Levitin, Daniel - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology.pdf - Kognitywistyka - FilozofiaUW2010

Preface

Daniel J. Levitin

What Is Cognition?

Cognition encompasses the scientiﬁc study of the human mind and how it

processes information; it focuses on one of the most difﬁcult of all mysteries

that humans have addressed. The mind is an enormously complex system

holding a unique position in science: by necessity, we must use the mind to

study itself, and so the focus of study and the instrument used for study are

recursively linked. The sheer tenacity of human curiosity has in our own life-

times brought answers to many of the most challenging scientiﬁc questions we

have had the ambition to ask. Although many mysteries remain, at the dawn of

the twenty-ﬁrst century, we ﬁnd that we do understand much about the fun-

damental laws of chemistry, biology, and physics; the structure of space-time,

theoriginsoftheuniverse.Wehaveplausibletheoriesabouttheoriginsand

nature of life and have mapped the entire human genome. We can now turn

our attention inward, to exploring the nature of thought, and how our mental

lifecomestobewhatitis.

There are scientists from nearly every ﬁeld engaged in this pursuit. Physicists

try to understand how physical matter can give rise to that ineffable state we

call consciousness, and the decidedly nonphysical ‘‘mind stuff’’ that Descartes

and other philosophers have argued about for centuries. Chemists, biologists,

and neuroscientists join them in trying to explicate the mechanisms by which

neurons communicate with each other and eventually form our thoughts, mem-

ories, emotions, and desires. At the other end of the spectrum, economists study

how we balance choices about limited natural and ﬁnancial resources, and

anthropologists study the inﬂuence of culture on thought and the formation of

societies. So at one end we ﬁnd scientists studying atoms and cells, at the other

end there are scientists studying entire groups of people. Cognitive psycholo-

gists tend to study the individual, and mental systems within individual brains,

although ideally we try to stay informed of what our colleagues are doing. So

cognition is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, and this collection of readings is

intended to reﬂect that.

Why Not a Textbook?

This book grew out of a course I took at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

nology (MIT) in 1975, from Susan Carey and Merrill Garrett (with occasional

guest lectures by Mary Potter), and courses I taught at the University of Ore-

xiv Preface

gon, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. When I

took cognition at MIT, there were only two textbooks about cognition as a ﬁeld

(ifitcouldevenbethoughtofasaﬁeldthen):UlricNeisser’s Cognitive Psy-

chology and Michael Posner’s Cognition: An Introduction . Professors Carey and

Garrett supplemented these texts with a thick book of hand-picked readings

from Scientiﬁc American and mainstream psychology journals. Reading journal

articles prepared the students for the debates that characterize science. Susan

and Merrill skillfully brought these debates out in the classroom, through inter-

active lectures and the Socratic method. Cognition is full of opposing theories

and controversies. It is an empirical science, but in many cases the same data

are used to support different arguments, and the reader must draw his or her

own conclusions. The ﬁeld of cognition is alive, dynamic, and rediscovering

itself all the time. We should expect nothing less of the science devoted to

understanding the mind.

Today there are many excellent textbooks and readers devoted to cognition.

Textbooks are valuable because they select and organize a daunting amount of

information and cover the essential points of a topic. The disadvantage is that

they do not reﬂect how psychologists learn about new research—this is most

often done through journal articles or ‘‘high-level’’ book chapters directed to

the working researcher. More technical in nature, these sources typically reveal

details of an experiment’s design, the measures used, and how the ﬁndings are

interpreted. They also reveal some of the inherent ambiguity in research (often

hidden in a textbook’s tidy summary). Frequently students, when confronted

with the actual data of a study, ﬁnd alternate interpretations of the ﬁndings,

and come to discover ﬁrsthand that researchers are often forced to draw their

own conclusions. By the time undergraduates take a course in cognition (usu-

ally their second or third course in psychology) they ﬁnd themselves wonder-

ingiftheyoughtto major in psychology, and a few even think about going to

graduate school. I believe they ought to know more about what it is like to read

actual psychology articles, so they’ll know what they’re getting into.

On the other hand, a book of readings composed exclusively of such primary

sources would be difﬁcult to read without a suitable grounding in the ﬁeld and

would leave out many important concepts, lacking an overview. That is, it might

tend to emphasize the trees at the expense of the forest.

Therefore, the goal of this anthology is to combine the best of both kinds

of readings. By compiling an anthology such as this, I was able to pick and

choose my favorite articles, by experts on each topic. Of the thirty-nine selec-

tions, ten are from undergraduate textbooks, six are from professional journals,

sixteen are chapters from ‘‘high-level’’ books aimed at advanced students and

research scientists, and seven are more or less hybrids, coming from sources

written for the educated layperson, such as Scientiﬁc American or popular books

(e.g., Gardner, Norman). This book is not intended to be a collection of the most

important papers in the history of cognitive psychology; other authors have

done this extremely well, especially Lloyd Komatsuin his excellent Experiment-

ing with the Mind (1994, Brooks/Cole). It is intended as a collection of readings

that can serve as the principal text for a course in cognitive psychology or cog-

nitive science.

Preface xv

The particular readings included here owe their evolution to a course I taught

at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1999, ‘‘Fundamental

Issues in Cognitive Science.’’ The readings for that course had been carefully

honed over ten years by Stephen Palmer and Alison Gopnik, outstanding

teachers whose courses are motivated by an understanding of the philosophical

basis for contemporary cognitive psychology. I had never seen cognitive psy-

chology taught this way, but once I did I couldn’t imagine teaching it any other

way. A fundamental assumption I share with them is that cognitive psychology

is in many respects empirical philosophy . By that I mean that the core questions

in cognitive psychology were for centuries considered the domain of philoso-

phers. Some of these questions include: What is the nature of thought? Does

language inﬂuence thought? Are memories and perceptions accurate? How can

we ever know if other people are conscious?

Aristotle was the ﬁrst information-processing theorist, and without exaggera-

tion one can argue that modern cognitive psychology owes him its heritage.

Descartes launched modern approaches to these questions, and much current

debate references his work. But for Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Husserl,

and others, the questions remained in the realm of philosophy. A century and

a half ago this all changed when Wundt, Fechner, Helmholtz, and their cohorts

established the ﬁrst laboratories in which they employed empirical methods to

probe what had previously been impenetrable to true science: the mind. Philos-

ophers framed the questions, and mental scientists (as they were then some-

times called) conducted experiments to answer them.

Today, the empirical work that interests me most in the ﬁeld of Cognition is

theory-driven and builds on these philosophical foundations. And a new group

of philosophers, philosophers of mind, closely monitor the progress made by

cognitive psychologists in order to interpret and debate their ﬁndings and to

place them in a larger context.

Who Is This For?

The book you have before you is intended to be used as a text for the under-

graduate cognitive psychology class I teach at McGill University. I hope that

others will ﬁnd some value in it as well. It should also be suitable for students

who wish to acquaint themselves through self-study with important ideas in

cognition. The ambitious student or professor may want to use this to sup-

plement a regular textbook as a way to add other perspectives on the topics

covered. It may also be of use to researchers as a resource that gathers up key

articles in one place. It presupposes a solid background in introductory psy-

chology and research methods. Students should have encountered most of these

topics previously, and this book gives them an opportunity to explore them

more deeply.

How the Book Is Organized and How It Differs from Other Books

The articles in this reader are organized thematically around topics tradition-

ally found in a course on cognitive psychology or cognitive science at the uni-

xvi Preface

versity level. The order of the readings could certainly be varied without loss of

coherence, although I think that the ﬁrst few readings ﬁt better at the begin-

ning. After that any order should work.

The readings begin with philosophical foundations, and it is useful to keep

these in mind when reading the remainder of the articles. This reﬂects the view

that good science builds on earlier foundations, even if it ultimately rejects

them.

This anthology differs from most other cognition readers in its coverage of

several topics not typically taught in cognition courses. One is human factors

and ergonomics, the study of how we interact with tools, machines, and arti-

facts, and what cognitive psychology can tell us about how to improve the de-

sign of such objects (including computers); this is represented in the excellent

papers by Don Norman. Another traditionally underrepresented topic, evolu-

tionary psychology, is represented here by two articles, one by David Buss and

his colleagues, and the other by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. Also unusual

are the inclusion of sections on music cognition, experimental design, and as

mentioned before, philosophical foundations. You will ﬁnd that there is some-

what less coverage of neuroscience and computer science perspectives on cog-

nition, simply because in our department at McGill, we teach separate courses

on those topics, and this reader reﬂects an attempt to reduce overlap.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many publishers and authors who agreed to let their works be included

here, my students, and Amy Brand, Tom Stone, Carolyn Anderson, Margy Avery, and Kathleen

Caruso at MIT Press. I am indebted in particular to the following students from my cognition class

for their tireless efforts at proofreading and indexing this book: Lindsay Ball, Ioana Dalca, Nora

Hussein, Christine Kwong, Aliza Miller, Bianca Mugyenyi, Patrick Sabourin, and Hannah Wein-

stangel. I also would like to thank my wife, Caroline Traube, who is a constant source of surprise

and inspiration and whose intuitions about cognitive psychology have led to many new studies.

Finally, I was extraordinarily lucky to have three outstanding scholars as teachers: Mike Posner,

Doug Hintzman, and Roger Shepard, to whom this book is dedicated. I would like to thank them

for their patience, inspiration, support, and friendship.

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