scientific research rests on a solid
scientific foundation in cognitive psychology, a science that studies human
cognition, i.e. how humans receive, store, manipulate, and use knowledge.
The theoretical framework for TAP experiments is provided mainly by the
work of Ericsson and Simon (1984). These scholars base their theory of
verbalization on the information-processing approach in cognitive psychology,
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