Daniel J. Levitin (ed) - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology, stooges (hasło - stooges), ebooks, Consciousness ...
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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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |