Why the Historical Context?

provide a more complete understanding of and
appreciation for cognitive psychology
 early cognitive psychology (and its downfall)
 the rise of behaviorism (and its downfall)
 the cognitive revolution
 cognition as information processing
 classical cognitive psychology
 where is cognitive psychology headed?
 embodied cognition
Early Research in Cognition

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
 the “father” of modern experimental
psychology
 1879 established first formal laboratory in
experimental psychology (Germany)
 research goal was to explain immediate mental
experience as it occurred
 discover the basic elements of thought
 discover the laws by which basic elements
combine into more complex thought
Early Research in Cognition

Edward Titchener (1867-1927)
 student of Wundt
 like Wundt, research goal was to examine
immediate mental experience as it occurred
 unlike Wundt, research goal was to describe the
structure of immediate mental experience as it
occurred
 structuralism
 “is” not “is for” of mental experience
Early Research in Cognition

Wundt and Titchener
 primary methodology → experimental introspection
 a technique to determine whether an individual is
experiencing a specific inner sensation
 participants were trained to only report their
immediate inner sensations of an object
 e.g., an apple
 study only elemental (basic) cognitive processes
Early Research in Cognition

the spectacular downfall of structuralism
 experimental introspection
 inconsistency in method and results
 Titchener became extremely dogmatic
 only his findings were of merit
 the phenomenon of interest (inner sensations)
were not publicly observable
 findings could not be verified or replicated
 introspection, for ~ 6 decades (even today)
was a dirty word for most psychologists
Early Research in Cognition

the spectacular downfall of structuralism
 excluded other forms of psychological investigation
 animal studies
 understand brain processes and structures
underlying cognition (e.g., vision – cats,
monkeys, even ferrets)
 abnormal behavior studies (humans)
 how does brain injury affect cognition
 e.g., HM
Early Research in Cognition

the spectacular downfall of structuralism
 excluded other forms of psychological investigation
 applied psychology studies
 issues of WWII
 how do people perform certain tasks
 how do sonar operators learn to detect
mines from rocks
 how do pilots learn to navigate their planes
 how to use intelligence tests to detect more
capable soldiers for leadership positions
Early Research in Cognition

the spectacular downfall of structuralism
 excluded other forms of psychological investigation
 evolutionary theory
 mental experience is functional
 discover the ‘is for’ of mental experience, not the ‘is’
 functions of the mind are adaptive
 cognitive abilities helped our ancestors survive
and reproduce, just like bodily abilities/structures
 more on this near the end
Early Research in Cognition

William James (1842-1910)
 ~ 80 years ahead of his time
 The Principles of Psychology (1890)
 was an early proponent of incorporating
evolutionary thought into psychology
 unfortunately, he was not overly influential in
the US, which became the dominant force in
experimental psychology
The Rise of Behaviorism
1849-1936
Pavlov

1878-1958
Watson
banished the study of mental events
 mental events were unobservable
1904-1990
Skinner
Behaviorist Manifesto

“Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely
objective experimental branch of natural science. Its
theoretical goal is the prediction and control of
behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its
methods, nor is the scientific value of its data
dependent upon the readiness with which they lend
themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of
animal response, recognizes no dividing line between
man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its
refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the
behaviorist’s total scheme of investigation.” (Watson,
1913)
Implications for the Study of
Cognition
 UH-OH!!!!!

this was the beginning of very dark days
(actually, decades) for cognitive psychology
Behaviorism’s Articles of Faith
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
the sole subject matter of psychology is behavior
cognitive constructs, events, and processes ought to
play no role in or be the object of psychological
investigation or theory
causes of behavior are external not internal to the
organism
humans are relatively passive receptors of external
stimuli
humans are not active information processors
publicly objective and verifiable methods must be
used to examine human (and animal) behavior
“‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and
my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll
guarantee to take any one at random and train him to
become any type of specialist I might select—a doctor,
lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even into
beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents,
penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of
his ancestors.’ I am going beyond my facts and I admit
it … Please note that when this experiment is made I
am to be allowed to specify the way they are to be
brought up and the type of world they have to live in”
(Watson, 1926)
Behaviorism’s Articles of Faith

the first five articles of faith = radical behaviorism
 explanation of behavior in terms of observed
events only
 stimulus and response (Pavlov/Watson), or
 response and reinforcement (Skinner)
 nature vs nuture
 no place for mental events in between
Behaviorism’s Articles of Faith

the sixth article of faith = methodological behaviorism
 a huge improvement in research design over
introspection
 cognitive psychologists today are methodological
behaviorists
 behavior used to index mental events and
processes
 it’s okay to study cognition, but must investigate it
by measuring overt behavior only (e.g., RT)
Radical Behaviorism

Skinner’s form of behaviorism was the dominant form
(in the US) at the time of the cognitive revolution
(1950s)
 denied the importance of examining mental events
 his attitude toward cognitive psychology?
 he hated it!
 but behaviorism had some glaring problems
 this coupled with developments in other
disciplines led to what is called the cognitive
revolution
Giants of the Cognitive Revolution
1912-1954
Turing
1916-2001
Shannon
1902-1977
Luria
1927-1992
Newell
1894-1964
Wiener
Miller
1916-2001
Simon
Chomsky
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

1: World War II
 academic psychologists were “put to work on the
practical problems of making war … trying to
understand problems of perception, judgment,
thinking, and decision making” (Lachman et al.,
1979)
 focus on performance
 pilots, radar and sonar operators and
technology
 assessment (personality, aptitude) for military rank
(officers)
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

1: World War II
 psychologists came into contact with scientists
from other research areas
 mathematicians, early “computer scientists”,
neuropsychologists, medical doctors
 need to build new technology
 “number cruncher” computers
 anti-aircraft technology
 code-breaking devices
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

2: cybernetics
 Norbert Wiener (1894-1964)
 mathematician
 servomechanisms
 devices keeping anti-aircraft artillery, guided
missiles on course
 importance of feedback, self-regulation, &
self-correction (‘internal’ communication)
 no time for environmental reinforcement
feedback
 functioning of biological organisms and
machines have important parallels
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

2: cybernetics
 Wiener “put forth the notion that problems of
control engineering and communication
engineering are inseparable; moreover, they
center not on the techniques of electrical
engineering, but rather on the much more
fundamental notion of the message—’whether this
should be transmitted by electrical, mechanical, or
nervous means’” (Gardner, 1985)
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

3: linguistics
 Noam Chomsky (1928)
 in 1959, reviewed Skinner’s 1957
book Verbal Behavior
 Skinner attempted to explain linguistic
behavior with laws of reinforcement
 Chomsky decisively demonstrated that
Skinner’s approach could not work
 poverty of the stimulus
 creativity
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

3: linguistics
 “the composition and production of an utterance is
not simply a matter of stringing together a
sequence of responses under the control of
outside stimulation and intraverbal association,
and that the syntactic organization of an utterance
is not something directly represented in any
simple way in the physical structure of the
utterance itself” (Chomsky, 1959)
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

3: linguistics
 “a critical account of his book must show that with
a literal reading (where the terms of the
descriptive system have something like the
technical meanings given in Skinner’s definitions)
the book covers almost no aspects of linguistic
behavior, and that with a metaphoric reading, it is
no more scientific than the traditional approaches
to this subject matter, and rarely as clear and
careful.” (Chomsky, 1964a)
Four Nails in Behaviorism’s Coffin

4: neuropsychology
 Alexander Luria (1902-1977)
 study of cognitive deficits following
brain injury
 behavior influenced by the integrity
(or damage) to the brain
 much similarity in cognitive deficits across
cultures, more than behaviorism would allow
 patterns of cognitive deficits not easily
explained by simple stimulus-response or
response-reinforcement theories
Cognition as Information Processing

Marr’s (1982) “Cognitive Manifesto”
 “it soon became clear that many aspects of the
world around us could benefit from an informationprocessing point of view. Most of the phenomena
that are central to us as human beings – the
mysteries of life and evolution, of perception and
feeling and thought – are primarily phenomena of
information processing, and if we are ever to
understand them fully, our thinking about them
must include this perspective”
Cognition’s Articles of Faith
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
cognitive processes and representations exist
many, many phenomena involve them
including a cognitive “point of view” is essential to
getting a full understanding of these phenomena
they can be studied scientifically
cognitive phenomena can be viewed as information
processing tasks or problems
cognitive constructs are useful (if properly
operationalized) in theorizing and experimentation
Cognition as Information Processing:
Early Guiding Ideas






computing information likely involves logical operations
(rules/algorithms) on a formal language (internal symbols) –
Frege
internal symbols isomorphic with the world - Wittgenstein
computers are machines that compute information –Turing
human nervous systems are machines that compute
information – McCulloch & Pitts
computers can store programs and it is the operation of the
programs that is of interest – von Neumann
human nervous systems can store programs and it is the
operation of the programs that is of interest – Wiener,
Shannon, Chomsky
The Classical View of Cognition

structure separate from process



structure
 set of individual symbols, symbol expressions
process
 set of processes that operate or manipulate the
symbols in some way (creating, modifying,
reproducing)
symbols and the processes that operate on them
are the subject matter of cognitive psychology
Cognition as Information Processing

Alan Turing (1912-1954)
 mathematician, computer scientist
 computation
 the act of computing or calculating;
a method or system of computing or
calculating
 Turing Machine
 a conceptual device
 computers, human brains (perhaps with
help)
 carry out any possible calculation, in principle
Cognition as Information Processing

Turing Machine
The Classical View of Cognition

functionalism
 cognitive states
defined in terms
of functional, causal
roles, not in terms of
the material structure
in which they are
instantiated
Fodor
Putnam
Pylyshyn
The Classical View of Cognition

functionalism
 to study cognition, cognitive psychologists study
the mind, not the brain
 effectively ignores the brain
 mental states (functional kind of thing) are multiply
realizable
 i.e., they are implementable in all manner of
physically different devices
 human brains, computers, Martian ‘brains’
The Classical View of Cognition

two major problems for the classical approach
 based on current digital computer technology, not
on the brain (not biologically plausible)
 computer metaphor for cognition
 disembodied – does not take the body into
account
Embodied Cognition
Lakoff
Johnson
Clark
Barsalou
Embodied Cognition

how the body interacts with the world
influences the types of cognitive capacities
we as humans have

evolutionary perspective: function of
 perceptual and motor systems
 how they aid with survival
 cognitive capacities are heavily dependent on
knowledge gained through how our bodies
can function in the world
Evidence for Embodied Cognition

1: Lakoff and Johnson – metaphor
 we use knowledge we gain through sensorimotor
interaction with the world to help us understand
abstract concepts
 examples from their book “Philosophy in the
Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to
Western Thought” (1999)
 p. 50
Evidence for Embodied Cognition

2: basic level categories
 take furniture-chair-rocking chair
 furniture – superordinate category
 chair – basic level category
 rocking chair – subordinate category
 basic level objects are recognized faster and
learned before and more easily than the other two
types of categories
 why?
Evidence for Embodied Cognition

2: basic level categories
 it is the highest level at which a single mental
image can represent the entire category
 imagine a chair, a bed, a piece of furniture
 it is the highest level at which category members
have similarly perceived overall shapes
 again, (prototypical) chairs, beds, have a similar
shape
 what is the shape of a prototypical piece of
furniture?
Evidence for Embodied Cognition

2: basic level categories
 it is the highest level at which a person uses
similar motor actions for interacting with category
members
 generalized motor actions for chairs and beds
but not for generalized pieces of furniture
 it is the level at which most of our knowledge is
organized
 what do you know about chairs and beds vs
furniture
Evidence for Embodied Cognition


I conduct research on visual word recognition
 what types of information is used to store and
retrieve memories for words
effects of imageability
 words that are easily imagined (e.g., PEACH,
BIKE) are recognized more rapidly than words
that are difficult to imagine (e.g., BRIBE, LOAN)
Evidence for Embodied Cognition


conducted a study this semester looking at the
effects of ease of body/object interaction
words that refer to objects with which our bodies can
easily interact (e.g., COUCH, ROPE) are recognized
more rapidly than words that refer to objects with
which our bodies cannot easily interact (e.g.,
CLOUD, MIST)
 importantly, imageability of the words of the two
ease of body/object interaction word lists are
matched
The Future of Cognitive Psychology

to fully understand and appreciate human cognition,
more research and theory development is needed in
the following areas:
 embodied cognition
 evolutionary psychology
 neuroscience and neuropsychology
 try to rid cognitive psychology of the still
prevalent idea of functionalism (a la Fodor,
Pylyshyn, Putnam)