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Cognitive psychology could finally integrate the physical and mental worlds, and mental life could now be explained by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback. Lachman, Lachman, and Butterflied, in Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing, provided one of the most impressive descriptions of how cognitive psychology could replace Watsonian and Skinnerian psychology.

Symbols continued to be the key to computer decision-making because computers, like humans, process symbols and make decisions about the input; create new impressions of the input; store the input; and
give back a symbolic output. Calling a behavior a response was quite different from calling behavior an output. It implied a different belief system and history and a totally different explanation. In a similar manner, a stimulus and an input would propose quite different implications. These discoveries encouraged psychologists to abandon animal for computer research, since computers had the potential to explain human behavior much more accurately than through the study of non-human animals.