Download What came before cognition? Early Psychologists Interesting aside

What came before cognition?
Enter Behaviorism
• Philosophy of mind
• Problem: Thorndike mixed his terms…
• ..and the term “associationism” was picked
up by John Watson and promoted in the
form of learning theory…
• …in spite of the well-established idea that
sensory information is merely data on
which preexisting mental structures act
(e.g., Plato, early rationalism; Aristotle, early
empiricism; Descartes, rationalism; Locke,
empiricism; Kant, synthesis(?)…etc.)
• Rationalism:
– complexity is built into the organism
• Empiricism:
– idea that all knowledge comes from sensory experience
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Early Psychologists
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Interesting aside
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e.g., Watson, Skinner
– Promoted view that only externally measurable
events (stimuli and responses) should be
considered in understanding the mind
– Behaviorists deny the utility of positing and
relying on internal states to properly explain
behavior
• Thorndike observed…
• …if no reward followed a response, the response
would disappear
– Thus, rewards were responsible for providing a
mechanism for establishing a more adaptive
response
– Sounds like Darwin’s natural selection
idea…and Thorndike was deeply influenced by
Darwin
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e.g., Watson, Skinner
– Promoted view that only externally measurable
events (stimuli and responses) should be
considered in understanding the mind
– Behaviorists deny the utility of positing and
relying on internal states to properly explain
behavior
• Fechner, Weber (psychophysicists)
– Related physical properties of things like light and sound to the
psychological experiences they produce in the observer
• Ebbinghaus (late 1800s)
– Decided complex processes like memory could be measured and
analyzed
• Thorndike (1911-published monograph on “Animal Intelligence: An
Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals”)
– ‘Law of effect’ (e.g., response followed by reward would
– be stamped onto organism as habitual response)
– First general statement about the nature of associations
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Positive Feedback:
Snowball effect
Cybernetics
• Examination of communication and control in
living beings and their machines (1940s)
– Postwar (WWII) focus on goal-directed
machines
• Louis Couffignal, 1958:
– "the art of assuring efficiency of action”
• Norbert Wiener, 1948:
– from Greek kubernetes (pilot or rudder), first used by
Plato in the sense of "the art of steering" or "the art of
government "
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Importance of Feedback
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Copyright© 1997 Principia Cybernetica
Copyright© 1997 Principia Cybernetica
Copyright© 1997 Principia Cybernetica
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Negative Feedback:
Adaptive, goal-seeking behavior
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Positive/Negative Feedback
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• Cybernetics
Wiener, mathematician; founder of cybernetics
movement;
McCulloch, neurophysiologist, first to develop
mathematical models of neural networks;
von Neumann, mathematician; founding father
in domains of game theory, quantum logic,
axioms of quantum mechanics, the digital
computer, cellular automata and selfreproducing systems
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Von Neumann was synthesizer and promoter of the
stored program concept. His logical design of the IAS
machine (from the Institute for Advanced Studies)
became the prototype of most of its successors
(e.g., von Neumann Architecture).
End of Behaviorism?
• Surprisingly, at a specific conference
– MIT, September 11th, 1956
– Claimed by George Miller to be the birth date
of cognitive psychology
– In the same year, at a conference at Dartmouth,
the term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined
• Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon (father of
information theory) and many others in attendance
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Von Neumann with ENIAC
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Cognitive Revolution
• Cognition:
– Change from the dominance of behaviorism to
cognitivism in approaches to understanding the
mind
– One version of the view that internal states are
important to explaining behavior of complex
systems
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‘Fathers’ of the Revolution
• Noam Chomsky
– Truly instrumental in challenging
behaviorism’s dominance
– Argued that a serious theory of mental
processes should replace empiricism (that is,
the belief that experience is the source of
knowledge) as the dominant model in American
science
– Chomsky placed linguistics at the core of
studies of the mind
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• Established a new field of linguistics (generative
grammar) based on a theory he worked on during
the 1950s
• In 1957, published “Syntactic Structures’,
outlining his theory of transformationalgenerative grammar
• Distinguished innate, unconscious knowledge
(competence) of language from the way in which
people actually use language (performance)
• Argued that linguistic theory must account for
universal similarities between all languages and
for children’s ability to learn language
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Other Important Figures
• James Tanner and John Swets
– Applied signal detection theory and computer
technology to study of perception
• George Miller
– Wrote “Magical Number Seven, Plus-or-Minus Two”
• Jerome Bruner
– Developmental psychologist who saw limited utility to
associationist ideas in childhood learning; believed in
higher-level processes involved in thinking, built upon
representations and mental maps
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‘Fathers’ of the Revolution
• Newell & Simon
– Wrote first AI program (General Problem
Solver, or GPS) in 1959
– GPS was a theory of human problem solving
stated in the form of a simulation program (that
is, simulating a cognitive process) (Newell &
Simon, 1972)
– Theoretical framework of GPS had huge impact
on direction of cognitive studies, introducing
use of productions as a method for specifying
cognitive models
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