THE PREHISTORY OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE THE REACTION AGAINST IN BEHAVIORISM?? (BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY)

 All behaviors are acquired through conditioning. Everything from speech to emotional responses were simply patterns of stimulus and learned response.  Only observable behavior should be considered (cognitions, emotions, and moods are too subjective – ignore them all!)  John B. Watson “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” 1913  "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—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." BEHAVIORISM?? (BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY)

 Two types of conditioning:  Classical conditioning: association between US and CS, CS results in conditioned behavioral response  Operant conditioning: that occurs through reinforcement and punishment, association between a behavior and a consequence for that behavior CLASSICAL CONDITIONING LITTLE ALBERT EXPERIMENT (PHOBIAS)

Watson and Rayner (1920) OPERANT CONDITIONING SKINNER BOX REINFORCEMENT THEORY CLASSICAL CONDITIONING VS. OPERANT CONDITIONING THREE LANDMARK PAPERS

1. Tolman and Honzik (1930): Latent Learning

2. Tolman et al. (1946): Sequential learning? Vs. Cognitive spatial map?

3. Lashley (1951): Importance of planning and organization 1. LATENT LEARNING LATENT LEARNING

▪ Learning in Behaviorism ▪ All learning is the result of conditioning ▪ Conditioning depends upon processes of association and reinforcement ➢ So learning is either reinforcement learning or simpler associative learning RAT MAZE LATENT LEARNING 1. First group: get rewarded every time

2. Second group: never get rewarded

3. Third group: Unrewarded for ten days, then began to be rewarded

➢ The third group showed significant increase in learning speed ➢ This is a form of ‘latent learning’ ➢ What do animals run then? Q1. Why latent learning is incompatible with assumptions of behaviorism? LATENT LEARNING OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

 Bandura “Bobo doll” 2. COGNITIVE MAP LEARNING COGNITIVE MAPS IN RATS?

Response learning vs. place learning

Q2. How do you know rats are doing place learning here? EDWARD C. TOLMAN 3. IMPORTANCE OF PLANNING AND ORGANIZATION THE PROBLEM OF SERIAL ORDER IN BEHAVIOR (1951)

Behaviorist’s view: Unfolding of behavior is the ‘reflex chain’

Movement N → movement N+1 → movement N+2 → ….

Lashley: Many of complex behaviors are products of prior planning and organization

✓ Movements can occur even when sensory feedback is interrupted ✓ Some movement sequences occur too quickly Karl Lashley ✓ The time to initiate a movement sequence can increase with the length or complexity of the sequence ✓ Early movement properties in a movement sequence can anticipate later features ✓ Neural activity can indicate preparation of upcoming behavioral events

▪ The movement planning is often subconscious: Hypothesis of subconscious information processing ▪ A complex task can be understood by breaking it down to a hierarchy of more basic sub-tasks: Hypothesis of task analysis TURING MACHINE AND CHOMSKY’S SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES TURING MACHINE AND CHOMSKY’S SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES TURING MACHINE LEGO TURING MACHINE TURING MACHINE AND CHOMSKY’S SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES

Transformational grammar

Similar phrase structures, with different meaning Susan is easy to please. Susan is eager to please.

Very different phrase structures, with similar meaning John has hit the ball. The ball has been hit by John. CHOMSKY’S SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES

▪ Bodies of information(phrase structure & transformation rule) ▪ Bodies of information can be manipulated algorithmically INFORMATION-PROCESSING MODELS IN PSYCHOLOGY THE EMERGENCE OF INFORMATION THEORY AND TWO INFLUENTIAL STUDIES

▪ George Miller, “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information”

▪ Donald Broadbent, “The role of auditory localization in attention and span” HOW MUCH INFORMATION CAN WE HANDLE?

Information-processing bottleneck! ▪ Our sensory systems are information channels with built-in limits

▪ ‘Chunking’ – 1100100 (Binary) vs. 100 (Decimal) ➢ 7 4 1 4 9 2 1 9 4 5

Q3. Think of an informal experiment that you can do to illustrate the significance of chunking information THE FLOW OF INFORMATION http://www.gocognitive.net/sites/default/files/selective.Attention.10_0.swf MODEL OF SELECTIVE ATTENTION

Q4. Give an example in your own words of selective attention in action. Incorporate as many different aspects of Broadbent’s model as possible. THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION-STEVEN PINKER