CHAPTER 14 –

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN

THE POST-WAR ERA

(GOODWIN)

Dr. Nancy Alvarado

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

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 30’s & 40’s cognitive

studies were done in the USA (Stroop) and

especially in Europe (Piaget & Bartlett).

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.

Frederick Bartlett

Bartlett on Memory

Bartlett criticized the usefulness of Ebbinhaus’s 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Model of Memory Processing

A Joke

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).

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 Skinner’s

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.

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.

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.

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.

TOTE Model for Slicing Carrots

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.”

Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

New journals appeared in the 70’s & 80’s.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Lashley’s 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.

Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985)

Interest in studying the functioning of the brain was

rekindled by Hebb, a student of Lashley’s.

As a student, Hebb was skeptical of Pavlov’s model

of the cortex.

He worked with Wilder Penfield on surgical

treatment of epilepsy – results contradicted

Lashley’s idea of equipotentiality.

Early childhood experiences are important to

intelligence but adult injury does not reverse it later.

Hebb’s 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 – Hebb’s rule.

Interest was renewed in the study of brain-behavior.

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.

Leon Festinger

People are motivated to seek consistency

between their beliefs, feelings and actions, to

reduce cognitive dissonance.

Festinger’s 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.

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.

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 Titchener’s

approach was dominant.

He taught at Harvard in a new dept of Social

Ethics, then Dartmouth, then Harvard for the

remainder of his career.

Gordon Allport

The influence of Allport’s work on

psychology is close to Skinner’s.

Allport’s 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 Freud’s

emphasis on sex, and he rejected projective tests.

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.

Jean Piaget

Piaget’s 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.