Summary: Chapter 1
The scientific study of the mind was the impetus that first led to the founding of psychology by Wundt. That early form of cognition foundered because of methodological problems and led to Watson’s founding of Behaviorism, a slow-moving movement that eventually came to dominate much of American psychology well into the 1970s. But, as Miller (2003) noted, the mind had remained alive within social and clinical psychology. World War II helped revive interest in cognition through the need to rapidly assess and select personnel for the specialized tasks of warfare. After the war, that effort led to a massive revival of psychological testing in a wide variety of arenas including education and job placement. The work of codebreakers using the earliest digital computers also led to their introduction to the civilian world after the war was over. The rise of ransomware has demonstrated how completely the digital computer and its networks have come to dominate the current scene.
The study of memory was not a part of psychology’s initial list of topics. It only gained prominence after Ebbinghaus published the results of the research he had painstakingly collected from himself using his new savings method. His results are still valid and appear in every general psychology text today. Bartlett was another early memory researcher but his goal was different from Ebbinghaus’s. Bartlett looked for the errors his students made after reading stories he presented. He found that the longer the interval between reading and testing the worse was their recall of story details, or the surface structure. Plus, his students tended to change unfamiliar topics to more familiar ones. But, nearly all of his students recalled the meaning of the story, its deep structure.
Ebbighaus’s methods were quickly adopted and modified and led to an interest in verbal learning by many psychologists. Calkins developed the paired associate method and it was used extensively in laboratory settings to study memory because it avoided the problems of serial methods. Recall methods were used too, as participants attempted to remember as many verbal of physical items following a brief presentation. Theories of forgetting were also part of the verbal learning movement. The earliest decay theories yielded to interference theories and later to theories that factored in biological constraints or the benefits of organization to memory. Miller’s “magic number 7” and Atkinson and Shiffrin’s information processing theory were examples of each respectively. Later modifications included Craik and Lockhart’s levels of processing model, Tulving’s distinction between episodic and semantic memories, and Baddeley and Hitch’s working memory. The verbal learning researchers changed the idea of memory as a thing to memory as a process.
Köhler’s insight learning showed how some problems were solved after an impasse and the linking of two separate gestalts together into one. The use and acceptance of representations also aided problem solving. Being able to switch from a representation that inhibited the finding of a solution to another where the solution was clearer aided problem solving. Roitblatt’s elucidation of the components of a representation: domain, content, code, medium, and dynamism made it easier to understand how representations played a role in problem solving. Newell and Simon’s Logic Theorist computer program demonstrated that computers, too, could be made to solve difficult problems through the use of formal logic and heuristics working together. Their definition of problems as consisting of a problem space, an initial set of conditions, a final desired goal, and operators to move through the problem space to the final goal has been widely adopted. While heuristics have proved helpful to problem solving, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated how some heuristics led to biased judgments. The current AI tsunami is being led by Large Language Models. Those produce new and insightful results but no one yet knows how they do so.
Language is an ubiquitous human phenomenon but one whose origins are lost in time. Biologically, the FOXP2 gene has been implicated in the evolution of language but many argue that human sociality also played a large role. In the 1970s Chomsky brought language into psychology as a major topic. Many studies have demonstrated the remarkably consistent process of language acquisition in children and in adults learning a second language.
The relationship of neurophysiology and cognition is also important. This old problem was revitalized in the late 20th century by Lashley’s search for the engram and Hebb’s idea of cell assemblies. Sperry’s discovery of the “split brain” won him a Nobel Prize and showed in new detail the organization of the human brain. Kandel also won a Nobel Prize for his work on Aplysia, the sea slug. He demonstrated the neurobiology of many types of learning. Hiesinger, a neurobiologist, attempted to bring neuroscientists, developmental geneticists, robotics engineers, and AI researchers together to better understand how information is handled by all of those disciplines and to have them better communicate about it among each other. Prochazka noted the many successes of applied devices such as cochlear implants and cardiac pacemakers. He pointed out how the transistor and integrated circuits have made it possible to make daily life better through engineering. Bräuer argued that the cognition of non-human animals is another worthwhile area for future study. He believed that researchers should become less anthropomorphic and should take animal ecology into better account in the future. (Above comes from my History of Psychology text.)
Most of the topics above will be covered during this semester.