Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [344]
But some cognitive neuroscientists think it possible, even likely, that their field will come to dominate mental science. Martha Farah, when asked if cognitive neuroscience would eventually become the overarching theory of psychology, said, “Yes, because it’s a broader and more heterogeneous approach to studying the mind which encompasses cognitive psychology. It’s a molecular-cellular-systems explanation of how the brain acts during all the classical processes of cognitive psychology—how we learn, think, behave, why we differ from each other, the sources of personality. All these things are in principle explainable by various levels of brain activity at various levels of description.”30
We seem to be at the top of the ninth, score tied, and will have to see how the game plays out.
Now let us return to the story of cognitive psychology and look more closely at several of its major themes of recent decades.
Memory
In the 1960s, the cognitive revolution rapidly won the allegiance, at least in academia, of some senior psychologists, most junior ones, and most graduate students of psychology. At first, they concentrated on perception, the first step of cognition, but fairly soon they shifted their attention to the uses the mind makes of perceptions—its higher-level mental processes. By 1980, John Anderson, a theorist of those processes, defined cognitive psychology as the attempt “to understand the nature of human intelligence and how people think.”31
In information-processing theory, the essential first step is the storing of incoming data in memory, whether for part of a second or for a lifetime. As James McGaugh said in a 1987 lecture:
Memory is essential for our behavior. There is nothing of significance that is not based fundamentally on memory. Our consciousness and our actions are shaped by our experiences. And, our experiences shape us only because of their lingering consequences.32
How crucial memory is to thought is painfully apparent to anyone who has known a person suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He may frequently forget what he wants to say partway through a sentence, get lost walking down the driveway to his mailbox, fail to recognize his children, and become upset by the unfamiliarity of his own living room.
In 1955—before the start of the cognitive revolution—George Miller had given an address at a meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association that has been called a landmark for cognitive theorists working on memory. In his typically breezy manner, Miller called the talk “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” and began by saying, “My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer.” The integer was 7, and what seemed to Miller both magical and persecutory about it was, as many experiments had shown, that it is the number of digits that one can usually hold in immediate memory.33 (It is easy to remember briefly, after a moment’s study, a number like 9237314 but not one like 5741179263.)
It is both noteworthy and mysterious that immediate memory, the limiting factor in what we can pay attention to, is so tiny. The limitation serves a vital purpose: it drastically prunes the incoming data to what the mind, at any moment, urgently needs to attend to and make decisions about, a function that undoubtedly helped our primitive ancestors survive life in the jungle or the desert.34 But it raises perplexing questions. How can so small a field of attention handle the flood of perceptions we must attend to when driving a car or skiing? Or the welter of sounds and meanings when someone is talking to us—or when we are trying to say something to them?
One answer, Miller said, making good use of an idea that had lain fallow in psychology for a century, is that immediate memory is not limited to seven digits but to seven—more or less —items: seven words or names, for instance, or “chunks” such as FBI, IBM, NATO, telephone area codes, or familiar sayings, all of which contain far more information than single digits but are as easily remembered.
But even with chunking, the capacity of