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31 Cards in this Set
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1. Aristotle
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First Greek theorist to develop a whole work to psychology.
Distinguished from early naturalists and formalists by his strong reliance on empirical evidence and observation. Recognized that his observations where provisional and based on the science of his day. Material cause – material in which it is realized (e.g., bronze for the statue of Zeus – neurons are made of cells) Formal cause – the essential form which is distinct from all others (e.g., the shape of the statue - neurons differ from other cells) Efficient cause – agency responsible for its generation (e.g., the sculptor, neurons are generated by cellular division) Final cause – the end function for which it exists (glorification for the gods, to allow us to process external stimuli) Final causes have been largely abandoned as a modern scientific explanation. Final causes are teleological – processes are explained in terms of an ascribed end or goal state. The psyche is the formal cause of a human being The material cause of human beings is the organized organic material that makes up our bodies Because humans are natural, the formal cause is also our efficient and final cause The four causes are only distinct for artifacts (non-natural existents) Plants and animals also have a psyche, but humans have three types of psyche A nutritive psyche (self-sustaining beings) – plants, animals, humans Sensitive psyche (sentient beings) – animals, humans Rationale psyche (cognitive beings) – humans Special sensible – only discernable by a single sense E.g., Color for sight, sound for hearing Common sensible – perceived by more than one sense Simple memory – ability to recognize an image from the past Recollection – actively searching memory images |
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5. Augustine Of Hippo
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Early church fathers embraced the Neoplatonic conception of the psyche as an immortal spiritual entity temporarily imprisoned in an inferior material body. This is clearly demonstrated in the writings of Saint Augustine
Reaffirmed Plotinus’s view that knowledge can only be attained through acquaintance with the external forms or ideals as the illumination of God and that man should turn away from the world of the senses and carnal pleasure Maintained that the soul is a special and simple spiritual substance which is distinct from the material substance and can survive bodily death Maintained that certain forms of knowledge are innate, such as mathematical relations and moral principles Reason and experience are only valuable if they agree with Christian theology |
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7. William of Occam
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A general principle of theoretical economy
Occam’s razor “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” Means that simple explanations are preferred to complex ones when the can explain something equally well |
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8. Andres Vesalius
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Subjected the classical medical theories of Galen to empirical evaluation
Dissection of cadavers had become common in medical teaching, but usually a butcher would conduct the dissection and the lecturer would read from Galen or Avicenna Vesalius performed his own dissections and identified many errors in Galen Concluding that Galen’s system was based on the physiology of pigs and goats rather than humans Although his challenges to Galen generated the same reactionary response as Galileo’s challenges to Aristotle, his pioneering studies transformed medical theory and practice |
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10. Isaac Newton
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In a two-year period (from ages 23-25), he developed the binomial theorem, invented calculus, and created the first refracting telescope.
His theory of universal gravitation integrated laws of terrestrial and celestial motion and successfully explained a wide range of empirical data More about the effect of Newton’s work in chapter 5 The mechanistic forms of efficient causal explanation were eventually extended to biology and psychology For example, William Harvey explained the circulation of blood through veins and arteries that form closed loops through which the heart pumps the blood Pereira explained the functions of animals in purely mechanistic terms – instincts and learned habits without any reference to consciousness or reason. Newton’s success produced a legend that science is achieved through a process of theoretical unification Psychologists have tried to develop theories of learning that integrate classical and operant conditioning Newton claimed that scientific theories must be based upon empirical data rather than rational intuition or classical authority |
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11. Rene Descartes
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One of his most significant contributions to the history of science and psychology was his application of mechanistic principles of efficient causal explanation to the behavior of organic human beings
Provided a detailed physiological account of reflexive behavior, which he characterized as automatic and involuntary Called such behavior reflexive because he believed that in the case of automatic and involuntary behavior, that animal spirits were reflected in the brain the fashion that light is reflected on the surface of a liquid. This mechanistic reflexive form of explanation could be extended to all animal and much of human behavior. Although Descartes account didn’t mark much of advance in some respects (i.e. animal spirits), the account was revolutionary because he applied mechanistic explanation not only to innate reflexes and involuntary behavior, but to many forms of animal behavior and human behavior that are based on learning and memory Like 20th century behaviorists, he maintained that the learned behavior of animals, and much human behavior, is automatic and involuntary as instincts or reflexes and can be explained without reference to consciousness or cognition. Descartes denied the mechanistic reflexive explanations could account for voluntary human behavior. He claimed that voluntary human behavior is generated through the action of a distinct immaterial soul Thus, Descartes was a dualist (body and soul are separate) and interactionist (body and soul interact) He claimed that the immaterial mind (reason, consciousness, and will) interacts with the material body via the pineal gland in the brain which enables the immaterial mind to direct the animal spirits to different muscles and generate different forms of behavior at will. Descartes claimed that voluntary behavior could always be distinguished from the behavior of animals or machines, even if the machines were modeled on real people. Although Descartes envisioned machines that could produce appropriate noises in stimulus situations, he wrote: ****“It is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as even the dullest of men can do”**** Thus claiming that no machine is capable of problem solving in the form of rational adaptation to novel situations In claiming that mechanistic explanations could be extended to the realm of animal and human behavior, he emphasized the continuity of animal and human behavior with other material processes in nature In denying the mechanistic reflexive explanation could be extended to human thought and voluntary behavior, he postulated a fundamental discontinuity between animals and human beings |
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15. Augustus Comte
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a
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16. John Stewart Mill
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Described “Mill’s methods” (see Chapter 1)
Agreement, difference, and concomitant variation means of both generating and evaluating hypotheses not limited to the study of observables practical prediction in psychology is limited by the difficulties of anticipating all the factors involved in human thought and behavior psychology is bound to remain an inexact science many psychological phenomenon have a plurality of causes |
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19. Marie Jean Pierre Flourens
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Undermined phrenology by demonstrating that the skull does not reflect the contours of the brain
Real objection was to Gall’s denial of the soul Experimental Ablation (removal of tissue) Enduring achievements Cerebellum = motor behavior Medulla oblongata = vital functions |
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20. Pierre Paul Broca
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First person to identify a specific neural location with a distinct function
Linked the faculty of articulate language to the superior region of the left frontal lobe (now known as Broca’s Area) |
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22. Johannes Muller
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Demonstrated that there are 5 types of sensory nerves - distinctive sensations for color, smell, taste, touch, and sound
Vitalism Physiological processes are the product of an emergent vital force distinct from the physical and chemical forces of attraction and repulsion Vital processes are not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry Vital force was postulated based on its observed effect |
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24. Gustav Fechner
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Measured the intensity of sensory stimuli
Found that the perceived intensity of a sensation is a logarithmic function of the physical intensity of the stimuli E.g., a 10-point increase in decibels is perceived as about “twice as loud” Now known as Fechner’s law Important b/c a mathematical linking physical stimulus with perceived intensity |
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27. Charles Darwin
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Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was one of the most significant intellectual accomplishments of the 19th century, matching in significance Newton’s theory of gravitation in the 17th century
Darwin’s theory represented a triumph of mechanistic explanation over final causal or teleological explanation Organism exhibit chance variation in their characteristics. They produce more offspring than can possibly survive in given environments, creating a struggle for existence. chance variations in characteristics that are conducive to the survival of an organism in a given environment are naturally selected, since organisms possessing these characteristics tend to survive and reproduce, whereas organisms lacking such characteristics tend to die and fail to reproduce. natural selection of minor variations in characteristics accounted for the gradual transformation of species over long periods of time. Proposed that there was a blending of adult characteristics through which half of the “particles” pass through the adult parents to their reproductive organs |
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28. Francis Galton
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Prolific & broad thinker
Pioneered the scientific study of weather giving us the terms “high”, “low” and “front” Pioneered the use of questionnaires and word-association tests First to systematically apply statistics to the study of psychological characteristics Demonstrated that the normal curve described the distribution of many biological and social factors Introduced the use of the median and percentiles to understand distributions Invented the correlation coefficient to explore the relation between test scores Identified “regression to the mean” First person to discuss the relative influence of heredity and environment Pioneered the use of twin-studies to study heredity Rejected the inheritance of acquired characteristics (soft heredity) and Darwin’s blending theory of reproduction Eugenics = Greek term meaning well-born society and government should adopt the practice of “artificial selection” that had served as the original model for Darwin’s theory of evolution intelligence tests could be used to select the most intelligent for the purpose of breeding ‘highly gifted” people should be encouraged to breed early and regularly and should be financially supported by the government |
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31. Wilhelm Wundt
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The year 1879 is conventionally designated as the one in which psychology was founded in Germany as an institutional scientific discipline. This was the year Wundt’s research lab was set up.
Wundt was the first to apply the experimental methods of physiology to mental states and processes and to establish the institutional resources necessary to develop the academic discipline of scientific psychology Believed he could make the study of conscious experience an exact science by rigorously controlling the experimental conditions Trained subjects provided concurrent commentaries on their conscious experience under rigorously controlled experimental conditions Many of Wundt’s experimental studies of apperception were precursors of contemporary research in cognitive psychology on attention span and short-term memory He originally thought it possible to attend to only 1 stimulus at a time, but experimental studies established that about 6 or 7 items could be simultaneously attended to His studies also found that chunking elements into larger meaningful units can increase the capacity Similar results were reported in George Miller’s (1956) classic study from which you learned the humans can remember 7 +/- 2 pieces of information Wundt also developed the tree diagrams representing sentence structure, which you probably hated in school. Wundt’s main achievement was the establishment of psychology as an autonomous scientific discipline He established a research community of psychologists working on a common set of experimental problems, who disseminated their results through PhD dissertations and journal publications. Supervised 186 dissertations including 33 Americans, many of whom went on to establish psychology programs at other universities No lasting substantive contributions to theoretical or experimental psychology |
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34. William James
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anticipated many of the later developments of scientific psychology, but did not found any distinctive school and had few theoretical disciples
James organized the informal meetings of the Metaphysical Society and successfully promoted pragmatism outcome of these meetings was the development of the philosophical view known as pragmatism: the view that the adequacy of any theoretical system should be judged by its practical utility pragmatist theory of truth, according to which a belief or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word. belief or proposition should be accepted as true if it satisfies our feelings or produces a beneficial effect such as a religious belief or a belief that mineral baths relieve backache James-Lange theory of emotion- emotion is not the cause of physiological arousal and behavior, but is our experience of physiological arousal and behavior. we should say that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble because we are sorry, angry or fearful Emotion is epiphenomenal (secondary to experience) Set up first lab at Harvard (but wasn’t used much) Students played a role in American psychology (but they did not develop in James’ direction) |
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35. Hugo Munsterberg
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greater promoter of American psychology
developed applied fields of psychology such as psychotherapy, forensic psychology, and industrial psychology. eyewitness testimony biased and distorted nature of perception and memory. police interrogation precursors of modern lie- detector machines conducted studies of personnel selection, task- oriented aptitude testing, work efficiency, motivation, marketing, sales, and advertising Supported Germany’s position before and during the First World War. He was vilified by the press and suspected of being a spy. |
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36. G. Stanley Hall
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First PhD on a psychological topic at Harvard
First lab and PhD program in US in 1883 at Johns Hopkins First journal in 1887, American Journal of Psychology Founded APA in 1892 and served as first president By 1898, he had supervised 30 of the 54 psychology PhDs thus far awarded in the US Genetic Psychology-based on the method of evolutionary biology focused on the development of individual organisms, especially the (extended) development of human children Hall made genetic psychology the foundation of his developmental and educational psychology Goal: establish the course of normal child development so that teaching practices could be suitably adapted to it Believed many differences in children’s abilities were innately determined, but that behavior is often the product of adaptive adjustment to environment In the summer of 1892 Hall invited 26 American psychologists to Clark to form a psychological association. Only a dozen of the invitees were able to attend the first organizational meeting held in Halls office on July 8, 1892, where the American Psychological Association was founded. APA was inclusive in its membership policy, at least in terms of religion and gender. Despite the common rejection of experimentalism and general advocacy of the practical application of psychology, for many decades membership was restricted to academic psychologists with established publication records. |
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37. Lightner Witmer
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He coined the term clinical psychology to describe a new diagnostic branch of applied psychology
“clinical” referenced the clinical method of medicine from which the diagnostic method was appropriated claimed that the ultimate value of psychological science lay in its practical utility: clinical psychology must be based upon case studies of individual persons with particular psychological problems main reason for calling his form of applied psychology clinical psychology, because it was based upon the method of case histories associated with clinical medicine he had little enthusiasm for the work of Freud, which was also based upon case histories |
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38. Walter Dill Scott
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founder of American industrial psychology
created a series of mental tests designed to assess business skills & rating scales for employee selection Industrial psychology expanded dramatically after the First World War, especially in the realm of personnel selection and evaluation, but also through studies of industrial efficiency. The most famous I-O Psych studies were conducted at the Hawthorne, Illinois, plant of the Western General Electric Company during the 1920s and 1930s. Studies indicated that changes in lighting and temperature improved efficiency investigators later noted that almost any environmental change produced the same effect a function of the apparent interest researchers (and by inference managers) were taking in workers progress Came to be known as the Hawthorne effect Being studied changes behavior. Re-analysis of data suggests alternative interpretations |
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39. Edward Titchener
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Titchener claimed that the primary goal of experimental psychology was to describe the basic structure of the mind
the conscious elements of mind and their modes of combination. characterized his form of psychology as structural psychology and distinguished it from functional psychology, which he claimed was primarily concerned with the functions of consciousness His methods relied heavily on introspection self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations training of experimental subjects analogous to the calibration of scientific instruments once experimental subjects were properly trained in hard introspective labor, they found that accurate introspection became a largely mechanical process founded his own group, which came to be known as the Experimentalists reconstituted in 1929 as the Society of Experimental Psychologists |
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40. E. L. Thorndike
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Thorndike’s cats
Thorndike’s cats were food-deprived and placed in slatted cages: They were required to open a latch (or series of latches) in order to escape and receive a food reward. The cats initially responded in a random fashion. They clawed and bit at the bars, sniffed around the cage, pushed their paws between the bars, and tried to squeeze between them. Eventually they hit upon the movement required to release the latch, which enabled them to escape and receive the food reward. On subsequent trials, the cats exhibited less and less random behavior until they learned the required behavior, which they would then produce whenever they were placed in the puzzle- box. Thorndike measured the decreased time it took for animals to produce the required behavior and the decreased number of incorrect responses over the series of trials until learning was completed. His data indicated that the required response was learned incrementally, rather than through any spontaneous act of insight or reasoning. By varying the conditions, Thorndike also demonstrated that that learning was not a product of imitation, since the observation of successful responses by other cats did not decrease the time it took for a cat to learn the correct response. Thorndike’s theory of learning, which he characterized as connectionism, appealed to traditional principles of association based upon contiguity and repetition. However, he focused on associations between behavior and its consequences rather than associations between ideas (although the main principle of the law of effect had been recognized by Hartley, Spencer, and Bain). Indeed, part of the point of Thorndike’s experiments was to demonstrate that animal learning did not involve any form of insight, reasoning, or association of ideas. |
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41. Ivan Pavlov
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During the first decade of his career, Pavlov focused his research on the physiological study of the digestive system, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1904. In his Nobel address, he mentioned the problem of psychic secretions that was to occupy him for the next three decades.
Pavlov reported that his laboratory dogs salivated in reflexive reaction not only to food stimuli (in the form of meat powder), but also to associated stimuli, such as the sight or sound of the experimenter. |
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42. John B. Watson
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“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well- formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant- chief and yes, even into beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.” (1924/ 1930, pp. 103 104)
Watson virtually denied the existence of inherited instincts, traits, and abilities and proclaimed that, given the resources, a behaviorist psychology could be employed to create any type of human being that society desired. Following an affair with a student and his divorce, Watson turned to a career in advertising, in which he achieved even greater success than he had in academia. He developed strategies for predicting and controlling consumer behavior that were far more effective than any of his earlier forays into animal and human psychology. He increased the sales of products such as Johnsons Baby Powder, Ponds Cold Cream, and Maxwell House Coffee and initiated marketing strategies such as demographic surveys and free samples. He invented the coffee break to sell coffee and introduced candy at supermarket checkouts to ambush mothers and their children. not the first to adopt the behaviorist position, but was undoubtedly its most forceful and successful advocate. maintained that psychology is a positivist science of prediction and control, based upon the description of behavior and its observable antecedents. Aside from his rejection of introspection, Watson’s basic positivist position was remarkably similar to Titchener’s. Like Titchener, he advocated an experimental science based upon repeatable observations, but focused upon observations of behavior rather than the introspection of mental states. His behaviorism was in fact little more than a restatement of traditional empiricist and associationist principles transposed from the realm of privately introspectable mental states to publicly observable behavior. |
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43. Alfred Binet
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Alfred Binet (1857-1911) developed a series of tests designed to identify retarded but educable children in the French elementary school system, which had expanded dramatically in the late 19th century when primary education became compulsory.
With his research assistant, Theodore Simon, Binet published a series of papers in 1905 describing a new scale for measuring child intelligence. This scale, which included 30 items ranked in order of difficulty, was administered to large numbers of schoolchildren between 1905 and 1908. The Binet- Simon scale (revised again in 1911, just before Binet’s death) was a great success in Europe and was translated into a variety of languages. It provided an objective measure of general intelligence that was easy to administer, although Binet and Simon stressed the limitations of their test. They held that their scale was a useful instrument for identifying children in need of special remedial education and not a measure of a fixed level of intelligence. They devised special programs of education by which they hoped to raise the mental level of retarded children. |
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44. Henry H. Goddard &
Lewis M. Terman |
Caution was thrown to the winds when Henry H. Goddard (1866-1957) and Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956) imported the Binet- Simon scale to America.
Terman’s 1916 revision of the Binet- Simon scale was more than a translation. included 36 additional items and was calibrated in relation to a substantial standardization sample drawn from California schools. The Stanford- Binet scale, as it came to be known, was designed to ensure that the average child at any age between 5 and 16 would test at that age. The average 10- year- old would test at the mental age of 10, and the average intelligence quotient (IQ) for any age would be 100. Terman defined the intelligence quotient ( IQ) as Sterns mental quotient (the ratio of mental age to chronological age) multiplied by 100. The Stanford- Binet scale became the standard American intelligence test until it was itself revised in 1937. Goddard and Terman did not follow Binet and Simon in treating their scales as merely useful instruments for identifying children in need of remedial education. They treated them as objective measures of genetically determined levels of intelligence, to be employed in interventionist programs of social engineering. Goddard managed to persuade immigration officers at Ellis Island that he was able to identify the feebleminded among the increasing numbers of eastern and southern Europeans of poor stock ( in comparison to northern and western Europeans of good stock) then immigrating to the United States. Impressed by Goddard’s ability to identify the feebleminded by sight and then have his identification objectively confirmed by their low scores on the Binet- Simon test (although the translators who administered the test complained that they would not have been able to answer questions about the New York Giants when they first came to America). As immigration inspectors began to make use of Goddard’s intelligence tests, they refused entry to increasing numbers of immigrants on grounds of feeblemindedness. |
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45. Edward Tolman
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While Tolman may not have had as revolutionary an impact as Watson or as immediate an influence as Hull, his theoretical position has endured better than theirs.
Tolmans own research was focused on purposive or goal- directed behavior in animals and humans. Tolman's Purposeful Behavior-Claimed that most animal and human behavior is intentionally directed toward goal or end states. Like Aristotle, Tolman maintained that most animal and human behavior is intrinsically purposive or teleological. Tolman did not deny the independence of conscious mentality and behavior. He thought it was perfectly legitimate to postulate mental determinants of the purposive behavior of animals and humans. He rejected the common conception of learning as the automatic connection of stimulus and response, based upon principles of contiguity, frequency, and reinforcement. Latent Learning- Tolman and Honzik (1930) maintained that rats are able to learn maze layouts in the absence of reinforcement. Tolman held that rats develop cognitive maps of their spatial environment based upon confirmations of their expectancies: in the course of learning something like a field map of the environment gets established in the rats brain. Cognitive Determinism- Tolman’s commitment to the cognitive determination of both animal and human behavior was a distinctive feature of his purposive behaviorism. It distinguished it from the forms of behaviorism advocated by most other behaviorists. Tolman rejected Lloyd Morgan’s claim that all animal behavior could be explained in terms of association and never embraced the standard behaviorist attempt to accommodate all forms of animal and human behavior in terms of conditioned learning. Intervening Variables- Tolman came to treat cognitive states as intervening variables, operationally defined in terms of external environmental or internal physiological stimulus variables (independent variables) and behavioral response variables (dependent variables) “Mental processes are but intervening variables between the five independent variables of (1) environmental stimuli, (2) physiological drive, (3) heredity, (4) previous training, and (5) maturity, on the one hand, and the final dependent variable, behavior, on the other.” Hypothetical Constructs- Tolman specified the meaning of his theoretical cognitive constructs independently of any operational definition. Tolman specified his theoretical references to cognitive maps, for example, in terms of an organism’s representation of its spatial environment, not in terms of its behavior in that environment. Given this theoretical specification, one could understand how rats represent their environment without knowing how they behave in that environment. |
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47. B. F. Skinner
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RADICAL BEHAVIORIST
focused upon what he called operant behavior, as opposed to Pavlovian respondent behavior. defined operant behavior as behavior whose probability of recurrence is increased by reinforcement respondent behavior as behavior elicited by unconditioned and conditioned stimuli. operant conditioning increases the probability of the recurrence of a behavior (in a stimulus situation) and the frequency of its recurrence, through reinforcement of the behavior. Skinner claimed that his account of operant conditioning was merely a refinement of Thorndike’s law of effect. However, Skinner rejected Thorndike’s references to satisfaction and discomfort and Hulls interpretation of reinforcement as drive reduction. He maintained that the only defining characteristic of a reinforcing stimulus is that it reinforces, ignoring the obvious circularity of the definition. Skinner rejected the scientific empiricist and neobehaviorist account of psychological theories. theories about unobservable states and processes, including theories about cognitive states and processes, are explanatory fictions: They are vacuous as explanations of relations between observable stimuli and responses and play no role in the development of novel predictions about behavior Skinner also recognized that the notion that operationally defined intervening variables can generate novel empirical predictions is completely illusory. Since at any point in time, the content of postulated intervening variables is supposedly determined by the functional relationships between observable stimuli and responses in terms of which they are operationally defined, the only basis for the prediction of novel functional relationships is our present knowledge of functional relationships between observable stimuli and responses. Skinner maintained that behaviorist psychology should focus on the description of functional relationships between observable behavior and environmental stimuli, based upon the experimental analysis, control, and manipulation of environmental reinforcement Skinner didn’t see any need for theory and rejected the hypothetico-deductive method advocated by Tolman and Hull. Skinner acknowledged the existence of cognitive states, but denied that they are centrally initiated. Cognitive states are merely internal links in fully determined causal chains relating behavior and environmental stimuli. He rejected the notion that the cognitive agent is the true originator or initiator of action and, like most other behaviorists, was a committed environmentalist. Skinners theoretical commitment to the environmental determination of behavior led him to champion programs of social engineering based upon experimentally derived principles of behavior modification. *****Skinner’s radical behaviorism became a distinctive movement within scientific psychology. Skinner was the most famous 20th century psychologist |
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48. Norbert Wiener
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Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) defined cybernetics
as the scientific study of control and communication in animals and machines, which he analyzed in terms of the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. characterized purposive behavior as the intelligent adjustment of behavior to environmental change (echoing earlier functionalist accounts – like Dewey) complained that a major obstacle to the development of mechanical systems that could mimic purposive behavior in humans was the inadequacy of neobehaviorist theory maintained that the behavior of servomechanisms such as torpedoes is intrinsically purposeful such machine behavior requires a teleological explanation in terms of regulation by feedback, defined as signals from the goal that modify the activity of the object in the course of the behavior Wiener maintained that the same information-theoretical principles of explanation apply to the restricted class of animal, human, and machine behavior that involves regulation by information feedback. In doing so, he made a major contribution to the development of the cognitive revolution. He legitimized the concepts of purposive behavior and teleological explanation for hard-nosed scientific skeptics by demonstrating their applicability to the behavior of inanimate machines. Wiener introduced many concepts that play a significant role in computer science and cognitive psychology, such as working memory and executive function ability of any mechanical system to engage in purposive behavior was based upon structural features suitable for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information |
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49. George Miller
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published a classic paper on the limited capacity of attention and memory as information channels titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” (Miller, 1956).
He demonstrated the limited capacity of sensory judgment, perception, and short-term memory and reframed in information-theoretical terms Wundt’s earlier claim that the capacity of human attention is restricted to around seven units. Miller also demonstrated the limitations of the pure information- theoretical approach. constraints on memory capacity can be surmounted by recoding information into meaningful chunks such as mother rather than the units r h m t e o during the 1950s Miller came to treat humans more as (active) processors of information than as (passive) channels of information At Princeton University he established a new program and laboratory in cognitive science, the name for the newly evolved interdisciplinary matrix of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics |
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50. Alan Turing
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developed the abstract idea of a hypothetical machine, now known as a Turing machine, capable of performing elementary operations on symbols printed on a paper tape
Turing originally approached the question by conceiving of a human operator, or human computer, who mechanically performed a set of instructions from a rulebook. By imagining a human replaced by a machine with a stored set of instructions, Turing created the notion of a computer program. In conceiving of a machine capable of performing a variety of tasks (such as computing numbers, drawing logical implications, and playing chess), Turing developed the principle of the modern computer Set-up: a human interrogator poses questions to a machine and another human whose only contact with them is via a teleprinter link Conclusion: Turing maintained that we should be prepared to ascribe intelligence to a machine if we could not discriminate the responses of the human communicator from a machine simulating or imitating these responses |
