Foundations of Cognitive Psychology This page intentionally left blank Foundations of Cognitive Psychology Core Readings Daniel J. Levitin A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ( 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Palatino on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levitin, Daniel J. Foundations of cognitive psychology : core readings / Daniel J. Levitin. p. cm. ‘‘A Bradford book.’’ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-12247-2 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Cognitive psychology. I. Title. BF201 .L48 2002 153—dc21 2002022662 To my teachers: Michael Posner, Douglas Hintzman, and Roger Shepard. This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface xiii part i Foundations—Philosophical Basis, The Mind/Body Problem 1 Chapter 1 Visual Awareness 3 Stephen E. Palmer Chapter 2 Where Am I? 23 Daniel C. Dennett Chapter 3 Can Machines Think? 35 Daniel C. Dennett part ii Neural Networks 55 Chapter 4 The Appeal of Parallel Distributed Processing 57 Jay L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhard, and Geoffrey E. Hinton part iii Objections 93 Chapter 5 Minds, Brains, and Programs 95 John R. Searle part iv Experimental Design 113 Chapter 6 Experimental Design in Psychological Research 115 Daniel J. Levitin viii Contents part v Perception 131 Chapter 7 Perception 133 Philip G. Zimbardo and Richard J. Gerrig Chapter 8 Organizing Objects and Scenes 189 Stephen E. Palmer Chapter 9 The Auditory Scene 213 Albert S. Bregman part vi Categories and Concepts 249 Chapter 10 Principles of Categorization 251 Eleanor Rosch Chapter 11 Philosophical Investigations, Sections 65–78 271 Ludwig Wittgenstein Chapter 12 The Exemplar View 277 Edward E. Smith and Douglas L. Medin part vii Memory 293 Chapter 13 Memory for Musical Attributes 295 Daniel J. Levitin Chapter 14 Memory 311 R. Kim Guenther part viii Attention 361 Chapter 15 Attention and Performance Limitations 363 Michael W. Eysenck and Mark T. Keane Chapter 16 Features and Objects in Visual Processing 399 Anne Treisman Contents ix part ix Human-Computer Interaction 415 Chapter 17 The Psychopathology of Everyday Things 417 Donald A. Norman Chapter 18 Distributed Cognition 443 Donald A. Norman part x Music Cognition 453 Chapter 19 Neural Nets, Temporal Composites, and Tonality 455 Jamshed J. Bharucha Chapter 20 The Development of Music Perception and Cognition 481 W. Jay Dowling Chapter 21 Cognitive Psychology and Music 503 Roger N. Shepard and Daniel J. Levitin part xi Expertise 515 Chapter 22 Prospects and Limits of the Empirical Study of Expertise: An Introduction 517 K. Anders Ericsson and Jacqui Smith Chapter 23 Three Problems in Teaching General Skills 551 John R. Hayes Chapter 24 Musical Expertise 565 John A. Sloboda part xii Decision Making 583 Chapter 25 Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases 585 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman Chapter 26 Decision Making 601 EldarShafirandAmosTversky xContents Chapter 27 For Those Condermned to Study the Past: Heuristics and Biases in Hindsight 621 Baruch Fischhoff part xiii Evolutionary Approaches 637 Chapter 28 Adaptations, Exaptations, and Spandrels 639 Daniel M. Buss, Martie G. Haselton, Todd K. Shackelford, April L. Bleske, and Jerome C. Wakefield Chapter 29 Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of Mind and Brain 665 John Tooby and Leda Cosmides part xiv Language 1—Language Acquisition 683 Chapter 30 The Invention of Language by Children: Environmental and Biological Influences 685 Lila R. Gleitman and Elissa L. Newport part xv Language 2—Language and Thought 705 Chapter 31 Languages and Logic 707 Benjamin L. Whorf part xvi Language 3—Pragmatics 717 Chapter 32 Logic and Conversation 719 H. P. Grice Chapter 33 Idiomaticity and Human Cognition 733 Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. part xvii Intelligence 751 Chapter 34 In a Nutshell 753 Howard Gardner Contents xi Chapter 35 A Rounded Version 761 Howard Gardner and Joseph Walters Chapter 36 Individual Differences in Cognition 779 R. Kim Guenther part xviii Cognitive Neuroscience 817 Chapter 37 Localization of Cognitive Operations in the Human Brain 819 Michael I. Posner, Steven E. Petersen, Peter T. Fox, and Marcus E. Raichle Chapter 38 The Mind and Donald O. Hebb 831 Peter M. Milner Chapter 39 Imaging the Future 841 Michael I. Posner and Daniel J. Levitin Index 855 This page intentionally left blank Preface Daniel J. Levitin What Is Cognitive Psychology? Cognitive psychology encompasses the scientific study of the human mind and how it processes information; it focuses on one of the most difficult of all mys- teries that humans have addressed. The mind is an enormously complex sys- tem holding a unique position in science: by necessity,we must use the mind to study itself,and so the focus of study and the instrument used for study are recursively linked. The sheer tenacity of human curiosity has in our own life- times brought answers to many of the most challenging scientific questions we have had the ambition to ask. Although many mysteries remain,at the dawn of the twenty-first century,we find that we do understand much about the fun- damental laws of chemistry,biology,and physics; the structure of space-time, theoriginsoftheuniverse.Wehaveplausibletheoriesabouttheoriginsand nature of life and have mapped the entire human genome. We can now turn our attention inward,to exploring the nature of thought,and how our mental lifecomestobewhatitis. There are scientists from nearly every field engaged in this pursuit. Physicists try to understand how physical matter can give rise to that ineffable state we call consciousness,and the decidedly nonphysical ‘‘mind stuff’’ that Descartes and other philosophers have argued about for centuries. Chemists,biologists, and neuroscientists join them in trying to explicate the mechanisms by which neurons communicate with each other and eventually form our thoughts,mem- ories,emotions,and desires. At the other end of the spectrum,economists study how we balance choices about limited natural and financial resources,and anthropologists study the influence of culture on thought and the formation of societies. So at one end we find scientists studying atoms and cells,at the other end there are scientists studying entire groups of people. Cognitive psycholo- gists tend to study the individual,and mental systems within individual brains, although ideally we try to stay informed of what our colleagues are doing. So cognition is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor,and this collection of readings is intended to reflect that. Why Not a Textbook? This book grew out of a course I took at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology (MIT) in 1975,from Susan Carey and Merrill Garrett (with occasional guest lectures by Mary Potter),and courses I taught at the University of Ore- xiv Preface gon, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. When I took cognition at MIT, there were only two textbooks about cognition as a field (ifitcouldevenbethoughtofasafieldthen):UlricNeisser’sCognitive Psy- chology and Michael Posner’s Cognition: An Introduction. Professors Carey and Garrett supplemented these texts with a thick book of hand-picked readings from Scientific American and mainstream psychology journals. Reading journal articles prepared the students for the debates that characterize science. Susan and Merrill skillfully brought these debates out in the classroom, through inter- active lectures and the Socratic method. Cognition is full of opposing theories and controversies. It is an empirical science, but in many cases the same data are used to support different arguments, and the reader must draw his or her own conclusions. The field of cognition is alive, dynamic, and rediscovering itself all the time. We should expect nothing less of the science devoted to understanding the mind. Today there are many excellent textbooks and readers devoted to cognition. Textbooks are valuable because they select and organize a daunting amount of information and cover the essential points of a topic. The disadvantage is that they do not reflect how psychologists learn about new research—this is most often done through journal articles or ‘‘high-level’’ book chapters directed to the working researcher. More technical in nature, these sources typically reveal details of an experiment’s design, the measures used, and how the findings are interpreted. They also reveal some of the inherent ambiguity in research (often hidden in a textbook’s tidy summary). Frequently students, when confronted with the actual data of a study, find alternate interpretations of the findings, and come to discover firsthand that researchers are often forced to draw their own conclusions. By the time undergraduates take a course in cognition (usu- ally their second or third course in psychology) they find themselves wonder- ingiftheyoughttomajor in psychology, and a few even think about going to graduate school. I believe they ought to know more about what it is like to read actual psychology articles, so they’ll know what they’re getting into. On the other hand, a book of readings composed exclusively of such primary sources would be difficult to read without a suitable grounding in the field and would leave out many important concepts, lacking an overview. That is, it might tend to emphasize the trees at the expense of the forest. Therefore, the goal of this anthology is to combine the best of both kinds of readings. By compiling an anthology such as this, I was able to pick and choose my favorite articles, by experts on each topic. Of the thirty-nine selec- tions, ten are from undergraduate textbooks, six are from professional journals, sixteen are chapters from ‘‘high-level’’ books aimed at advanced students and research scientists, and seven are more or less hybrids, coming from sources written for the educated layperson, such as Scientific American or popular books (e.g., Gardner, Norman).