History of Cognition

Question 1

With what disciplines deals cognitive psychology?

Answer 1

• Mind
• Behaviour
• Behaviour

Question 2

What is the mind?

Answer 2

• Fire
• Spirit
• Soul
• Consciousness
• Intellect
• Anima (Greeks)
• Ātman (Hindu Philosophy)
• Dasein (German Philosophy)
• Experience

Question 3

There is no good definition of cognition because it depends on the philosophical stance of the respondent.
What can we say in general?

Answer 3

Cognition is about knowing.

Inherently a relation between the knower and the known.

Question 4

Who dominated the Pre-Socratic philosophy?

Answer 4

Heraclitus (500 BC):

• Things are constantly changing
• Universal flux; A reality exists and persists by virtue of constant change of its parts
• You can step in the same river, but not the same water

Parmenides of Elea (5th century BC):

• Wrote a complex metaphysical poem
• Universal stasis; to exist is not to change

Question 5

How did Aristotle ( 384-322 BCE) influence cognitive theory ?

Answer 5

• Devices a method of correct reasoning-logic: - an argument in which, when certain things are laid down, something else follows of necessity in their virtue of their being so
• Deductive Reasoning- Syllogisms
• Required the conviction of universal constants or truths

Question 6

Associationism involves Aristotle‘s law on remembrance and recall.
Which 4 components does it contain?

Answer 6

• The law of contiguity (Things or er events that occur close to each other in space or time tend to get linked together in the mind)
• The law of frequency (The more often two things or events are linked, the more powerful will be the association)
• The law of similarity (If two things are similar, the thought of one will tend ti trigger the thought of the other)
• The law of contrast (Seeing or recalling something may also trigger the recollection of something completely opposite)

Question 7

What did René Descartes (1596-1650),
who was a catholic rationalist who wanted to establish a foundation for the true and certain knowledge, state sbout the perceived world?

Answer 7

‚So after considering everything thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived by my mind‘ (Meditation 2, AT 7:25).

Question 8

How did Descartes (1596-1650) create the mind-body-problem?

Answer 8

He said that:
- The ‚I‘ is durable - soul / cogito / mind
- Mental phenomena and the physical structures on which they depend seem qualitatively different
- The mental and the physical are made of different stuff - dualist approach
- but they do interact!
—> this creates the mind-body problem for subtance dualism

Question 9

Descartes (1596-1650) viewed the body as a mechanical system, an automata, that obeys physical laws.
It was not until Isaac Newton (1642-1727) that these physical laws were described. What became the question then?

Answer 9

The question becomes ‚What are the laws for the mental world?‘
This would be the first and foremost question for the scientific field, called psychology.

Question 10

How was Empiricism developed?

Answer 10

• John Locke (1632-1704, English)
• George Berkley (1685-1753, Irish)
• David Hume (1711-1776, Scottish)
  —> Contrary to Descartes, all knowledge is seen as grounded in the experience of the world mediated by senses; knowledge through engagement with the world

Question 11

What is Molyneux’s question?

Answer 11

‘Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube, and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the cube, which is the sphere.
Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and the blind man to be made to see. Quære, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the globe, which is the cube (Locke, 1694/1979).’

Question 12

What happened to Associationism during the Enlightenment?

Answer 12

• Associations were seen as part of passive reason, not active reason, such as abstraction
• Locke assumed that complex ideas form for associating simple ideas and simple reflections
• Hume: all coherence are due to laws of resemblance and contiguity

Question 13

What are the keypoints of Rationalism and Empiricism?

Answer 13

Rationalism:

• Innate knowledge
• Reason and deduction
• Certainty
• a priori

Empiricism:

• Tabala rasa
• Inference and induction
• Tentative knowledge
• a posteriori

Question 14

How did Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) attempt to synthesise the insights of the rationalist and empiricist views?

Answer 14

• Regarded space and time as a priori of experience, and grounding the notion of cause and effect
• The natural laws can not be applied to living creatures, including humans
• Therefore psychology as a science is not possible

Kant agreed with the scepticism about what the senses provide and therefore we can never know about the world itself, as all information is relayed through our senses. Thus, there is no direct knowledge of the world. Any knowledge that is gathered is limited by the person’s senses. Even when using sophisticated equipment, reading the measurements still requires the senses. The objective study of the mind, in the same way as physics is an objective science, it is not possible.

Question 15

What does Kant’s in regards to psychology as a transcendental subject state?

Answer 15

• We can never know about the world in itself, as all information is relayed through our senses
• There is no direct knowledge of the world
• Any knowledge is limited by the person’s senses
• Objective study of the mind impossible

Question 16

How did John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) extend the associationist reach?

Answer 16

• A sensory impression leaves a mental representation (idea or image)
• If two stimuli are presented together repeated, they create an association in the mind
• The intensity of such a pairing can be serve the same fuction as repetition
• Associations can have attributes different from the parts
• Going beyond Hume, Mill argues that through generalisation more knowledge can be obtained beyond experience
• The scientific method
• Hypothetico-deductive method
• Psychology will never be an exact science

Question 17

The scientific methods have had many successful applications in various fields and facilitated the industrial revolution.
Why was there not such a revolution in the study of human cognition?

Answer 17

There are two reasons that can be found:

1) Darwin and medical scientists argued that animals and humans are on a continuum in a physical sense. By studying the human mind in the same way as studying a muscle or an animal was heretical.
2) There is a tension within psychology. Psychology studies behaviour, which objectively measurable (although variable), and the experience that a person has, which is subjective. Assuming that the physical entity produces both behaviour and experience means the soul comes from the body. This was a very dangerous position to hold and hence researchers interested in the mind tried to study the mind without antagonising the establishment.

Question 18

What researchers did was to focus on the parts of the body, using scientific method.
The research programme being that by researching the body in minute detail, there will be a time when the mental experience can be tested or recast in physical terms.
What did Helmholtz, Fechner and Wundt do, using this perspective?

Answer 18

• Helmholtz measures the speed of neural signal transmission (at 30 meters/second), 1849.
• Fechner published a book that aimed to quantitatively relate the objective quantities to subjective sensations and perceptions, 1860.
• Wundt established a laboratory dedicated to this type of research, 1979.

Question 19

Who influenced early psychology research?

Answer 19

1849: Hermann von Helmholtz first measures speed of neural signal transmission (ca. 30 meters per second).
1860: Gustav Fechner publishes ‘Elemente der Psychophysik’ seeking to quantitatively relate measurable quantities to subjective sensations.
1879: Wilhelm Wundt establishes laboratory in Leipzig, Germany

Question 20

Which methods were adopted in early research?

Answer 20

• analysis (reason) - armchair work
• psychophysics
• experiments
• introspection
  —> not psychodynamics - not a scientific approach

Question 21

Psychophysics establish the lawful relation between measurable properties such as a pitch.
How do you find out what someone perceives?

Answer 21

Ask them:

• judge if 2 stimuli are identical or not
• find just noticeable differences (JND)
• adjust two stimuli until they appear to be equal

Question 22

What did Ernst Weber (1795-1878) find out in regards to psychophysics?

Answer 22

• using JND he found out that people can distinguish between 40 pound weight in one hand from 41 pound weight in the other hand
• and a 20 pound weight from a 20.5 pound weight
• people can perceive a 1/40 pound difference
  —> Weber’s Law

Question 23

How did Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) developed Weber’s law?

Answer 23

He added his own analysis to it. So according to Weber’s law the ratio of the two weights that are Just distinguishable is a constant. Fechner’s law links the subjective sensation of the weight to the physical quantity of the weight. This makes it possible to have psychology as an activity of scientific inquiry. Thus, the science of psychology is indeed possible in the same way that physics as a science is possible.

Weber’s law: *R/R = k
Fechner’s law: S = k Log R

—> Sensation has a direct mathematical relation with a physical quantity
—> Psychology as an activity of scientific inquiry could be possible!

Question 24

Who was Wilhem Wundt (1832-1920)?

Answer 24

• Wundt was influenced by Leibnitz (parallelism)
• Assistant of von Helmholtz
• Only considers conscious activities (unit)
• Psychology can not be reduced to physiology
• Physical and mental states exist in different reference systems

Question 25

How did Wundt apply introspection as a method of inquiry?

Answer 25

• Introspection requires trained observers and therefore results are observer-dependent
• Higher-level processes unobservable
• despite constant criticism, everyone still uses introspection

Question 26

Who was William James (1842-1910)?

Answer 26

• William James publishes the ‘Principles of Psychology’ in 1890
• strong interest in subjective experience
• influenced by Buddhist and Hindu philosophy as well as western science
• his approach was therefore very introspective and dynamic
• many of his contributions to psychology involves theoretical positions that put dynamicism at its centre
• his work on memory and attention is still of importance to this day

Question 27

What are the 4 key principles of Watson’s (1878-1958) Behaviourism?

Answer 27

1) Focus on observables
2) Explain behaviour (forget about consciousness)
3) Keep theories simple
4) Goal is to break down behaviour into irreducible constructs

Question 28

The associations within the behaviourist tradition focused on describing laws of behaviour. For example, Thorndike (1874-1949) tested the behaviour of animals under various conditions. What did he formulate?

Answer 28

• law of exercise: practice increases stimulus-response connections
• law of effect: responses with positive/negative outcomes are more/less likely in the future
• law of recency: recent responses are more likely to reoccur

Question 29

The assumption of the behaviourist associationists is that behaviour is initially trial-and-error and with associative learning, behaviour repertoires are created.
Why did the behaviourist tradition receive a lot of criticism from cognitivists?

Answer 29

Cognitivists criticised that the field of behaviourism could:
- not explain errors or new behaviour. - not explain the subjective experience. - not explain language learning (internal linguistic rules; generative language).

Question 30

How did McCulloch influence cognitive psychology in 1943?

Answer 30

McCulloch suggested that as the neurons emit pulses they can be likened to a network of on/off switches or gates. He demonstrated mathematically that a system with on/off gates and various connectivities will be able to compute information: the brain as a computing machine was born.

Question 31

What did Von Neumann do in 1945?

Answer 31

Von Neumann created architecture of the device that could process and store information (McCulloch’s Computer metaphor, 1943). This computer architecture was used by cognitive psychologists in the early theories of cognitive processing.
Two characteristics with this architecture are that:
1) it is serial
2) the input and output stages are physically separated

Question 32

What did Claude Shannon do in 1948 ?

Answer 32

Claude Shannon wrote a two-part paper (‘A mathematical theory of communication’, 1948, Bell Labs) addressing how information could be communicated and explored a range of situations, such as noise on the telephone cable and encryption and decryption technology to guard against interception.

Question 33

What did Turing do in 1950?

Answer 33

Turing introduced his famous imitation test in which a person needs to find out through questioning which one of two entities, X and Y, is human, with one being a human and the other being a machine.

Question 34

What did the behaviourist Skinner do in the 1950s?

Answer 34

Skinner wrote a book stating that language is a set of learned habits.

Question 35

What did the rationalist and linguist Chromsky argue (in 1959) in respond to the behaviourist Skinner’s theory that language is a set of learned habits?

Answer 35

Chromsky argued that this does not tally with the infinite number and sentences that humans can produce. He focused in syntax and put forward his famous ‘poverty of stimulus argument’ that says that despite children receiving poor language examples from parents, they still learn language.

Question 36

Who was Ulrich Neisser (1928-2012)?

Answer 36

• studied gestalt psychology
• PhD in psychophysics (1956)
• influenced by Maslow
• wrote the most influential cognitive psychology textbook in 1967

Question 37

Which two main perspectives on cognition were popular in the 1960s?

Answer 37

1) Cybernetics: the mental is situated in the world and operates in a manner to interact with that world
—> requires research in the field
2) Artificial intelligence: mental universalities (such a Chomsky’s universal grammar) do not depend on the physical
—> research in artificial environments (labs)
—> human mind = information processing system

Cybernetics looked at the mind as situated in and interacting with the environment. The other was called artificial intelligence, which was looking at creating the computer program of cognition. Research funding went to the latter and as a consequence its views and methods dominated the study of cognition. As computer programs do not have a consciousness, any methodology that addresses phenomenological experiences was seen as not being a valid method to be used. This meant that psychophysics and introspection were not seen as useful methods in the creation of artificial intelligence. In addition, this dominance led to the current view that the human mind is an information processing system.

Question 38

Neisser criticised the change in the 1970s and called out the overemphasis on information processing and its failure to account for everyday behaviour. He did change his position from one that was clearly aligned to indirect realism, such as discussed by Descartes, to assuming that what you perceive is what the objects are in their nature.
What is Neisser’s definition of cognition in his 1967 book?

Answer 38

The term ‘cognition’ refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stores, recovered, and used.

Further in this paragraph, Neisser states that Cognition ‘is concerned with these processes EVEN when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation…’
This goes back to Descartes’ approach of using reason as a method to understand how the mind works. He excludes work in dynamic psychology, but highlights the distinction quite nicely without dismissing its status as a psychology subfield. This is a direct influence from Maslow’s work.

Question 39

What did Neisser state about why he defines cognition as ‘The term cognition refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used’ ?

Answer 39

Because these processes even operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations…
Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon.
But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory inputs, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man’s actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject’s goals, needs or instincts.