Chapter 14 – PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN THE POST-WAR ERA (GOODWIN)

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Chapter 14 PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN THE
POST-WAR ERA (GOODWIN)

• Dr. Nancy Alvarado

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Post-War Psychology

• The most important development in psychology
  after WWII was modern cognitive psychology.
• The change was evolutionary, not revolutionary,
  emerging from but not replacing behaviorism.
• Goodwin also describes 4 other prominent areas of
  research, highlighting the work of one key
  person
• Physiological or neuropsychology Donald Hebb
• Social psychology Leon Festinger
• Personality psychology Gordon Allport
• Developmental psychology Jean Piaget

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Early Cognitivists

• Pioneers studying memory, attention, perception
  and thinking in the 19th century included
  Ebbinghaus, Wundt, Kulpe, Wertheimer Titchener.
• In the 20th century the methods were different
  and models were based on the computer (as
  metaphor).
• Some psychologists starting calling themselves
  cognitive psychologists.
• Even during the behaviorist 30s 40s cognitive
  studies were done in the USA (Stroop) and
  especially in Europe (Piaget Bartlett).

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Frederick C. Bartlett (1886-1969)

• In 1932, Bartlett published Remembering A study
  in Experimental and Social Psychology describing
  his dissertation studies done 15 years earlier.
• He earned his doctorate at Cambridge, then became
  head of the Psychology Laboratory, one of the
  first experimental psych labs in Great Britain.
• Although he also worked on animal learning and
  applied studies (pilot fatigue), his reputation
  rests on his memory research.

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Frederick Bartlett
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Bartlett on Memory

• Bartlett criticized the usefulness of Ebbinhauss
  work.
• Memorizing nonsense syllables by rote is too
  artificial.
• Research should focus on the person not the
  stimuli.
• People do not passively form associations but
  actively organize material into meaningful wholes
  called schemata (plural for schema).
• He demonstrated this in two experiments described
  by Goodwin (Chapter 14).

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Military Men on Postcards

• Bartlett showed subjects a series of 6 drawings
  of military men (see pg 468). He then asked them
  to describe the drawings. He found
• Serial position effect first and last best
  remembered.
• No memory for whether facing left or right.
• Transposition of detail from one picture to
  another.
• Intrusions (importation) of details not actually
  there.
• Responses were affected by leading questions.
• His results were presented without detail on
  method.

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The War of the Ghosts

• Participants were given a 328 word Native Amer.
  folk tale to read twice and then reproduce 15
  minutes later and also hours to months later.
• Total recall declined.
• What was recalled was shaped by the need to form
  a coherent understandable story in the context of
  their own cultural knowledge (schemata
  concepts).
• Memory was an active process of construction.
• In the 1960s, the significance of this work
  became more appreciated it is now widely
  accepted.

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Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958)

• Lashley studied with Yerkes and Watson, then
  became a professor at Harvard University.
• He became a critic of S-R and associatist
  theories in a talk on the serial order problem.
• Mental representation is needed to explain
  language.
• Serial sequences of speech or movement require
  too fast a neural analysis to be based on simple
  contiguity.
• Speech is more complex than simple chains of
  sounds, so the brain must be exercising
  organizational control over patterns of behavior.

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Other Influences

• The development of computer science provided a
  metaphor for brain functioning
• A computer takes in info from the environment,
  processes it internally, and produces some
  output.
• John von Neuman presented this analogy in 1948.
• Atkinson Shiffrin presented a flowchart of
  memory analogous to computer processing.
• Shannon Weaver introduced information theory
  in The Mathematical Theory of Communication in
  1949.

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A Model of Memory Processing
A Joke
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Shannon Weaver

• Information theory was important to both computer
  science and psychology.
• They introduced the concept of a bit binary
  digit with the logical operators of true and
  false and two states, on and off.
• A coin toss contains one bit of information
  because it decides between heads and tails.
• The bit provides a way of standardizing
  information regardless of what form it takes
  (coin toss, numbers, letters, etc).

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Noam Chomsky

• The development linguistics, especially at MIT by
  Chomsky, further undermined behaviorism.
• Skinner tried to put language into operant terms.
• Chomsky wrote a highly critical review of
  Skinners book, saying language development is
  too fast for conditioning to be relevant.
• Language came to be viewed as behavior governed
  by application of a hierarchical set of rules
  called a grammar innate linguistic universals.
• Grammar can generate an infinity of unique
  utterances.

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George A. Miller

• Miller recognized the relevance of information
  theory for psychology.
• He studied the difficulty hearing spoken messages
  while sitting in loud airplanes at Harvard.
• The magical number seven, plus or minus two
  Some limits on our capacity for processing
  information.
• Bits and channel capacity can describe limits on
  human processing, such as the limited capacity of
  memory.
• The term chunk captures the idea that the
  information in bits can vary widely. Recoding
  reorganizes data.

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Donald Broadbent (1926-1993)

• Broadbent applied information theory to the study
  of attention.
• Engineers did not take into account human pilots
  when designing airline cockpit instrumentation,
  causing errors.
• He pioneered modern attention research with the
  dichotic listening task in which people hear two
  channels of information (one in each ear).
• He proposed a selective filter to explain the
  cocktail party phenomenon.

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The TOTE Model

• Miller, Galanter Pribram (a student of Lashley)
  developed a model of how plans operate on images
  to guide behavior.
• Called TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) and based on
  the idea of feedback from cybernetics (computer
  science). See example pg 479 for hammering nail.
• This feedback system was proposed as an
  alternative for the reflex arc hypothesized by
  behaviorists.

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TOTE Model for Slicing Carrots
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Ulric Neisser

• Momentum for cognitive approaches continued to
  build in the 1960s Neisser published Cognitive
  Psychology in 1967, naming the approach.
• Neisser studied with Miller at Harvard, then
  Kohler at Swarthmore, then MIT and Harvard again.
• Cognitive psychology is the experimental study of
  all cognitive processes those processes by
  which sensory input is transformed, reduce,
  elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.

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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

• New journals appeared in the 70s 80s.
• Neisser urged greater ecological validity
  research with relevance to every day activities.
• In response, Loftus studied eyewitness testimony,
  Bahrick studied long-term recall of school
  material.
• Cognitive science was created an
  interdisciplinary field including cognitive
  psych, linguistics, computer science, cultural
  anthropology epistemology.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• AI is an applied field attempting to enable
  machines to act with some degree of intelligence.
• Herb Simon and Alan Newell collaborated on a
  General Problem Solver (GPS) aimed at solving a
  broad range of problems.
• An algorithm is a set of rules for obtaining a
  solution. A heuristic is a more creative
  strategy, not guaranteed to work but more
  efficient than an algorithm.
• The GPS used means-end analysis as a heuristic,
  with feedback about goal status.

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The Turing Test

• The more dominant approach in AI is now to create
  a program that solves a problem in the most
  efficient way, not necessarily the way people do.
• This has led to the question of testing whether
  computers can be intelligent or learn to think,
  posed by Alan Turing in 1950 as an imitation
  game.
• Strong AI proposes computers can think as people
  do. Weak AI proposes that computers can yield
  important insights about human thinking.
• Searle described the Chinese Room problem.

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Evaluating Cognitive Psychology

• Skinner was a vocal critic, objecting to
  hypothetical mental mechanisms like STM that
  become frozen into explanatory fictions.
• Attributing memory failure to limited STM
  explains nothing.
• The computer metaphor ignores emotion, motivation
  and intentionality.
• It also ignores neurological reality (although
  this is less true today as models are tested
  against neuroscience).

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The Brain and Behavior

• How does the firing of neurons in the brain
  actually result in psychological experience?
• Psychologists concentrated on finding
  relationships between physical and mental events.
  
• Lashleys conclusions that the brain operated as
  an integrated system dampened brain research.
• Equipotentiality all areas of the brain work
  together.
• Behaviorist emphasis on behavior, not the person,
  eliminated the need for physiological
  explanations.

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Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985)

• Interest in studying the functioning of the brain
  was rekindled by Hebb, a student of Lashleys.
• As a student, Hebb was skeptical of Pavlovs
  model of the cortex.
• He worked with Wilder Penfield on surgical
  treatment of epilepsy results contradicted
  Lashleys idea of equipotentiality.
• Early childhood experiences are important to
  intelligence but adult injury does not reverse it
  later.

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Hebbs Theory

• Hebb proposed that cortical organization occurs
  through cell assemblies and phase sequences.
• Cell assembly is the basic unit, a set of
  associated neurons that work together because
  activated together.
• Phase sequences incorporate several cell
  assemblies. They account for why stimuli do not
  simply produce responses but are mediated by the
  brain.
• Repeated stimulation produces structural changes
  at the synaptic level Hebbs rule.
• Interest was renewed in the study of
  brain-behavior.

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Leon Festinger (1919-1989)

• Festinger studied at the Univ. of Iowa under Kurt
  Lewin. During WWII he was a statistician then
  rejoined Lewin at MIT.
• After Lewin died, he moved to the U. of Michigan,
  U. of Minnesota, then Stanford University in1955,
  then the New School for Social Research in NY in
  1968.
• He is remembered for developing the theory of
  cognitive dissonance.
• People are motivated to be consistent in their
  thoughts, feelings and actions and feel
  discomfort otherwise.

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Leon Festinger
People are motivated to seek consistency between
their beliefs, feelings and actions, to reduce
cognitive dissonance.
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Festingers Contributions

• Festinger created an experimental tradition in
  social psychology of using elaborately staged and
  deceptive research settings, to get true
  reactions.
• Festinger Carlsmith administered a boring task,
  then asked subjects to tell the next person it
  was interesting.
• Participants were paid either 1 or 20 for the
  lie.
• Those paid 20 later thought the expt was still
  boring but those paid 1 changed their opinions
  because 1 was insufficient justification for
  being dishonest.
• Festinger used ANOVA to analyze his data.

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Personality Psychology

• Most of psychology is nomothetic attempting to
  find principles that affect humans in general.
• An alternative approach is idiographic focusing
  on a detailed analysis of how individuals differ.
• This distinction is attributed to Gordon Allport,
  but Hugo Munsterberg also used the terms which go
  back to German philosopher Windelband.
• Personality psychology focuses on individuals in
  order to find general principles about how they
  differ.

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Gordon Allport (1897-1967)

• Gordon Allport published Personality A
  Psychological Interpretation in 1937, creating
  personality psychology as a subfield.
• His brother Floyd did the same for Social
  Psychology.
• His study was taboo at Harvard where Titcheners
  approach was dominant.
• He taught at Harvard in a new dept of Social
  Ethics, then Dartmouth, then Harvard for the
  remainder of his career.

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Gordon Allport
The influence of Allports work on psychology is
close to Skinners.
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Allports Conception of Personality

• The basic unit of personality was the trait a
  particular pattern of thinking, feeling and
  behaving characteristic of a person, different
  than others.
• Cardinal traits were attributes dominant in a
  person.
• Central traits provide a reasonable accurate
  summary description of an individual (letter of
  recommendation).
• Secondary traits, less manifested, known only to
  friends.
• Allport advocated use of the case study as
  method.
• Allport rejected psychoanalysis and Freuds
  emphasis on sex, and he rejected projective tests.

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Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

• While working on standardizing a reasoning test
  developed by Cyril Burt, Piaget had more interest
  in the thinking processes of kids than their
  answers.
• Especially revealing were wrong answers.
• Piaget began interviewing children about how they
  solved problems, concluding that kids think
  differently than adults, not just know less.
• This led to his stage theory of cognitive
  development.

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Jean Piaget
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Piagets Genetic Epistemology

• He referred to his approach as genetic
  epistemology genetic refers to developmental
  processes not heredity (as G.S. Hall used the
  term).
• He asked, how do schemata develop in the
  individual
• He believed children were active formulators, not
  passive recipients of their experiences.
• Knowledge structures are formed as wholes that
  cannot be reduced to their elements (like Gestalt
  psychologists)
• He established a research institute at the
  University of Geneva in the 1950s and remained
  there.