1996 Summer Reading Group
Cognitive Psychology: Past, Present and Future

(http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/srg.html)

Contents:

Introduction:

The call for participation in the 1996 summer reading group went out to cognoscente e-mail list on Tuesday 16 April 1996:

"Last summer (1995) I was fortunate enough to have many of you help me understand (or at least recognize what I didn't understand in) four books:

It was so much fun and so interesting that I decided to organize another reading group this summer. The books I selected for this summer are the following three (unlike last summer, you might even detect a thematic connection among them)."

The Books and How to Order Them.

  1. Reflections on The Principles of Psychology: William James after a century.
    Edited by M. G. Johnson and T. B. Henley.     Erlbaum, 1990.
    ISBN 0-8058-0205-3
    "This important volume looks back to 1890 and--100 years later--asks some of the same questions William James was asking in his Principles of Psychology. In so doing, it reviews our progress toward their solutions. Among the contemporary concerns of 1990 that the editors consider are: the nature of the self and the will, conscious experience, associationism, the basic acts of cognition, and the nature of perception. Their findings: Although the developments in each of these areas during the last 100 years have been monumental, James' views as presented in the Principles still remain viable and provocative." (From the Erlbaum catalog.)

  2. Cognition on Cognition.
    Edited by J. Mehler and S. Franck. MIT Press, 1995.
    ISBN 0-262-63167-9
    "Written by some of the foremost scientists studying different aspects of the mind, the articles review progress achieved over the past twenty-five years in the main parts of the discipline. They provide a unique record of what is happening today in the field of cognition with an added historical perspective that is often absent from other volumes that seek to cover such a large area." (From the MIT Press catalog.)

  3. The Science of the Mind: 2001 and Beyond.
    Edited by R. L. Solso and D. W. Massaro. Oxford U. Press, 1995.
    ISBN 0-19-508064-5

    "What would happen if someone brought together the finest minds in psychology to reflect on the past century and speculate on the future of the field in the twenty-first century? Robert Solso and Dominic Massaro did just that, and the result is this fascinating, insightful, and sometimes humorous collection of essays from leading psychologists ... this wide-ranging work will provoke thought and discussion about the shape of psychology as we approach the next century." (From the dust jacket.)
How to order the books: As this is an informal group, I will not be ordering books in bulk. I will leave it up to you to order the books from your favorite bookstore, or directly from the publisher. Most bookstores are quite happy to take orders; they want your business. You can also click on the publishers and book titles above, and order the books via the Web.

Meeting Time, Date and Place, with Pages for Each Meeting.

We will meet on Thursday afternoons, from 2:00 - 3:30, beginning on June 13 through August 22, in the Psychology Conference Room (room 128, within the Main Office).

Tentative pages for each meeting:

13 June
Pages 1-99 of Reflections on the Principles of Psychology

20 June
Pages 101-196 of Reflections on the Principles of Psychology

27 June
Pages 197-309 of Reflections on the Principles of Psychology

4 July
No meeting.

11 July
Pages 1-108 of Cognition on Cognition.

18 July
Pages 109-236 of Cognition on Cognition

25 July
Pages 237-348 of Cognition on Cognition.
Different meeting room, this meeting only: Room 113 Psychology.

1 August
Pages 349-470 of Cognition on Cognition

8 August
Pages 1-106 of Mind: 2001 and Beyond

15 August
Pages 107-202 of Mind: 2001 and Beyond

22 August
Pages 203-316 of Mind: 2001 and Beyond

29 August
No meeting

Comments on the Readings: Past | Present | Future

Regarding "Reflections on William James":

My purposes in reading about William James were several. First, I wanted a book that gave some general perspective on the (relatively recent) past in (cognitive) psychology. But I also wanted to learn more specifically about William James and his work. What was the historical context of his work? What was original in his work? Why are the Principles still quoted and valued? What has been James' influence since 1890? The book provided some answers to these questions, a few of which I will indicate below in the commentators own words:

J. C. Malone:
"James honestly began the Principles by confessing that he could not claim any originality, aside from the aforementioned `positivistic point of view.' This, and his engaging writing style, may indeed be all that was original." (p. 142)

Malone concludes his chapter by lamenting that James' "positivism" does not define psychology today. Malone argues that psychology is trapped in false assumptions and theoretical categorizations, which prevent theories from explaining anything real:

"But the problem may be that we do not well enough understand the phenomena for which our theories are proposed. ... Someday we may pass beyond introductory textbook models and determine what people and animals do in situations that are of interest to us. Then we can search for explanations." (p. 161)

E. S. Reed:
Reed argues that James had insights into his contempories' false assumptions about what constituted the stimulus for perception (e.g., that the perception of motion was defined as the change in location of stimulation through time). Applying such false assumptions was called by James "the psychologist's fallacy."

"If we did know precisely what it was to which an observer was responding ... we would then be able to infer in a proper way what was the state of mind of that organism. ... Even today, many theories of perception, cognition, and action do not have within them a principled means for determining to what, specifically, an experimental subject is responding. ... If modern information processing psychology is not to flounder in a sea of unjustified assumptions and unverifiable processes, we had better seek to use knowledge about James's psychologist's fallacy as a life raft to get us to terra firma." (. 245)

(More context for Reed's remarks: Reed is a major proponent and interpreter of J. J. Gibson's ecological psychology.)

I. Rock:
"... [James'] prescience, his penetrating insights, and his ability to summarize in beautiful prose all that was known about perception in his time, gave us such a superb starting point." (p. 224)

S. Park & S. M. Kosslyn:
"And in fact, [James'] main contribution to the study of imagery lies in his multidisciplinary review of the state of the art in research on imagination at the end of the 19th century. ... James went a long way toward structuring the area of inquiry by elucidating the problems that should be addressed." (p. 184)

"However, in typical James style he did more than simply regurgitate what others thought. James organized the material in such a way as to reveal the underlying issues, and his thinking led him to offer interesting speculations about those issues." (p. 195)

H. R. Pollio:
"... it is no wonder the Jamesian metaphor [stream of consciousness] has lasted longer than others and continues to be productive after a century of examination and use. ... it seems clear that the more we learn about consciousness, the stronger the stream metaphor becomes. For this insight we must be grateful to the master, William James." (p.293)

M. Henle:
"James's greatest talent seems to be generally recognized as looking into his own mind and reporting what he there discovered. ... As Perry put it (1948, p. 46), William James `had a capacity, perhaps never equaled, of seizing and exposing the evanescent moments and fugitive sequence of conscious life. He could see most cunningly out of the corner of his eye.'" (p.97)

Regarding "Cognition on Cognition":

My purpose for reading this book was to get an overview of contemporary cognitive psychology, stated by the researchers themselves (as opposed to digested in a textbook).

The 23 articles in this collection provided an interesting survey of contemporary cognitive psychology. The overview was highly selective, emphasizing topics typical of the journal Cognition. For example, there are no articles on memory per se, or visual object recognition, or visual imagery, etc. The table of contents looks very different from the tables of contents of introductory cognitive psychology textbooks (but perhaps somewhat less different from tables of contents of cognitive science textbooks). The order of the chapters is also strange; e.g., several chapters on cognitive development are widely scattered, and several chapters addressing nature versus nurture are separated (this despite the editors statement that, "We present these articles in an order which we think brings out their thematic coherence" Preface p.x).

With such a wide range of topics, it is difficult to summarize the state of the science. I will instead just quote the opening paragraph of the article by Morais and Kolinsky (Ch.18, p.349):

Cognitive psychology is concerned with what information is represented mentally and how it is represented. In these twenty years or so of Cognition's life the issue of where, that is, at what levels of processing, particular types of information are represented has become increasingly compelling. This issue is crucial both to track the mental itinerary of information and to draw a correct picture of mental structure. However, the "where" question may be even more difficult to answer than the "what" and "how" ones. In spite of the tremendous development of the functional imaging technology, we are still unable to follow on a computer screen the multiple recodings of information accomplished in the brain. Thus, the experimental study of human behavior remains up to now the most powerful approach to the mind's microstructure. (Italics added.)

Inconsequential Research?

Among all the topics covered in this expansive volume, there is one footnote that sticks in my mind most strongly. The specific topic is particularly salient to me because of my idiosyncratic interests, but the conclusion I wish to draw applies to all science.

On p. 419, Mark Seidenberg discusses the phenomenon of catastrophic interference in vanilla backpropagation networks. He says,

Catastrophic interference occurs when training is strictly blocked: first one set of patterns is learned and then a completely different second set is trained without any re-exposure to members of the initial set. It is hard to imagine any interesting aspect of learning in the real world that has this character. [Italics added.]
I agree with nearly all of what Seidenberg has to say about connectionist models and their role in the logic of explanation, and he lucidly makes a number of cogent and important points. But he also makes, as an ancillary remark in a footnote, what I believe is an egregiously wrong assertion that undercuts all of laboratory science:
I can think of only one case in which human learning is a [sic] strictly blocked as in the McCloskey and Cohen simulations; that would be verbal learning experiments in which subjects have to learn lists of nonsense syllables, random paired-associates, and other meaningless stimuli. Of course, the fact that this kind of verbal learning research is largely irrelevant to how people learn language or arithmetic or anything else of consequence is what brought it virtually to an end about 25 years ago. [Footnote 2, italics added.]
The logic of this specific argument seems to be that because the laboratory studies in verbal learning did not imitate ecological learning, the research was "irrelevant" and of no consequence. I believe this is wrong, both in particular and in principle. In particular, I believe that verbal learning research lost momentum for reasons other than its use of artificial laboratory paradigms. Rather, it lost practitioners because no broad, coherent and generalizable theory emerged to explain the laboratory results, let alone apply to more complex, ecologically valid situations. If such a theory had, in fact, emerged, then no one would be complaining about some supposed "irrelevance" of the laboratory paradigm. Instead, the paradigm would be championed as exemplary science, by virtue of the theory that emerged from the paradigm and generalized to the real world.

As a general principle, the logic of Seidenberg's argument goes like this: Because laboratory studies of Topic X do not imitate real-world cases of Topic X, the laboratory studies are irrelevant and of no consequence. This applies to all science, from psychology to physics, from biology to chemistry. But clearly the argument is invalid. Laboratory experiments, in any area of science, purposely and painstakingly avoid imitating complex real-world environments, in an attempt to isolate important causal factors, and with the hope of thereby leading to an explanatory and predictive theory of the effects. If the underlying causal factors are understood in the simplified domain, then maybe they can be understood in the more complex real-world domain. Physicists from Galileo onward have studied the trajectories of masses dropped in more and more perfect vacuums - utterly insulated from "the real world" - yet because a comprehensive theory of mass-movement came from these ecologically invalid experiments, they are famous. Had no good theory of mass-movement emerged from these experiments, perhaps other scientists would be ridiculing Galileo, too.

Regarding "Science of Mind: 2001 and Beyond":

Out of this vast and dense forest of ideas, which trees should I highlight? I will try only to continue the theme I have been commenting on from past through present to future, leaving other themes aside.

In the past, James is reputed to have been especially good at identifying what is "interesting" in human psychology, and conceptually organizing those phenomena. He was interested in psychology in the everyday world (including religious and even paranormal psychology), and eschewed laboratory studies as tedious and uninteresting. James also eschewed presumptive theories which imposed particular untested stances toward analysis of stimuli and behavior, a presumption called "the psychologist's fallacy".

In the present, despite James' distaste for laboratory studies, we see that "the experimental study of human behavior remains up to now the most powerful approach to the mind's microstructure" (Morais & Kolinsky, Ch.18, p.349, of Cognition on Cognition). Yet even with the acceptance of laboratory studies, there is still a continuation of James' attitude that some experiments, even whole paradigms of study, are uninteresting or irrelevant; see, for example, my earlier discussion of Seidenberg's footnote. I argued that what ultimately made the studies "uninteresting" was the failure of a generalizable, comprehensive theory to emerge.

For the future, some prognosticators suggest that real-world applications will grow in importance for cognitive psychology, for pragmatic reasons of research funding if nothing else. "Laboratory research will still have its place, but we shall have to think a good deal more than we have about what that place is." (Hunt, p.272, The Science of Mind: 2001 and Beyond.) Hunt also says (p.268):

The rosy view of things is that cognitive psychology will contribute by developing theories of human problem solving, rooted in our understanding of the information-processing capabilities that underlie it. Unfortunately, though, we do not have such a theory. What we do have, with our various studies of expert problem solving and cognitive developmental psychology, is a very good "guild literature" about how to analyze problems involving human thought. Within the next ten years, our major "doable" project may be systematizing this literature. The result will not be a theory of problem solving driven by models of information processing... . It will be a pretheoretical (and hopefully increasingly orderly) way of looking at an important slice of the world. Although we shall not have a general theory of how people develop problem representations, we can develop a methodology for analyzing a wide range of problem-solving situations. This may be just what society needs.
This might be what society needs in the short run, but will it ultimately solve society's problems? I believe (and my impression is that Hunt agrees, when the view is rosy) that cognitive psychology will only be applied with great success after the general theories are established. Was the airplane invented before a theory of aerodynamics was established? Could it have been? Was a spacecraft put in orbit before a theory of gravity was established? Could it have been? Will cancer be eradicated before an expansive theory of the immune system is established? One could answer "yes" to these questions; as counter-examples to the implied "no" are the facts that animals and plants were selectively bred before a theory of genetics was established, various metallic alloys were used before a theory of chemical elements was established, and so on. But I think it can be safely asserted that the rate and productivity of applications is vastly expanded when a good underlying theory is understood.

In the final chapter of the book, the editors (Massaro and Solso) point out "perennial issues for the next century". The editors are strongly committed to the importance of theories, reiterating Ben Murdock's reiteration of Clyde Coombs observation that "Data without theory are meaningless" (p.312). Yet, when "predicting the future" in the final section of their summary, the editors do not explicitly highlight the importance of basic research toward generating basic theories. In my own prognostications, I believe that the future --- even the relatively near future --- holds the development of good theories: theories that are formally specified, predictive, general, applicable, and explanatory.

How to Contact Kruschke

John K. Kruschke
Dept. of Psychology
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405-1301 USA

E-mail: kruschke@indiana.edu

Voice: (812) 855-3192

Fax: (812) 855-4691

Home page: http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/home.html

The page you are looking at now is http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/srg.html

Thanks to Michael Erickson for instigating this Web page and finding the links to the publishers.