A Brief History of Cognitive Science

The development of cognitive science as a field as taught in LGCS 11 can be traced through three major time/idea periods.

19th century Cognitive Psychology/Structuralism

The history of LCGS 11 cogsci starts in the 19th century, when Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology lab at the University of Leipzig in 1879.

Wundt and Along with his student Edward Titchener (who later became a professor at Cornell) developed the structuralist approach to psychology, which sought to break down the conscious experience into fundamental elements. Methodologically, they employed "analytic introspection", where subjects' self-reports of their conscious experiences were used as data.

The flaw with this method is that it's difficult to accurately self-report mental experiences, so experiments were difficult to replicate. On top of this, conscious experiences are often distortions of actual physical or cognitive processes in the first place: when we move our eyes while reading, for example, we do so in sharp movements, but consciously read smoothly. At the extreme, unconscious cognitive processes can't be tested at all with this method.

1913-50: Behaviorism

Cognitive psychology was replaced by Behaviorism in the first half of the 20th century.

Rather than self-reported conscious experiences, behaviorism focuses on relationships between concrete stimuli and directly observable behavior, disregarding abstract concepts of thoughts or ideas.

A well-known example is Ivan Pavlov's 1927 experiment on classical conditioning in dogs. Pavlov observed that dogs naturally salivate in the presence of food, but not in response to neutral stimuli like the ringing of a bell. By repeatedly ringing the bell at the same time as food was presented, however, the dog was conditioned to salivate at the ringing of the bell alone, even when food wasn't present with it. B. F. Skinner expanded on this with the theory of operant conditioning, the idea that behavior is trained based on perceived rewards and punishments for them. He conducted various animal experiments to support this theory.

Some key experiments contradicted these behaviorist theories, however. In 1930, Tolman and Honzik found that rats put in a maze learned to navigate it regardless of whether or not a reward was given for it. They only displayed their earlier learning, however, when a reward was given, indicating that learning can happen as a latent process with more complex drivers than simply positive or negative stimuli.

Linguist Noam Chomsky presented a key critique of behaviorism in 1959 by pointing out that language is not acquired through reinforcement, a claim substantiated by a 1971 study by Braine. Furthermore, some verbal behavior -- and other animal behavior, like that pointed out by Breland and Breland in 1961 -- seem to be genetically predetermined rather than learned, which can even override learned behavior as reinforcement fades.

Though the theoretical content of behaviorism has since been left in the past, behaviorism's contributions of more precise descriptions, precise experimental control, animal testing, and emphasis on learning and behavior benefited the field.

1950s: Cognitive Revolution

Inspired by developments in computation and linguistics, a series of new ideas emerged in the Cognitive Revolution challenging the simplicity of earlier theories, especially regarding information, memory, and unconscious processing.

Wikipedia's page on cognitive neuroscience mentions a September 11, 1956 conference at MIT, which included presentations from George Miller (influential 7 +- 2 paper) and Chomsky. The Wikipedia page also mentions that it was in the 50s that the term "psychology" was replaced by "cognitive science" for the field.

Technologies like TMS (1985), fMRI (1991) and PET scanning also enabled cognitive scientists to conduct experiments looking at neural bases for various cognitive functions starting in the 80s.

In LGCS 11, the findings of cognitive neuroscience were presented through UCSD Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran's 2004 book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness. Ramachandran especially looks at patients with brain damage to specific regions of their brain, which in turn impair specific conscious and unconscious cognitive functions in surprising ways.