The cognitive revolution in psychology

Psychologist Dr. Doping talks about priority of behaviorism in the early XX century, artificial intelligence and cognitive hexagon. Why in American psychology beginning of the XX century was dominated by behaviorism? What role in the revival of interest in matters of knowledge played a study of artificial intelligence? As cognitive science has changed the psychological research?

The cognitive revolution IS a series of events that relate to the middle of the XX century, when science arose abruptly surge of interest in human cognitive processes, their peculiarities. In fact, the surge affected not only psychology, but also a whole range of related sciences. Therefore, the emergence of cognitive psychology, cognitive science as an interdisciplinary research involving and linguistics, and neuroscience - the science of the brain, and computer science - artificial intelligence, and anthropology, analyzing cognitive universals and particular knowledge of different cultures, and the philosophy of mind - that's all it begins to interest researchers in the 50-ies of XX century. For improving cognitive process one can buy nootropics: Phenylpiracetam, Picamilon, Pantogam, Noopept, Semax, as well as Cytamine Cerebramin.

The cognitive revolution in psychology, as such, was actually a counter-revolution. Why? Because psychology as a science, when it appeared, it began with an analysis of human cognition. Already in the middle of the XIX century there psychophysics, measured the association between exposure and feeling psychophysical formulate mathematical laws. At the end of the XIX century, the founder of experimental psychology Wilhelm Wundt studied the structure of consciousness, I measured the amount of attention. At the same time were the experimental studies of memory. But it so happened that in the early XX century in the American psychology to the fore the study of the behavior, or the direction, which was called behaviorism. Why? For his supporters, primarily psychologist John Watson, he declared that in fact a scientific study of the subjective experience of what is happening in the mind of a person, it is impossible.

What methods psychology work? Researchers peered inside and give a report about what they have going on in my head. The behaviorists say, it is impossible to study what is outwardly observable, not reproducible in any other laboratory, not fixed with the help of devices, so let's study the behavior - the behavior of a set of external reactions externally observable reactions to external stimuli same. And with the 10-ies of the XX century, behaviorism dominated psychology as a scientific discipline - in the US, we note psychology. While in the 30s the situation began to wobble a little bit, because the data appeared that even describe the behavior on the basis of only the external influences and external reactions impossible.

There was a trend called neo-behaviorism, which developed the notion that even when we describe the movement of the mouse in a maze, we must admit the existence of a mouse some purpose (why it generally carries out and repeats the activity) and at second, a general presentation this labyrinth of his unit - the so-called cognitive maps. In particular, Edward Chace Tolman formulated the idea of the intermediate variables - to what he attributed goals and cognitive maps - like a black box between the external action and external reaction, from which, in fact, subsequently sprouted cognitive psychology.

Meanwhile in Europe, the study of knowledge continued, although there were relatively isolated. In England, Frederick Charles Bartlett studied the features of human memory, introduced subsequently essential for cognitive psychology, the concept of knowledge as a circuit pack, way of organizing our experience, from which we reconstruct received, heard, learned information. In Switzerland, Jean Piaget conducted research on human intelligence and levels of development. In Russia, Alexander Luria built a concept of systemic organization of the dynamic localization of higher mental functions, in fact, analyzing how knowledge is represented in the brain and brain function provided.

But America in general was to study the behavior of the rails, developed in line with behaviorism, but at the same time resolutely began to develop computer science. An idea of the universal Turing machine, imported from England to the United States, there were ideas about the general architecture of the computer John von Neumann, Claude Shannon formulated his theory of communication, Wiener laid the foundations of cybernetics as the science of managing artificial living systems.

An idea that you can build a computer that would think like a man.

And then everyone realized that in fact no one understands how a person thinks. As a result, science, pushed by these requests, appealed to the research of knowledge - here, in fact, a cognitive revolution and accomplished.

In cognitive science there is even your own birthday - those considered September 11, 1956, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held the second day of the symposium on the problems of information processing. The first day was a lot of interesting things, but it was the second day of the three reports have been made that, in fact, laid the foundation for the study of knowledge from the position information approach.

The first speaker was the linguist Noam Chomsky has a report "Three model description language", in which he contrasted the model probability, stochastic structure model of its own, for the first time takes into account the human, what is happening in his head, as an important component of speech bith and process of speech understanding. The second speaker psychologist George Miller with an outstanding reputation for denials and the number of the report "The seven plus or minus two, or about some limitations of our ability to process information." Miller presented a model of working memory, short-term memory. The model was cell. Interestingly, it was based on the computer metaphor: Miller presented a short-term memory as a set of cells, which can be written to the structural units of information, and, if necessary supplemented by some new, will have to erase some old. The third report, which made a political scientist and mathematician Herbert Simon and Allen Newell programmer, was presented the first model in the world of artificial intelligence called "Logic theorists." Strictly speaking, it was the first attempt to describe human thinking in the language of a computer program, and at the same time it was a working model that proved the theorem of the logic of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and a theorem proved even better authors.

But, interestingly, this model was constructed using data on how to solve the problem like a man, that is with the protocols of real human judgments. And what do we see here? First, we see that people from different areas of knowledge involved in various problems, begin to work on some single and common theme: how a person perceives the world. Secondly, we see that it is interested in all internal processes rather than external action, the external reactions. And third, we see that most of the arguments are based on the computer metaphor, that is, the comparison of the mind and human knowledge with the computer operation. Strictly speaking, this is where the cognitive study and begin.

In the same 1956, the first Symposium on Artificial Intelligence. In the same year came a series of seminal works. For example, a well-known work on the formation of concepts, written by Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner, who is also established in the first Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960. But it will have to take some time to display the first magazine devoted to cognitive research and cognitive science, and was created by the Society of Cognitive Science. It took about 15 years before this company was founded. It created it was very funny: the representatives of the western and eastern coast of America - on one, respectively, Boston, with his Harvard and MIT, at the other University of California, San Diego, California Technology - could not agree on who's in charge. Gathered in Dallas, Texas in the airport, we signed the papers on the basis of society, but the conference is held in California.

Just a year later began a large-scale funding for Cognitive Studies Foundation Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This is 1981, when the first university program, the first research centers, and since cognitive science began to develop as rapidly and intensively, how intensively it is developing now. It was in the late 70's there was the famous cognitive hexagon, which included experimental psychology cognitive processes that dominated the early stages of the development of cognitive science, neuroscience, which is completely dominated by now, linguistics, computer science, cultural anthropology, and philosophy of mind.

All these subjects are interlinked with each other, and cognitive studies began was not within them, where they were held in the past, and at the joints between them.

For example, in the field of psycholinguistics, and neuropsychology, philosophy and computer science, philosophy of artificial intelligence. Around the same time appeared the first Nobel Prize for cognitive research. Herbert Simon, creator of the first model of artificial intelligence, it was the first in 1978, however, with the description of the decision-making in organizations. At approximately the same area in 2002, received the Nobel Prize now psychologist Daniel Kahneman for the description of the basic mistakes and pitfalls of human thinking in making economic decisions.

Cognitive science, which has been made a powerful infusion of funds in the 80s, is now about to learn to earn a living, but the most important thing is that more and more interdisciplinary become research and more and more difficult to distinguish between the individual areas. If the experimental psychology, cognitive processes of cognitive psychology can be said in the '50s,' 60s and even the 70s, but now to talk about it it is already difficult, because it is always psychology with elements of computer simulation and attempts to understand those brain mechanisms that are relevant for cognitive processes.