Section 1.1
• Behaviorism is no longer the dominant paradigm in psychology, but what can we learn from it? Are parts of behaviorist thinking correct?
• Was Tolman right to postulate cognitive maps? In general, what do you think about postulating representations such as cognitive maps to explain behavior?
• Is the hypothesis of subconscious information processing correct? What about the hypothesis of task analysis?
Section 1.2
• Is computation what minds do, as many cognitive scientists believe?
Section 1.3
• Chomsky was interested in gaining a theoretical understanding of why languages work as they do. How does the theory of transformational grammar contribute to this project?
Section 1.4
• Can you see any limitations in applying the tools of information theory to psychology?
• Is Broadbent’s strategy of giving flowcharts a good model of explanation for cognitive science? Why or why not?
Section 1.5
• How do the concepts of information and information processing run through the historical episodes presented in Chapter 1?
Alan Baddeley on the cognitive revolution (video from YouTube)
Steven Pinker on the cognitive revolution (video from YouTube)
MIT professor Barbara Liskov on the Turing machine and early computer science (video from YouTube)
A Turing machine made of LEGOs (video from YouTube)
Lecture by Chomsky on the poverty of the stimulus (video from YouTube)
Steven Pinker on cognitive science and the study of language (video from YouTube)
Podcast on Donald Broadbent and the Cocktail party effect (2013, from the BBC)
Experimental demonstration of selective attention (video from YouTube)
1.1 The Reaction against Behaviorism in Psychology
Behaviorism (entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by George Graham)
Classical conditioning (entry from Scholarpedia)
Operant conditioning (entry from Scholarpedia)
Conditioning (chapter from Russell Dewey’s online Psychology: An Introduction)
Psychology as the behaviorist views it (by John B. Watson, 1913; from Classics in the History of Psychology)
Cognitive maps in rats and men (by Edward Tolman, 1948; from Classics in the History of Psychology)
Do animals have cognitive maps? (paper by Bennett, 1996, in The Journal of Experimental Biology)
Commentary on “Psychology as the behaviorist views it” (by Robert Wozniak, 1997; from Classics in the History of Psychology)
1.2 The Theory of Computation and the Idea of an Algorithm
Turing machines (entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Turing machine (entry from Scholarpedia)
Alan Turing (entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Online algorithm problems and tutorial (from CodeChef)
Alan Mathison Turing (biographical entry from the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive)
The Alan Turing home page (maintained by biographer Andrew Hodges)
TuringMachine lab: Introduction to Turing machines (lab, including an applet)
On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem (paper by Turing, 1936)
Computing machinery and intelligence (paper by Turing, 1950, in Mind)
Information processing algorithms in the brain (paper by Schyns et al., 2008, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences)
A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity (paper by McCulloch and Pitts, 1943 , in Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics)
The First Computational Theory of Mind and Brain: A Close Look at Mcculloch and Pitts’s “Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (paper by Piccinini, 2004, in Synthese)
Walter Pitts and “A Logical Calculus” (paper by Schlatter and Aizawa, 2008, in Synthese)
1.3 Linguistics and the Formal Analysis of Language
Noam Chomsky (entry from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
A review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (paper by Chomsky, 1967; first published in 1959 from Readings in the Psychology of Language)
The case against B. F. Skinner (article by Chomsky, 1971, in The New York Review of Books)
On Chomsky’s appraisal of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior: A half century of misunderstanding (paper by Palmer, 2006, in The Behavior Analyst)
1.4 Information-Processing Models in Psychology
Attention (entry from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Experimental demonstration of working memory (from the Psychology Department at Missouri State University)
A mathematical theory of communication (paper by Shannon, 1948, in Bell System Technical Journal)
The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information (paper by Miller, 1956, in Psychological Review)
The cocktail party problem (paper by McDermott, 2009, in Current Biology)
Selective attention (section from Russell Dewey’s online Psychology: An Introduction)
Donald Broadbent (article by Berry, 2002, in The Psychologist)
