Annette's list of topics " sensation, perception, attention, sensory memory, short term (working, active) memory, long term memory, concept formation, semantic organization, problem solving, decision making" that she identifies as "new" in cognition texts were nearly all included in the first text on Cognitive Psychology (Neisser).
I don't have Neisser's text handy to consult - he might not have spent much time on language and JDM topics. Neisser didn't dwell much on thinking, either, as I recall. It was enough to propose information processing models and "analysis by synthesis" in the face of hostility from hard-core S-R behaviorists. We won't talk about what happened to analysis by synthesis. Not all new ideas are meant to survive. :-) The field has evloved. I recall spending an entire week discussing various bottleneck models of attention (Neisser devotes an entire chapter to these). Current texts barely devote more than a few paragraphs to this work. Why? The emphasis has changed from the divisibility of attention to multitasking and resource allocation. Additionally, the bottleneck models become so conplex and nuanced (to account for various findings) that they became untestable (consider Treisman's "leaky filter" model). The resource allocation models have been much more fruitful in advancing our understanding of attention and how task demands can change with practice and expertise. The old Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory has not fared well under the weight of research evidence - Baddeley's model of Working Memory does a much better job accounting for what we know about short-term memory processes. I am amazed by how much my course on cognition has changed over the past 30 years - just in terms of the range of theory based on tasks. (Gary - recall that cognition has always retained it allegiance to methodological behaviorism - it's the slavish devotion to explaining everyting in terms of stimulus control that we objected to.) Early texts gave only a passing nod to the fact that we have a brain that underlies all these interesting cognitive phenomena. There was little discussion of the role of the brain beyond a few cases of amnesia such as Henry M. and Broca's and Wernicke's aphasias. One important reason for this was that the state of neuropsychology was still fairly primitive. Plenty of single-unit recording studies (sensory) and EEG (mostly sleep stages) and evoked potential studies (mostly sensory). The linkage between the basic processing accounted for by this early work and models of cognition was weak at best. You could build almost any model of cognitive representation of knowledge from what we knew about how neural tissue coded information. The neural network models were a first try at making this linkage better, but even these models were not constrained much by the information about neural function. In fact, the "neural units" hypothesized in these models bore little resemblance to the complexities and variation of real neurons - even given what was known when these models were proposed. The biggest impact of neuroscience on cognitive psychology has arisen since about the mid-1980s when fMRI studies with cognitive tasks appeared. These studies create a more direct lnk between brain function and the traditional behavior-based models. The linkage is still fairly loose. Many of these studies seldom get beyond the wow of the pretty picture that accompanies performance in a cognitive task. But at last cognitive psychologists acknowledge the fact that brain activity underlies all cognitive processes and at some point the two need to be reconciled. Yes, this makes cognition more challenging to teach. We can no longer ignore neurons and brain anatomy or treat this material as a separate area of psychology. Prior to the 1980s we had neither the technology (or access to the technology) nor the understanding of brain processes that we have now. As the richness of the knowledge base in the two arenas increases, we need to begin integrating the two areas. Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director, Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Associate Professor, Psychology University of West Florida Pensacola, FL 32514 - 5751 Phone: (850) 857-6355 or (850) 473-7435 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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