Cognitivism

• The need to reintroduce the mental and the claim for its independent status (after the denying stance brought by behaviorism)
• The first book of cognitive psychology was published in 1957, 10 years after scholars started to talked about cognitivism.
• The starting point of cognitivism is conventionally indicated as the publication of the first book of cognitive psychology in 1957.
• Cognitivism has a lot of sources, their pillars were built in the second part of the 50’.
• The Cognitive Approach was published in 1967, marking the beginning of cognitivism.
• Cognitivism, cognitive psychology, and cognitive sciences are terms which are different but here in this context they’re synonyms.
• Neisser in 1967’s book started by talking about the relationship between the subject and the world.
• The first point which opposes to behaviorism: the subjects actively construct the world of experience.
• The role of subject is very active (on the contrary to behaviorism)
• In cognitivism the world as it is experienced by us is a reconstruction of the real world: the outcome of a process performed by our mental systems.
• Cognitive processes are a way of framing the mind.
• The main general theory of perception in cognitivism is that the distance stimulus is the object of the world, starting from our experience of the world.
• According to Neisser, the stimuli in the retina, called proximal stimuli, are very different from the final outcomes of perception.
• Visual cognition deals with the processes by which a perceived, remembered, and thought-about world is brought into being from as unpromising a beginning as the retinal patterns.
• Cognition refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.
• Cognitive psychology should open up the field to address more genuinely human topics such as human nature and existence.
• Neisser proposes a special level of analysis which is about the interdependence of cognitive processes.
• Cognition and Reality, a book published in 1976, criticizes the development of cognitive psychology over the past 10 years.
• Cognitive psychology laws with ecological validity, it doesn’t really deal with the reality of cognitive processes as they occur in ordinary life.
• Most of the time, cognitive psychologists take into account very tiny simple cognitive skills to evaluate into experiments, instead of more complex ones.
• Neisser proposes a realistic turn in cognitive psychology, suggesting that it should target processes which are about real life and not artificial circumstances as those taken into account in most laboratory research.
• Neisser suggests that if we want to build a more ecologically valid cognitive psychology, we need to take into account more complex skills such as complex decision making and ordinal life decisions.
• Cognitive psychologists should consider the features of the world since they are interested in the way we experience the world.
• The concept of computation was rigorized by the theory of Turing machine, a mathematical entity which components are: a control unit with a finite number of states, an infinite tape divided in an infinite number of cells, and a moving read/write head.
• Cognitivism is grounded in the computational model of the mind.
• Economics is interested in the flow of capital, which requires an autonomy, while psychology is interested in the interference of certain facts and events but not in their material features.
• Psychology, like economics, is a science concerned with the interdependence among certain events rather than with their physical nature.
• One of the merits of cognitivism was that it reintroduced back issues and concepts that were removed by the behaviorist framework such as sensations, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem solving and thinking.
• Cognitive psychology was developed in the wrong direction, according to Neisser.
• Psychology is not interested in the material aspects of organisms but cognitive psych is about cognitive processes, which is at an autonomous level.
• The machine follows the read-write-move cycle over and over again, until it is told to halt.
• Behaviorism and cognitive psychology share a common point: psychology is a scientific discipline, whose methods are those of natural sciences.
• The string written on the tape at the end of all of this is the output.
• Tape alphabet will contain instructions like: start position, end position, blank, etc.
• Computability is defined as whatever can be computed by a Turing machine.
• According to functionalism, mental states are functional states characterized by their functional role.
• Pain is caused by events in the external world (input), has causal relations with other mental states (effects on other mental states), and can contribute to causing the subject’s behavior (effects on behavior).
• Functionalism has no ontological commitment on the nature of mental states, being compatible both with dualism (the mind is immaterial) and some form of physicalism (mental properties are physical properties).
• Behaviorism and cognitive psychology diverge on the issue of mental states, with behaviorism denying their existence and cognitive psychology affirming their existence.
• Church-Turing thesis: a function can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine.