Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [336]
And became a leader of the movement that radically changed the focus and methods of psychology and has guided it ever since.
George Miller’s coming-out typifies what was happening to experimental psychologists in the 1960s. At first a few, then many, and soon a majority abandoned rats, mazes, electric grids, and food-dispensing levers in favor of research on the higher mental processes of human beings. Within the decade, the movement had assumed such proportions as to earn the name “the cognitive revolution.”
Many forces had been building toward it. During the two previous decades, Gestaltists, personality researchers, developmentalists, and social psychologists were all, in their different ways, exploring mental processes. Coincidentally, a series of developments in several other scientific fields (some of which we have already heard about, some of which we will hear about shortly) were producing knowledge of other kinds about how the mind works. Specifically:
—Neuroscientists, using microelectrode probes and other new techniques, were observing the neural events and cellular interconnections involved in mental processes.
—Logicians and mathematicians were developing information theory and using it to account for both the capabilities and limitations of human communication.
—Anthropologists, analyzing the thought patterns of people in other cultures, were discovering which mental processes vary among cultures, and which are universal and therefore possibly innate.
—Psycholinguists, studying language acquisition and use, were learning how the mind acquires and manipulates the intricate symbol system we call language.
—Computer scientists, a new hybrid (part mathematician, part logician, part engineer), were contributing a brand-new theoretical model of thinking, and designing machinery that seemed to think.
By the late 1970s, cognitive psychology and these related fields came to be known as the cognitive sciences; a number of enthusiasts called them collectively, “cognitive science” and regarded it as a new and distinctive field.2 In the 1980s and early 1990s they expected it to replace the field of psychology; instead, standard psychology morphed, absorbing the new ideas of cognitive science. Today, most departments of psychology include many cognitive science topics, and the relatively few separate departments of cognitive science that exist include many or most classical psychology topics.3 The bottom line: The cognitive revolution was more than a remarkable broadening and deepening of psychology; it was the extraordinary—indeed, wholly improbable—simultaneous development in six sciences of new knowledge bearing on mental processes.
Computer science had by far the greatest impact on psychology. This new field was the product of intense research during World War II, when Allied forces urgently needed calculating machines that could rapidly handle large sets of numbers to direct antiaircraft guns, operate navigation equipment, and the like. But even very high-speed calculating machines needed to be told by a human operator, after each calculation, what to do next, which severely limited their speed and introduced inaccuracies. By the late 1940s, mathematicians and engineers were starting to provide the machines with sets of instructions (programs) stored in their electronic memories. Now the machines could swiftly and accurately guide their own operations, carry out lengthy sequences of operations, and make decisions about what needed to be done next. The calculating machines had become computers.
At first, computers dealt only with numerical problems. But as the mathematicians John von Neumann and Claude Shannon and other computer experts soon pointed out, any symbol can represent another kind of symbol. A number can stand for a letter and a series of numbers for a word, and mathematical computations can represent relationships expressed by language. For instance, [H11005] can stand for “is the same as,” [HS11005] for “is not the same as,” > for “more than” or “too much.” Given