True story. Sometime in 1978-1979 I submitted a paper for
presentation at the annual APA convention. It was a review
of the role of information theory in psychology from Shannon's
seminal 1948 papers which influenced many psychologists in
the early 1950s (the peak of this influence might be considered
to be George Miller's "Magic Number 7" paper which showed
how information theory could characterize some aspects of
attentional processing but could not be used as measure of
the capacity of immediate memory) to how Wiener's work
on control of systems (cybernetics) would influence late
1950's/early 1960 thinking and research (perhaps the peak
being represented by Miller, Pribram, and Galanter's "Plans
and the Structure of Behavior"). I had learned about
information theory in the early 1970s in the context of my
participation in research that was using signal detection theory
in animal psychophysics. When I got to graduate school, for
a course on S&P I wrote a short history of how info theory affected
psychology topics such as psychophysics, perception, reaction time
(anyone remember Hick's Law?), memory, and so on. I used
this paper as the basis for the my submission to APA.
It was rejected and one of the comments made by a reviewer
was "this is pretty recent history" -- a point that supports
Chris Green's comment below. ;-)
I just had to wait until the 1990s to re-submit the paper to APA
for the presentation at its convention though in a somewhat modified
form (hey, I learned a lot more). This time it was accepted.
Morale: Write up what you do today and wait. Eventually it
will become History. ;-)
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
On Mon, 21 Oct 2013 22:34:50 -0400, Christopher Green wrote:
No Payl. It's the history of psychology that ends around 1960. After
that,
it's called psychology. :-)
On Oct 21, 2013, at 7:42 PM, Paul C Bernhardt
<[email protected]> wrote:
I'm researching History of Psychology textbooks with intention to
teach it
next semester.
I've learned the most amazing thing: Apparently, the history of
psychology
ends sometime about 1960! LOL!
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