Cognitive Psychology: History Offered a Mechanistic Account of Selective Attention, a Concept That Had Been Banished During Behaviorism
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Cognitie Neuroscience Mesulam M M 2000 Principles of Behaioral and Cognitie ism was concerned primarily with the learning of Neurology. Oxford University Press, New York associations, particularly in nonhuman species, and it Moody S L, Wise S P, di Pellegrino G, Zipser D 1998 A model constrained theorizing to stimulus–response notions. that accounts for activity in primate frontal cortex during a The overthrow of behaviorism came not so much from delayed matching-to-sample task. Journal of Neuroscience 18(1): 399–410 ideas within psychology as from three research ap- Olson C R, Gettner N 1995 Object-centered direction selectivity proaches external to the field. in the supplementary eye field of the macaque monkey. Science 269: 985–8 Petersen S E, Fox P T, Posner M I, Mintun M, Raichle M E 1988 Positron emission tomographic studies of the cortical 1.1 Communications Research and the Information anatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331: 585–9 Processing Approach Pouget A, Deneve S, Sejnowski T J 1999 Frames of reference in During World War II, new concepts and theories were hemineglect: A computational approach. Progress in Brain developed about signal processing and communica- Research 121: 81–97 Rumelhart D E, McClelland J L, the PDP Research Group 1986 tion, and these ideas had a profound impact on Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Micro- psychologists active during the war years. One im- structure of Cognition. Vol. 1: Foundations. MIT Press, portant work was Shannon’s 1948 paper about Infor- Cambridge, MA mation Theory. It proposed that information was Seidenberg M S, McClelland J L 1989 A distributed, devel- communicated by sending a signal through a sequence opmental model of word recognition and naming. Psycho- of stages or transformations. This suggested that logical Reiew 96: 523–68 human perception and memory might be concep- Tanaka K 1996 Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. Annual tualized in a similar way: sensory information enters Re iew Neuroscience 19: 109–39 the receptors, then is fed into perceptual analyzers, Ungerleider L G, Mishkin M 1982 Two cortical visual systems. whose outputs in turn are input to memory systems. In: Ingle D J, Goodale M A, Mansfield R J W (eds.) Analysis of Visual Behaior. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA This was the start of the ‘information processing’ Wilson M A, McNaughton B L 1994 Reactivation of hippo- approach—the idea that cognition could be under- campal ensemble memories during sleep. Science 265: 676–9 stood as a flow of information within the organism, Zipser D, Andersen R A 1988 A back propagation programmed an idea that continues to dominate cognitive psy- network that simulates response properties of a subset of chology. posterior parietal neurons. Nature 331: 679–84 Perhaps the first major theoretical effort in infor- mation processing psychology was Donald Broad- J. L. McClelland bent’s Perception and Communication (Broadbent 1958). According to Broadbent’s model, information output from the perceptual system encountered a filter, which passed only information to which people were attending. Although this notion of an all-or-none filter would prove too strong (Treisman 1960), it Cognitive Psychology: History offered a mechanistic account of selective attention, a concept that had been banished during behaviorism. Information that passed Broadbent’s filter then moved Since the beginning of experimental psychology in on to a ‘limited capacity decision channel,’ a system the nineteenth century, there had been interest in the that has some of the properties of short-term memory, study of higher mental processes. But something and from there on to long-term memory. This last part discontinuous happened in the late 1950s, something of Broadbent’s model—the transfer of information so dramatic that it is now referred to as the ‘cognitive from short- to long-term memory—became the salient revolution,’ and the view of mental processes that it point of the dual-memory models developed in the spawned is called ‘cognitive psychology.’ What hap- 1970s. pened was that American psychologists rejected be- Another aspect of Information theory that attracted haviorism and adopted a model of mind based on the psychologist’s interest was a quantitative measure of computer. The brief history that follows (adapted in information in terms of ‘bits’ (roughly, the logarithm part from Hilgard (1987) and Kessel and Bevan (1985)) to the base 2 of the number of possible alternatives). In chronicles mainstream cognitive psychology from the a still widely cited paper, George Miller (1956) showed onset of the cognitive revolution to the beginning of that the limits of short-term memory had little to do the twenty-first century. with bits. But along the way, Miller’s and others’ interest in the technical aspects of information theory and related work had fostered mathematical psy- 1. Beginnings chology, a subfield that was being fueled by other sources as well (e.g., Estes and Burke 1953, Luce 1959, From roughly the 1920s through the 1950s, American Garner 1962). Over the years, mathematical psychol- psychology was dominated by behaviorism. Behavior- ogy has frequently joined forces with the information 2140 Cognitie Psychology: History processing approach to provide precise claims about transformational grammar would change the intel- memory, attention, and related processes. lectual landscape of linguistics, and usher in a new psycholinguistics. Chomsky’s second publication (1959) was a review of Verbal Behaior, a book about language learning by 1.2 The Computer Modeling Approach the then most respected behaviorist alive, B. F. Skinner Technical developments during World War II also led (Skinner 1957). Chomsky’s review is arguably one of to the development of digital computers. Questions the most significant documents in the history of soon arose about the comparability of computer and cognitive psychology. It aimed not merely to devastate human intelligence (Turing 1950). By 1957, Alan Skinner’s proposals about language, but to undermine Newell, J. C. Shaw, and Herb Simon had designed a behaviorism as a serious scientific approach to psy- computer program that could solve difficult logic chology. To some extent, it succeeded on both counts. problems, a domain previously thought to be the unique province of humans. Newell and Simon soon followed with programs that displayed general 1.4 An Approach Intrinsic to Psychology problem-solving skills much like those of humans, and argued that these programs offered detailed models of At least one source of modern cognitive psychology human problem solving (a classic summary is con- came from within the field. This approach had its roots tained in Newell and Simon (1972)). This work would in Gestalt psychology, and maintained its focus on the also help establish the field of artificial intelligence. higher mental processes. A signal event in this tra- Early on, cross-talk developed between the com- dition was the 1956 book A Study of Thinking,by puter modeling and information-processing ap- Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (Bruner et al. 1956). proaches, which crystallized in the 1960 book Plans The work investigated how people learn new concepts and the Structure of Behaior (Miller et al. 1960). The and categories, and it emphasized strategies of learning book showed that information-processing psychology rather than just associative relations. The proposals fit could use the theoretical language of computer model- perfectly with the information-processing approach— ing even if it did not actually lead to computer indeed, they were information processing proposals— programs. With the ‘bit’ having failed as a psycho- and offered still another reason to break from be- logical unit, information processing badly needed a haviorism. rigorous but rich means to represent psychological By the early 1960s all was in place. Behaviorism was information (without such representations, what on the wane in academic departments all over America exactly was being processed in the information proces- (it had never really taken strong root in Europe). sing approach?). Computer modeling supplied power- Psychologists interested in the information-processing ful ideas about representations (as data structures), as approach were moving into academia, and Harvard well as about processes that operate on these struc- University went so far as to establish a Center for tures. The resultant idea of human information pro- Cognitive Studies directed by Jerome Bruner and cessing as sequences of computational processes George Miller. The new view in psychology was operating on mental representations remains the information processing. It likened mind to a computer, cornerstone of modern cognitive psychology (see and emphasized the representations and processes e.g., Fodor 1975). needed to give rise to activities ranging from pattern recognition, attention, categorization, memory, reas- oning, decision making, problem solving, and language. 1.3 The Generatie Linguistics Approach A third external influence that lead to the rise of modern cognitive psychology was the development of 2. The Growth of Cognitie Psychology generative grammar in linguistics by Noam Chomsky. Two of Chomsky’s publications in the late 1950s had The 1960s brought progress in many of the above- a profound effect on the nascent cognitive psychology. mentioned topic areas, some of which are highlighted The first was his 1957 book Syntactic Structures below. (Chomsky 1957). It focused on the mental structures needed to represent the kind of linguistic knowledge that any competent speaker of a language must have. 2.1 Pattern Recognition Chomsky argued that associations per se, and even phrase structure grammars, could not fully represent One of the first areas to benefit from the cognitive our knowledge of syntax (how words are organized revolution was pattern recognition, the study of how into phrases and sentences). What had to be added people perceive and recognize objects. The cognitive was a component capable of transforming one syn- approach provided a general two-stage view of object tactic structure into another.