Hi A couple of thoughts (from a cognitive psychologist of the "old" school).
1. Much neuroscience is remarkably ignorant of past investigations of the phenomena under study. How often have recent brain imagers claimed to be the first ones studying consciousness? I remember being amazed a few weeks ago when a contemporary brain stimulation person expressed surprised about the work of Delgado decades ago. John Horgan has a nice article on this at: http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark/teach/ If they are unaware of research even in the neurosciences, how much can we expect them to know about traditional cognitive psychology? This in no way means traditional cognitive psychology is irrelevant to their work, just that they don't know about it (see point 2). 2. Research on brain processes is MUCH more likely to be successful if guided by well-founded cognitive models. Can we really expect that progress will be made in understanding one of the most (perhaps the most?) complex systems in the universe purely using inductive methods starting from scratch (i.e., absent knowledge of the considerable traditional literature)? Absent building on past work, I would predict a great deal of time spent rediscovering the wheel. 3. Cognitive psychology in fact has had a number of phases of theoretical thinking that integrates nicely with the study of brain processes. Neural networks (or whatever) has already been mentioned. I would also include associative models of any sort, computational or not, starting with the early associationists and then later researchers who tried to explain cognitive processes in terms of mechanistic, associative models. The work in this tradition that I am most familiar with is Allen Paivio's dual coding model (he was my advisor), but there are numerous such models or micro-models out there (e.g., models of reading, picture naming, ...). This class of model translates nicely into the study of brain processes, because the models try not to include complex operators (e.g., if-then mechanisms) without providing a mechanistic description. Not always easy to do. 4. Is some of the movement from cognitive psychology to neuroscience (assuming there is such a movement) due to the separation of many basic scientists from psychology associations because "psychology" acquired (to some) unwanted connotations because of the dominance of clinicians? In addition to the APA - APS split, Canadian basic psychologists left the Canadian Psychological Association to form the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science (CS-BBCS or just BBCS) some years ago. Note the absence of the word "psychology." 5. For what it is worth, when I teach cognitive I teach the standard information-processing model and use it to organize material, but also try to relate it to other models (associationist/computational/neural), suggesting that they are different (but not incompatible) ways to conceptualize the phenomena (e.g., STM = transient activation, LTM = permanent change in associations). A not unheard of situation in science (wave - particles, Newtonian - Einsteinian, ...). Take care Jim James M. Clark Professor of Psychology 204-786-9757 204-774-4134 Fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Psychology University of Winnipeg Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 CANADA >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 02-Nov-08 5:08 PM >>> I love tips :) Except for the posting limit ;-) So I am making an omnibus reply to several posts. Claudia you made some great points about things that have come and gone. I might love to argue and discuss a few points, such as bottleneck models of attention--because I think we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on that one. (I did a 3-year post doc on (cognitive aging and specifically) attention and have great respect for both models.) I think you misunderstood something I said. My intent was to make the point that sensation, perception...decision making are indeed the traditional areas of study in cognitive psych, but that many aspects of these areas lately only seem to be covered to the extent that they have some relation to either neural network (PDP--too long to write out or use) models or some neuroscience/biological component--which really we are only guessing is correctly imaging what we think we are imaging. Really, our background knowledge is only partial, so it's hard to be so certain about what is building on it. I'm a skeptic here--open to suggestions but very cautious. Indeed, most of your points still focus on traditional approaches to cognition that rely on inferring cognitive processes from our behaviors--capacity models of attention, working memory--although I don't know anyone who would argue vigorously that there is a unitary memory system--i.e, the old boxes model still holds to the extent that there are qualitatively different memory systems for long term storage and for working on information in the present; anyway, just saying that we could have a vigorous (friendly! educational!) discussion over some of these points. In regards to Gary's reply: Oh No! I never saw myself as Skinnerian. I really and truly believe we have a very rich inner thought life that is distinct from stimulus response contingencies! :) But, like you, I am left wondering when history happened and I blinked and missed it! Mike: OK, a new book on my amazon wishlist: Artificial Dreams. Interestingly, it has no reader reviews, and is a bit pricey. Hmm, maybe I should get it from the library :) How do you find time to keep up with all the literature? I knew I could count on tips folks to get a discussion going; I will follow along. However, I think I still stand by my current thinking (but am willing to change) that for the junior/senior level undergraduate what I want to teach them is more strongly focused on our incomplete knowledge developed from behavioral studies, rather than spending too much time talking about imaging correlates of incomplete knowledge. Does that make sense? Annette ps: analysis by synthesis dead? Wow, I'd better stop reading my old Neisser over and over again ;-) Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
