Transcript Powerpoint

CHAPTER 14 –
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN
THE POST-WAR ERA
(GOODWIN)
Dr. Nancy Alvarado
Post-War Psychology

The most important development in psychology
after WWII was modern cognitive psychology.
 The
change was evolutionary, not revolutionary,
emerging from but not replacing behaviorism.

Goodwin also describes 4 other prominent areas of
research, highlighting the work of one key person:
 Physiological
or neuropsychology – Donald Hebb
 Social psychology – Leon Festinger
 Personality psychology – Gordon Allport
 Developmental psychology – Jean Piaget
Early Cognitivists


Pioneers studying memory, attention, perception
and thinking in the 19th century included
Ebbinghaus, Wundt, Kulpe, Wertheimer & Titchener.
In the 20th century the methods were different and
models were based on the computer (as metaphor).
 Some
psychologists starting calling themselves
“cognitive psychologists.”

Even during the behaviorist 30’s & 40’s cognitive
studies were done in the USA (Stroop) and
especially in Europe (Piaget & Bartlett).
Frederick C. Bartlett (1886-1969)



In 1932, Bartlett published “Remembering: A study
in Experimental and Social Psychology” describing
his dissertation studies done 15 years earlier.
He earned his doctorate at Cambridge, then
became head of the Psychology Laboratory, one of
the first experimental psych labs in Great Britain.
Although he also worked on animal learning and
applied studies (pilot fatigue), his reputation rests
on his memory research.
Frederick Bartlett
Bartlett on Memory

Bartlett criticized the usefulness of Ebbinhaus’s work.
 Memorizing
nonsense syllables by rote is too artificial.
 Research should focus on the person not the stimuli.


People do not passively form associations but
actively organize material into meaningful wholes
called schemata (plural for schema).
He demonstrated this in two experiments described
by Goodwin (Chapter 14).
Military Men on Postcards

Bartlett showed subjects a series of 6 drawings of
military men (see pg 468). He then asked them to
describe the drawings. He found:
 Serial
position effect – first and last best remembered.
 No memory for whether facing left or right.
 Transposition of detail from one picture to another.
 Intrusions (importation) of details not actually there.
 Responses were affected by leading questions.

His results were presented without detail on method.
The War of the Ghosts

Participants were given a 328 word Native Amer.
folk tale to read twice and then reproduce 15
minutes later and also hours to months later.
 Total
recall declined.
 What was recalled was shaped by the need to form a
coherent understandable story in the context of their
own cultural knowledge (schemata – concepts).
 Memory was an active process of construction.

In the 1960s, the significance of this work became
more appreciated – it is now widely accepted.
Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958)


Lashley studied with Yerkes and Watson, then
became a professor at Harvard University.
He became a critic of S-R and associatist theories in
a talk on the “serial order” problem.
 Mental
representation is needed to explain language.
 Serial sequences of speech or movement require too
fast a neural analysis to be based on simple contiguity.
 Speech is more complex than simple chains of sounds,
so the brain must be exercising organizational control
over patterns of behavior.
Other Influences

The development of computer science provided a
metaphor for brain functioning:
A
computer takes in info from the environment,
processes it internally, and produces some output.
 John von Neuman presented this analogy in 1948.


Atkinson & Shiffrin presented a flowchart of
memory analogous to computer processing.
Shannon & Weaver introduced “information theory”
in “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” in
1949.
A Model of Memory Processing
A Joke
Shannon & Weaver

Information theory was important to both computer
science and psychology.
 They
introduced the concept of a “bit” – binary digit
with the logical operators of true and false and two
states, on and off.
 A coin toss contains one bit of information because it
decides between heads and tails.

The bit provides a way of standardizing information
regardless of what form it takes (coin toss, numbers,
letters, etc).
Noam Chomsky

The development linguistics, especially at MIT by
Chomsky, further undermined behaviorism.
 Skinner
tried to put language into operant terms.
 Chomsky wrote a highly critical review of Skinner’s
book, saying language development is too fast for
conditioning to be relevant.

Language came to be viewed as behavior
governed by application of a hierarchical set of
rules called a grammar – innate linguistic universals.
 Grammar
can generate an infinity of unique utterances.
George A. Miller

Miller recognized the relevance of information
theory for psychology.
 He
studied the difficulty hearing spoken messages while
sitting in loud airplanes at Harvard.

“The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some
limits on our capacity for processing information.”
 Bits
and channel capacity can describe limits on human
processing, such as the limited capacity of memory.
 The term “chunk” captures the idea that the information
in bits can vary widely. “Recoding” reorganizes data.
Donald Broadbent (1926-1993)

Broadbent applied information theory to the study
of attention.
 Engineers
did not take into account human pilots when
designing airline cockpit instrumentation, causing errors.

He pioneered modern attention research with the
dichotic listening task in which people hear two
channels of information (one in each ear).
 He
proposed a selective filter to explain the cocktail
party phenomenon.
The TOTE Model



Miller, Galanter & Pribram (a student of Lashley)
developed a model of how plans operate on
images to guide behavior.
Called TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) and based on
the idea of feedback from cybernetics (computer
science). See example pg 479 for hammering nail.
This feedback system was proposed as an
alternative for the reflex arc hypothesized by
behaviorists.
TOTE Model for Slicing Carrots
Ulric Neisser



Momentum for cognitive approaches continued to
build in the 1960s – Neisser published “Cognitive
Psychology” in 1967, naming the approach.
Neisser studied with Miller at Harvard, then Kohler
at Swarthmore, then MIT and Harvard again.
Cognitive psychology is the experimental study of
all cognitive processes – “those processes by which
sensory input is transformed, reduce, elaborated,
stored, recovered, and used.”
Evolution of Cognitive Psychology


New journals appeared in the 70’s & 80’s.
Neisser urged greater ecological validity –
research with relevance to every day activities.
 In
response, Loftus studied eyewitness testimony, Bahrick
studied long-term recall of school material.

Cognitive science was created – an interdisciplinary
field including cognitive psych, linguistics, computer
science, cultural anthropology & epistemology.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)


AI is an applied field attempting to enable
machines to act with some degree of intelligence.
Herb Simon and Alan Newell collaborated on a
General Problem Solver (GPS) aimed at solving a
broad range of problems.
 An
algorithm is a set of rules for obtaining a solution. A
heuristic is a more creative strategy, not guaranteed to
work but more efficient than an algorithm.
 The GPS used means-end analysis as a heuristic, with
feedback about goal status.
The Turing Test



The more dominant approach in AI is now to create
a program that solves a problem in the most
efficient way, not necessarily the way people do.
This has led to the question of testing whether
computers can be intelligent or learn to think, posed
by Alan Turing in 1950 as an “imitation game.”
Strong AI proposes computers can think as people
do. Weak AI proposes that computers can yield
important insights about human thinking.
 Searle
described the Chinese Room problem.
Evaluating Cognitive Psychology

Skinner was a vocal critic, objecting to hypothetical
mental mechanisms like STM that become frozen
into “explanatory fictions.”
 Attributing
memory failure to limited STM explains
nothing.

The computer metaphor ignores emotion, motivation
and intentionality.
 It
also ignores neurological reality (although this is less
true today as models are tested against neuroscience).
The Brain and Behavior

How does the firing of neurons in the brain actually
result in psychological experience?
 Psychologists
concentrated on finding relationships
between physical and mental events.

Lashley’s conclusions that the brain operated as an
integrated system dampened brain research.
 Equipotentiality

– all areas of the brain work together.
Behaviorist emphasis on behavior, not the person,
eliminated the need for physiological explanations.
Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985)



Interest in studying the functioning of the brain was
rekindled by Hebb, a student of Lashley’s.
As a student, Hebb was skeptical of Pavlov’s model
of the cortex.
He worked with Wilder Penfield on surgical
treatment of epilepsy – results contradicted
Lashley’s idea of equipotentiality.
 Early
childhood experiences are important to
intelligence but adult injury does not reverse it later.
Hebb’s Theory

Hebb proposed that cortical organization occurs
through “cell assemblies” and “phase sequences.”
 Cell
assembly is the basic unit, a set of associated
neurons that work together because activated together.
 Phase sequences incorporate several cell assemblies.
They account for why stimuli do not simply produce
responses but are mediated by the brain.
 Repeated stimulation produces structural changes at the
synaptic level – Hebb’s rule.

Interest was renewed in the study of brain-behavior.
Leon Festinger (1919-1989)

Festinger studied at the Univ. of Iowa under Kurt
Lewin. During WWII he was a statistician then
rejoined Lewin at MIT.
 After
Lewin died, he moved to the U. of Michigan, U. of
Minnesota, then Stanford University in1955, then the
New School for Social Research in NY in 1968.

He is remembered for developing the theory of
cognitive dissonance.
 People
are motivated to be consistent in their thoughts,
feelings and actions and feel discomfort otherwise.
Leon Festinger
People are motivated to seek consistency
between their beliefs, feelings and actions, to
reduce cognitive dissonance.
Festinger’s Contributions

Festinger created an experimental tradition in social
psychology of using elaborately staged and
deceptive research settings, to get “true” reactions.
 Festinger
& Carlsmith administered a boring task, then
asked subjects to tell the next person it was interesting.
 Participants were paid either $1 or $20 for the lie.
 Those paid $20 later thought the expt was still boring
but those paid $1 changed their opinions because $1
was insufficient justification for being dishonest.

Festinger used ANOVA to analyze his data.
Personality Psychology


Most of psychology is nomothetic – attempting to
find principles that affect humans in general.
An alternative approach is idiographic – focusing
on a detailed analysis of how individuals differ.
 This
distinction is attributed to Gordon Allport, but Hugo
Munsterberg also used the terms which go back to
German philosopher Windelband.

Personality psychology focuses on individuals in
order to find general principles about how they
differ.
Gordon Allport (1897-1967)

Gordon Allport published “Personality: A
Psychological Interpretation” in 1937, creating
personality psychology as a subfield.
 His
brother Floyd did the same for Social Psychology.
 His study was taboo at Harvard where Titchener’s
approach was dominant.

He taught at Harvard in a new dept of Social
Ethics, then Dartmouth, then Harvard for the
remainder of his career.
Gordon Allport
The influence of Allport’s work on
psychology is close to Skinner’s.
Allport’s Conception of Personality

The basic unit of personality was the trait – a
particular pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving
characteristic of a person, different than others.
 Cardinal
traits were attributes dominant in a person.
 Central traits provide a reasonable accurate summary
description of an individual (letter of recommendation).
 Secondary traits, less manifested, known only to friends.


Allport advocated use of the case study as method.
Allport rejected psychoanalysis and Freud’s
emphasis on sex, and he rejected projective tests.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

While working on standardizing a reasoning test
developed by Cyril Burt, Piaget had more interest
in the thinking processes of kids than their answers.
 Especially


revealing were wrong answers.
Piaget began interviewing children about how they
solved problems, concluding that kids think
differently than adults, not just know less.
This led to his stage theory of cognitive
development.
Jean Piaget
Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology

He referred to his approach as genetic
epistemology – genetic refers to developmental
processes not heredity (as G.S. Hall used the term).
 He
asked, “how do schemata develop in the individual”
 He believed children were active formulators, not
passive recipients of their experiences.
 Knowledge structures are formed as wholes that cannot
be reduced to their elements (like Gestalt psychologists)

He established a research institute at the University
of Geneva in the 1950s and remained there.