Cognitive Revolution
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The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes. It later became known collectively as cognitive science. The relevant areas of interchange were between the fields of
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
,
linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
,
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
,
anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
,
neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...
, and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
,
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
, and
neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...
. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the
University of California San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is th ...
were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology. A key goal of early cognitive psychology was to apply the
scientific method The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific ...
to the study of human cognition. Some of the main ideas and developments from the cognitive revolution were the use of the scientific method in cognitive science research, the necessity of mental systems to process sensory input, the innateness of these systems, and the modularity of the mind. Important publications in triggering the cognitive revolution include psychologist George Miller's 1956 article "
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. It was written by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Harvard University's De ...
" (one of the most frequently cited papers in psychology), linguist
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
's '' Syntactic Structures'' (1957) and
Review of B. F. Skinner's ''Verbal Behavior''
(1959), and foundational works in the field of artificial intelligence by John McCarthy,
Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon, such as the 1958 article "Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving".
Ulric Neisser Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive p ...
's 1967 book ''Cognitive Psychology'' was also a landmark contribution.


Historical background

Prior to the cognitive revolution, behaviorism was the dominant trend in psychology in the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
. Behaviorists were interested in "learning," which was seen as "the novel association of stimuli with responses." Animal experiments played a significant role in behaviorist research, and prominent behaviorist J. B. Watson, interested in describing the responses of humans and animals as one group, stated that there was no need to distinguish between the two. Watson hoped to learn to predict and control behavior through his research. The popular Hull- Spence stimulus-response approach was, according to
George Mandler George Mandler (June 11, 1924 – May 6, 2016) was an Austrian-born American psychologist, who became a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Career Mandler was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924. He re ...
, impossible to use to research topics that held the interest of cognitive scientists, like memory and thought, because both the stimulus and the response were thought of as completely physical events. Behaviorists typically did not research these subjects.
B. F. Skinner Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and Social philosophy, social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his ret ...
, a functionalist behaviorist, criticized certain mental concepts like instinct as "explanatory fiction(s)," ideas that assume more than humans actually know about a mental concept. Various types of behaviorists had different views on the exact role (if any) that consciousness and cognition played in behavior. Although behaviorism was popular in the United States, Europe was not particularly influenced by it, and research on cognition could easily be found in Europe during this time. Noam Chomsky has framed the cognitive and behaviorist positions as rationalist and
empiricist In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...
, respectively, which are philosophical positions that arose long before behaviorism became popular and the cognitive revolution occurred. Empiricists believe that humans acquire knowledge only through sensory input, while rationalists believe that there is something beyond sensory experience that contributes to human knowledge. However, whether Chomsky's position on language fits into the traditional rationalist approach has been questioned by philosopher
John Cottingham John Cottingham (born 1943) is an English philosopher. The focus of his research has been early-modern philosophy (especially Descartes), the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy.Athanassoulis, Nafsika and Vice, Samantha eds. (2008) ''Th ...
. George Miller, one of the scientists involved in the cognitive revolution, sets the date of its beginning as September 11, 1956, when several researchers from fields like experimental psychology, computer science, and theoretical linguistics presented their work on cognitive science-related topics at a meeting of the ‘Special Interest Group in Information Theory’ at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
. This interdisciplinary cooperation went by several names like cognitive studies and information-processing psychology but eventually came to be known as cognitive science. Grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in the 1970s advanced interdisciplinary understanding in the relevant fields and supported the research that led to the field of
cognitive neuroscience Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental process ...
.


Main ideas

George Miller states that six fields participated in the development of cognitive science:
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
,
linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
,
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
,
anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
,
neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...
, and philosophy, with the first three playing the main roles.


The Scientific Method

A key goal of early cognitive psychology was to apply the
scientific method The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific ...
to the study of human cognition. This was done by designing experiments that used computational models of artificial intelligence to systematically test theories about human mental processes in a controlled laboratory setting.


Mediation and information processing

When defining the "Cognitive Approach,"
Ulric Neisser Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive p ...
says that humans can only interact with the "real world" through intermediary systems that process information like sensory input. As understood by a cognitive scientist, the study of cognition is the study of these systems and the ways they process information from the input. The processing includes not just the initial structuring and interpretation of the input but also the storage and later use. Steven Pinker claims that the cognitive revolution bridged the gap between the physical world and the world of ideas, concepts, meanings and intentions. It unified the two worlds with a theory that mental life can be explained in terms of information, computation and feedback.


Innateness

In his 1975 book ''Reflections on Language'',
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
questions how humans can know so much, despite relatively limited input. He argues that they must have some kind of innate learning mechanism that processes input, and that mechanism must be domain-specific and innate. Chomsky observes that physical organs do not develop based on their experience, but based on some inherent genetic coding, and wrote that the mind should be treated the same way. He says that there is no question that there is some kind of innate structure in the mind, but it is less agreed upon whether the same structure is used by all organisms for different types of learning. He compares humans to rats in the task of maze running to show that the same learning theory cannot be used for different species because they would be equally good at what they are learning, which is not the case. He also says that even within humans, using the same learning theory for multiple types of learning could be possible, but there is no solid evidence to suggest it. He proposes a hypothesis that claims that there is a biologically based language faculty that organizes the linguistic information in the input and constrains human language to a set of particular types of grammars. He introduces universal grammar, a set of inherent rules and principles that all humans have to govern language, and says that the components of universal grammar are biological. To support this, he points out that children seem to know that language has a hierarchical structure, and they never make mistakes that one would expect from a hypothesis that language is linear. Steven Pinker has also written on this subject from the perspective of modern-day cognitive science. He says that modern cognitive scientists, like figures in the past such as
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of math ...
(1646-1716), don't believe in the idea of the mind starting a "
blank slate ''Tabula rasa'' (; "blank slate") is the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content, and therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. Epistemological proponents of ''tabula rasa'' disagree with the doctri ...
." Though they have disputes on the nature-nurture diffusion, they all believe that learning is based on something innate to humans. Without this innateness, there will be no learning process. He points out that humans' acts are non-exhaustive, even though basic biological functions are finite. An example of this from linguistics is the fact that humans can produce infinite sentences, most of which are brand new to the speaker themselves, even though the words and phrases they have heard are not infinite. Pinker, who agrees with Chomsky's idea of innate universal grammar, claims that although humans speak around six thousand mutually unintelligible languages, the grammatical programs in their minds differ far less than the actual speech. Many different languages can be used to convey the same concepts or ideas, which suggests there may be a common ground for all the languages.


Modularity of the mind

Pinker claims another important idea from the cognitive revolution was that the mind is modular, with many parts cooperating to generate a train of thought or an organized action. It has different distinct systems for different specific missions. Behaviors can vary across cultures, but the mental programs that generate the behaviors don't need to be varied.


Criticism

There have been criticisms of the typical characterization of the shift from behaviorism to cognitivism.
Henry L. Roediger III Henry L. "Roddy" Roediger III (born July 24, 1947) is an American psychology researcher in the area of human learning and memory. He rose to prominence for his work on the psychological aspects of False memory syndrome, false memories. Biograph ...
argues that the common narrative most people believe about the cognitive revolution is inaccurate. The narrative he describes states that psychology started out well but lost its way and fell into behaviorism, but this was corrected by the Cognitive Revolution, which essentially put an end to behaviorism. He claims that behavior analysis is actually still an active area of research that produces successful results in psychology and points to the
Association for Behavior Analysis International The Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting behavior analysis. The organization has over 9,000 members. The group organizes conferences and publishes journals on the topic of appl ...
as evidence. He claims that behaviorist research is responsible for successful treatments of autism, stuttering, and aphasia, and that most psychologists actually study observable behavior, even if they interpret their results cognitively. He believes that the change from behaviorism to cognitivism was gradual, slowly evolving by building on behaviorism. Lachman and Butterfield were among the first to imply that cognitive psychology has a revolutionary origin. Thomas H. Leahey has criticized the idea that the introduction of behaviorism and the cognitive revolution were actually revolutions and proposed an alternative history of American psychology as "a narrative of research traditions." Other authors criticize behaviorism, but they also criticize the cognitive revolution for having adopted new forms of anti-mentalism. Cognitive psychologist
Jerome Bruner Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at ...
criticized the adoption of the computational theory of mind and the exclusion of meaning from cognitive science, and he characterized one of the primary objects of the cognitive revolution as changing the study of psychology so that meaning was its core. His understanding of the cognitive revolution revolves entirely around "
meaning-making In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self. The term is widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy, especial ...
" and the hermeneutic description of how people go about this. He believes that the cognitive revolution steered psychology away from behaviorism and this was good, but then another form of anti-mentalism took its place: computationalism. Bruner states that the cognitive revolution should replace behaviorism rather than only modify it.
Neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, neural circuits, and glial ...
Gerald Edelman Gerald Maurice Edelman (; July 1, 1929 – May 17, 2014) was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concern ...
argues in his book ''Bright Air, Brilliant Fire'' (1991) that a positive result of the emergence of "cognitive science" was the departure from "simplistic behaviorism”. However, he adds, a negative result was the growing popularity of a total misconception of the nature of thought: the
computational theory of mind In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of com ...
or cognitivism, which asserts that the brain is a computer that processes symbols whose meanings are entities of the objective world. In this view, the symbols of the mind correspond exactly to entities or categories in the world defined by criteria of necessary and sufficient conditions, that is, classical categories. The representations would be manipulated according to certain rules that constitute a syntax. Edelman rejects the idea that objects of the world come in classical categories, and also rejects the idea that the brain/mind is a computer. The author rejects behaviorism (a points he also makes in his 2006 book ''Second Nature. Brain science and human knowledge''), but also cognitivism (the computational-representational theory of the mind), since the latter conceptualizes the mind as a computer and meaning as objective correspondence. Furthermore, Edelman criticizes "functionalism", the idea that formal and abstract functional properties of the mind can be analyzed without making direct reference to the brain and its processes. Edelman asserts that most of those who work in the field of cognitive psychology and cognitive science seem to adhere to this computational view, but he mentions some important exceptions. Exceptions include John Searle,
Jerome Bruner Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at ...
, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Alan Gauld, Benny Shanon, Claes von Hofsten, and others. Edelman argues that he agrees with the critical and dissenting approaches of these authors that are exceptions to the majority view of cognitivism.


Perceptual symbols, imagery and the cognitive neuroscience revolution

In their paper “The cognitive neuroscience revolution”,
Gualtiero Piccinini Gualtiero Piccinini (born 1970) is an Italian–American philosopher known for his work on the nature of mind and computation as well as on how to integrate psychology and neuroscience. He is Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy De ...
and Worth Boone argue that cognitive neuroscience emerged as a discipline in the late 1980s. Prior to that time, cognitive science and neuroscience had largely developed in isolation. Cognitive science developed between the 1950s and 1970s as an interdisciplinary field composed primarily of aspects of psychology, linguistics, and computer science. However, both classical symbolic computational theories and connectionist models developed largely independently of biological considerations. The authors argue that connectionist models were closer to symbolic models than to neurobiology.Boone, W. & Piccinini, G. (2016). The cognitive neuroscience revolution. ''Synthese, 193'', 1509–1534. Piccinini and Boone state that a revolutionary change is currently taking place: the move from cognitive science (autonomous from neuroscience) to cognitive ''neuro''science. The authors point out that many researchers who previously carried out psychological and behavioral studies now give properly cognitive neuroscientific explanations. They mention the example of
Stephen Kosslyn Stephen Michael Kosslyn (born 1948) is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. Kosslyn is best known for his work on visual cognition and the science of learning. Kosslyn currently serves as the president of Active Learning Sciences Inc., w ...
, who postulated his theory of the pictorial format of mental images in the 1980s based on behavioral studies. Later, with the advent of magnetic resonance imaging technology, Kosslyn was able to show that when people imagine, the visual cortex is activated. This lent strong neuroscientific evidence to his theory of the pictorial format, refuting speculations about a supposed non-pictorial format of mental images. According to Canales Johnson et al. (2021): Neuroscientist
Joseph LeDoux Joseph E. LeDoux (born December 7, 1949) is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety. LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science ...
in his book ''The Emotional Brain'' argues that cognitive science emerged around the middle of the 20th century, and is often described as 'the new science of the mind.' However, in fact, cognitive science is actually a science of only one part of the mind, the part that has to do with thinking, reasoning, and intellect. It leaves emotions out. “And minds without emotions are not really minds at all…” Psychologist Lawrence Barsalou argues that human cognitive processing involves the simulation of perceptual, motor, and emotional states. The classical and ‘intellectualist’ view of cognition, considers that it is essentially processing propositional information of a verbal or numerical type. However, Barsalou's theory explains human conceptual processing by the activation of regions of the sensory cortices of different modalities, as well as of the motor cortex, and by the simulation of embodied experiences –visual, auditory, emotional, motor–, that ground meaning in experience situated in the world. Modal symbols are those analogical mental representations linked to a specific sensory channel: for example, the representation of 'dog' through a visual image similar to a dog or through an auditory image of the barking of dogs, based on the memory of the experiences of seeing a dog or hearing its barking. Lawrence Barsalou's 'perceptual symbols' theory asserts that mental processes operate with modal symbols that maintain the sensory properties of perceptual experiences. According to Barsalou (2020), the “grounded cognition” perspective in which his theory is framed asserts that cognition emerges from the interaction between amodal symbols, modal symbols, the body and the world. Therefore, this perspective does not rule out 'classical' symbols –amodal ones, such as those typical of verbal language or numerical reasoning– but rather considers that these interact with imagination, perception and action situated in the world.Barsalou, L. W. (2020). Challenges and opportunities for grounding cognition. ''Journal of Cognition, 3'', 1, 31, 1-24.


See also

* Digital infinity *
Enactivism (psychology) Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active ...
*
Human factors Human factors and ergonomics (commonly referred to as human factors) is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Four primary goals of human factors learnin ...
*
Postcognitivism Movements in cognitive science are considered to be post-cognitivist if they are opposed to or move beyond the cognitivist theories posited by Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, David Marr, and others. Postcognitivists challenge tenets within cognitivi ...
* Embodied cognition


Notes


References

* Bruner, J. S., Bruner, U. P. J. (1990). ''Acts of meaning.'' Cambridge: Harvard University Press. * * * Mandler, G. (2007) ''A history of modern experimental psychology: From James and Wundt to cognitive science.'' Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. *


Further reading


Books

* Baars, Bernard J. (1986) ''The cognitive revolution in psychology'' Guilford Press, New York, * Gardner, Howard (1986) ''The mind's new science : a history of the cognitive revolution'' Basic Books, New York, ; reissued in 1998 with an epilogue by the author: "Cognitive science after 1984" * Johnson, David Martel and Emeling, Christina E. (1997) ''The future of the cognitive revolution'' Oxford University Press, New York, * LePan, Don (1989) ''The cognitive revolution in Western culture'' Macmillan, Basingstoke, England, * Murray, David J. (1995) ''Gestalt psychology and the cognitive revolution'' Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, * Olson, David R. (2007) ''Jerome Bruner: the cognitive revolution in educational theory'' Continuum, London, * Richardson, Alan and Steen, Francis F. (editors) (2002) ''Literature and the cognitive revolution'' Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, being ''Poetics today'' 23(1), * Royer, James M. (2005) ''The cognitive revolution in educational psychology'' Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, Connecticut, * Simon, Herbert A. ''et al.'' (1992) ''Economics, bounded rationality and the cognitive revolution'' E. Elgar, Aldershot, England, * Todd, James T. and Morris, Edward K. (editors) (1995) ''Modern perspectives on B. F. Skinner and contemporary behaviorism'' (Series: Contributions in psychology, no. 28) Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut,


Articles

* * * * Pinker, Steven (2011)
The Cognitive Revolution
Harvard Gazette {{DEFAULTSORT:Cognitive Revolution Cognitive science History of psychology Philosophical movements Revolutions by type Secularism Western culture