1. 1 Three topics: 1. Pre-history of the study of cognition  Models of mind in classical times  Causes of behavior 2. Early history  Descartes, Locke, Helmholtz, Darwin 3. Recent history

2. 2 Classical times – the issues  Models of mind – did early societies have the concept mind?  Causes of behavior – to what causes did early societies attribute behavior?  Gods and demons  Internal organs

3. 3 Classical civilization – the issues  Models of mind  How did ancient peoples understand mental agency?  Causes of behavior  Did they see a connection between mind and behavior?

4. 4 Early classical Greece – models of mind  No evidence an integrated model of mind existed in classical Greece (or elsewhere).  Reference to many functions, but not to relations among these functions.  Analogy: Homer has words for limbs, muscles, bones, joints, but not for body.  Rich, complex behavior seen as produced by an interaction among parts.

5. 5 Early classical Greece – models of mind Imagine describing a library…  By listing the books it holds, or  By describing how its functions interrelate, or  By developing a theory of what libraries are, how they work, and how their structure enables their function.  The Homeric model of mind was like the list.

6. 6 Classical civilization – the issues  Models of mind  How did ancient peoples understand mental agency?  Causes of behavior  Did they see a connection between mind and behavior?

7. 7 Classical times – causes of behaviour A. Gods and demons  Basic idea: behavior comes from outside the person, not from inside  For example, gods send messages in dreams that cause people to do things  Note similar views today: e.g., television causes violence, media images cause anorexia, commercials make people buy things…  Diminishes the person – not seen as agent

8. 8 Classical times – causes of behaviour B. Internal organs in complex interaction  Brain had no special status  Modern traces of this view: “He doesn’t have the stomach for it” “He’s got guts.” “I was inspired” (e.g., I breathed in) “My heart is broken” “She’s full of bile”

9. 9 Classical times - summary  Early societies (circa 1000 BC) had little understanding of the actual causes of behavior or of the internal (mental) representations of the world that make behavior possible.  Nonetheless, thinkers of the time – poets, philosophers – knew that human behavior is richly varied and complex, and sought accounts of it that were commensurately complex.

10. 10 Early history of the study of Cognition 1. Rene Descartes 2. John Locke 3. 19th century German physiologists 4. Darwin

11. 1 Descartes  Grew up during chaos of Thirty Years War in Europe, a time of great brutality.  System and order were very important to him.  Knew that animals share many psychological functions with humans (e.g., learning).  But there are some things we do that animals do not do – these are the most interesting.

12. 12 Descartes argued:  We are conscious in a way that animals are not (we are self-aware)  Our consciousness allows us to think and use language, which animals do not do.  Animals have some limited cognitive ability but it is very different from human cognition  This made how humans are different from animals the central issue for psychology in the two centuries after Descartes.

13. 13 Descartes argued…  Animals do not have human-like, reflective consciousness.  Animals do not have souls.  The soul is the seat of consciousness.  Problem for modern science, which does not recognize the soul: what is consciousness?

14. 14 Locke argued:  Against divine right of kings to rule.  Against idea that some people are born special, and should rule because of that.  For idea that knowledge comes from experience (people are born as ‘blank slates’).  So anybody with right experience (not right genes) can govern – this is the basis of modern democracy.

15. 15 Locke distinguished two types of knowledge Sensation  sensory impressions of the world Reflection  combining sensations through association to create complex knowledge  reflection is the only source of complex knowledge

16. 16 Interim summary We have looked at three different approaches to the question of what causes behavior (classical times, Descartes, Locke).  In each case, the scholars involved knew that human behavior is complex.  They knew, too, that their theory had to have some way of accounting for that complexity.  All the theories we’ve discussed, and all the ones we will discuss in this course, have the same way of dealing with that complexity: they posit something mysterious to account for it.

17. 17 Interim summary  In classical Greece, complexity of behavior seen as due to interaction of many parts & agencies. That interaction remains mysterious.  Descartes argued that distinctively-human, complex behavior produced by thinking, which is done by the soul. The soul remains mysterious.  Locke argued that behavior is driven by knowledge and knowledge comes from experience. Complex behavior, then, comes from a rich life history. It’s impossible to know a life history in enough detail – so it remains mysterious.

18. 18 19th century German physiologists Physiology was an established science. It gave the study of behavior credibility.  Physiologists studied nerve conduction speed – an observable, physical process  They developed psychophysics  Showed you can have a science of behavior  Led to first psychology lab, built by Wilhelm Wundt, at Leipzig in 1879

19. 19 Charles Darwin (1809-1882)  people & animals evolved from common ancestors.  human functions evolved from animal functions.

20. 20 Darwin’s influence on psychology  Continuity paradox: some human functions have no animal analogue (e.g., consciousness, language).  Descartes had made what was different about humans the central problem for psychology.  After Darwin, psychology focused on what was shared with animals (learning) and pretty much ignored what was different about humans.

21. 21 Interim summary  19th century physiologists studied nerve conduction speed.  They applied techniques already accepted by the scientific community. This made study of mental states respectable.  Darwin made continuity of function between humans and animals the central tenet of psychology. After Darwin, psychology ignored the continuity paradox (and largely continues to ignore it).

22. 2 Recent history of cognitive psychology A. World War II – technology B. World War II – movements of refugees C. Computer science D. Linguistics

23. 23 A. World War II - technology  More complex machines and weaponry vital to war effort. To select and train human operators, psychologists had to answer new questions:  E.g., how can fighter cockpit be designed to improve pilot’s information processing?  How long can a radar operator be on station before performance falls off? Does it fall off gradually or precipitously?

24. 24 A. World War II - Technology  Problem – behaviorists had no relevant knowledge or research techniques.  They studied learning in pigeons and rats, who don’t fly fighter planes!  Their accounts of behavior involved life history, not current state of the organism.  Behaviorists had to start all over again.

25. 25 B. World War II – Movements of Peoples Many European psychologists, especially Jews, were persecuted by Nazis. Most of those who got away went to the United States of America.  Tended not to have Behaviorist biases  Included Gestalt psychologists and others who didn’t mind referring to mental events  Met U.S. psychologists returning from military, offered them new ideas at a time when many of them were searching for an alternative approach.

26. 26 C. Computer Science  Computers are capable of sophisticated behaviour such as mathematical calculation – so computers are more similar to humans than animals are.  The computer’s program specifies the processes that produce its behaviour.  If we can specify the processes that produce sophisticated computer behaviour, why can’t we do the same for sophisticated human behaviour?

27. 27 D. Linguistics Today, Noam Chomsky is an idiot. But many years ago, he made two contributions:  Attacked Behaviourism – devastating review of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior (1959).  Developed Transformational Generative Grammar in the fifties.

28. 28 Chomsky – Review of Verbal Behaviour  Showed that technical terms from Skinner’s learning lab had no meaning in the real world.  Showed that utterances (sentences) have internal structure that cannot be described by ‘chains’ in which one word is stimulus for next.  Showed language function cannot be explained in terms of reinforcement, because most language behaviour is original, not repeated.

29. 29 Chomsky – Tranformational Generative Grammar  Chomsky gave us a theory of mental processes at a time when psychology was anti-mentalist.  Showed that human behaviour can be captured in a theory which specifies rules operating on mental representations.  Emphasized the infinite productivity of human language.  Showed that this infinite productivity can be captured by a finite set of words and a finite number of rules for combining them (syntax).

30. 30 All these threads came together in the 1950s… A time of great change in North America.  Fins were in.  Vinyl was stylish.  Elvis was thin.  And governments were throwing money at the universities.

31. 31. All these influences came together… Fins, vinyl, and Elvis weren’t involved, but:  Graduate schools opened up and turned out lots of young turks.  Like all young turks, they thought the old guys were wrong about everything. Especially psychology.  Change was unavoidable

32. 32 Cognitive Psychology  That change produced a new way of understanding human mental function.  This new way focused on mental representations and the processes that operate on them.  It was called Cognitive Psychology.

33. 3 Something to think about The complexity of human behaviour has always impressed people trying to explain behaviour – even those who have argued that humans are just sophisticated monkeys. That complexity has to be handled somehow in any theory of human behaviour. Trace the various ways the theories discussed today have handled this demand.