Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science

1. Starting in the late 1950's and the 1960's experimental psychologists started focusing on problems of perception, attention, memory, and language. Dealing with these seemed to require a different set of concepts and principles than those that were used for most of the first part of the century.
2. Late 19^th and early 20^th Century:  Symbolic Logic (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein)--There are formal principles leading to valid conclusions that are far more powerful than those of Aristotle.
3. Wiener--the concept of cybernetics and the use of information in causal or explanatory systems.
4. Turing--the idea of a generalized Turing machine. A machine that can (in principle) solve any well-specified problem that can be solved. Church-Turing thesis--One can find different formalisms which can solve these problems, and they can all solve exactly the same set of problems.
5. Bartlett--One uses schemata to understand, learn and remember. These schemata play an important role in our understanding of the world.
6. Chomsky--critique of Skinner. Formal limitations of associative processes. Invented Generative grammars. Proposed a language organ in the brain. Are there innate grammars?
7. Broadbent--One can build flow-charts to show the movement and transduction of information as a person receives information in the senses, stores it and modifies it so that it is available for interpretation of new information and the production of responses. The processes designed to deal with the limited capacity of our processing mechanisms are called Attention. These are factors that help focus and select information for further processing, analysis or consciousness.
8. Minsky, and Simon and Newell--one can write computer programs which can solve logic problems and other reasoning situations. These receive information, store it and transform it so that it is available to help interpret new information and for the production of responses. Moreover, one can write programs that simulate the thought processes of human problem solvers, even by getting the problems wrong in the same way. This is done by the use of heuristics, and not only algorithms.
9. Piaget--children go through stages where they use different kinds of processes to solve problems. After the first stage, which might resemble behavioristic ideas, they require the use of memory and reversible processes as different representations are manipulated. These go far beyond the mechanisms allowed by associationistic principles.
10. G. Miller--Argued successfully that language couldn't be explained without complex rules of generation. People must use higher level representations in order to remember different things. The magic number 7 ± 2 and the idea of "chunks" of information were illustrative of the manipulation of symbols for memory and to solve problems.
11. Vygotsky--Children, and people with different cultural backgrounds (particularly, lack of literacy) may use different principles of organization and different heuristics.
12. Rosch--categorization: following up some of the ideas of Wittgenstein, Rosch showed that categories are not clearly identifiable. Aristotle’s idea that a category can be identified by singularly necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is normally not the case. Certain basic categories are the first to be learned, and most other categories are learned using these as a basis. These categories tend to have perceptually similar members that are responded to in a similar fashion. Categorization is an important basis for our knowledge and understanding of language and the world.
13. Tversky and Kahneman--People generally do not reason according to sound logical principles. They are influenced by the framing of a problem, and they use certain heuristics (such as the "representative" heuristic which often lead them to the wrong conclusion.
14. Rumelhart, McClelland, Slominsky and others following McCulloch and Pitts neural network theory have been generating "sub-symbolic" models of  parallel distributed processes  to account for certain cognitive activity. These "PDP" models have become of interest to many cognitive and neural scientists.
15. Some issues are--What is innate in our cognition? How broadly applicable is the computation model (the computer metaphor? Do children think according to the same principles as adults or are do they use a different kind of reasoning than adults? Are people basically rational? If so, how do you explain their many errors in reasoning? If not how do they use rational processes at all? Do all mental systems operate according to the same or similar principles or are there large difference between mental systems? What is the role of consciousness? How can consciousness be accounted for in a physiological system? What is the relationship between symbolic and sub-symbolic theoretical systems?