Mediated Cognition: Information Technologies and the Sciences of Mind Alasdair J. McMillan A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies York University Toronto, Ontario August 2016 © Alasdair McMillan, 2016 ii Abstract This dissertation investigates the interconnections between minds, media, and the cognitive sciences. It asks what it means for media to have effects upon the mind: do our tools influence the ways that we think? It considers what scientific evidence can be brought to bear on the question: how can we know and measure these effects? Ultimately, it looks to the looping pathways by which science employs technological media in understanding the mind, and the public comes to understand and respond to these scientific discourses. I contend that like human cognition itself, the enterprise of cognitive science is a deeply and distinctively mediated phenomenon. This casts a different light on contemporary debates about whether television, computers, or the Internet are ‘changing our brains,’ for better or for worse. Rather than imagining media effects as befalling a fictive natural mind, I draw on multiple disciplines to situate mind and the sciences thereof as shaped from their origins through interaction with technology. Our task is then to interrogate the forms of cognition and attention fostered by different media, alongside their attendant costs and benefits. The first chapter positions this dissertation between the fields of media studies and STS, developing a case for the reality of media effects without the implication of ‘technological determinism.’ The second considers the history of technological metaphor in scientific characterizations of the mind. The third section consists of three separate chapters on the history of cognitive science, presenting the core of my case for its uniquely mediated character. Across three distinct eras, what unifies cognitive science is the quest to understand the mind using computational systems, operating by turns as generative metaphors and tangible models. I then evaluate the contemporary cognitive-scientific research on the question of media effects, and the growing role of electronic media in science. My fifth and final section develops a content analysis: what is said in the media about the popular theory that media themselves, in one way or another, are causing attention deficit disorders? The work concludes with a summary and some reflections on mind, culture, technoscience and markets as recursively interwoven causal systems. iii Acknowledgements Though writing is typically a solitary pursuit, I couldn’t have done this without a lot of help. Infinite thanks to my wife Danielle for her continuous emotional and material support over many years of writing, and to our daughter Elspeth for being the most wonderful distraction from this work that I could ever hope for. Thanks as well to my parents; your love and support, along with your own senses of intellectual curiosity helped set me on this path and get me to the end of it. A huge thank you to my supervisor, Edward Jones-Imhotep, for your constructive advice and your imperturbable calm; thanks as well to my committee members Chris Green and Mike Pettit. All three of you struck just the right balance between critique, appreciation, and “get it done!” I’m also very grateful for constructive feedback from and discussions with my external examiners, Steve Bailey and Tara Abraham. Thanks, too, to the graduate program directors over my time here and since the birth of the program: Bernard Lightman, Kenton Kroker, and Aryn Martin. Each of you helped shepherd me through and make it a fulfilling experience, alongside the rest of the STS faculty and my graduate student colleagues. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you and sharpening my thinking in discussions at seminars, lectures, and conferences. Foremost among colleagues and friends in the program I want to thank Cameron Murray and Bernhard Isopp, without you guys I would have had nowhere near as much fun doing this. Acknowledgements are also due to the nonhuman actors deployed in writing the text, both hardware and software. Without Zotero there is no way my puny human brain could have wrangled all these references, thanks be to it and the volunteer team of human contributors to this open- source project. And I may have had to swap out a few components here and there but never once lost any substantial amount of work, nor had to give a second thought to backups. Call it a regression to the days of mainframes and timesharing if you will, but I say cloud storage is a wonderful thing. Final acknowledgements are in order to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose grant support was essential in allowing me to complete this research project. iv Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................................................................. iv Table of Figures .................................................................................................................................................................................. v Prelude .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 1. Messages and mediators ................................................................................................................................................................. 7 The hazards of media effects. ............................................................................................................................................... 10 Mediation, ANT and STS. .................................................................................................................................................... 21 The sciences and economies of attention. .......................................................................................................................... 34 2. Technological metaphor and the figuration of mind ............................................................................................................... 45 3. A mediated history of cognitive science .................................................................................................................................... 75 3.1 : Cybernetics: electromechanical brains and analog minds .............................................................................................. 84 A technoscientific metaphysics. ........................................................................................................................................... 84 From ordnance to Perceptrons: thinking machines in cybernetics. ................................................................................ 90 Cybernetics’ speculative futures. ........................................................................................................................................ 118 3.2 : Cognitivism: the ascent of digital representations ........................................................................................................ 130 The emancipation of models and the return to minds. ................................................................................................... 130 Programming tools for cognition: Logic Theorist, General Problem Solver, and list processing. ........................... 138 Cognitivism becomes ‘old-fashioned.’ ............................................................................................................................... 166 3.3: Post-Cognitivism: PDP, Connectionism, and a return to neurobiology .................................................................... 178 4. Media effects in science and society ......................................................................................................................................... 216 Delimiting ‘effects.’ .............................................................................................................................................................. 220 Toward neuromediation. ..................................................................................................................................................... 231 Another angle on mediation in science and cognition. ................................................................................................... 265 5. Technology and attentional pathology: the case of ADHD ................................................................................................. 288 5.1. Historicizing diagnosis ....................................................................................................................................................... 292 Regarding ‘construction.’ ....................................................................................................................................................