Cognitive Psychology

By Philipp Koehn. 2017

This chapter explores the entanglement of cognitive psychology with science fiction, but avoids familiar motifs from post-cyberpunk fiction. The beginnings of cognitive psychology are traced to the foundational work of figures such as George Miller and Noam Chomsky, subsequently codified into a self-conscious school by Ulrich Neisser. Jack Finney’s classic narrative, The Body Snatchers (1955), draws upon earlier proto-cognitivist discourses to contend, often quite didactically, that the human mind typically operates as a biased, limited capacity information processor. With this psychological and political thesis, the novel explores possible personal, political and aesthetic strategies that might free the human mind from its stereotypes and blind spots. The unsettling of everyday perception in The Body Snatchers is systematically generalized by the linguistic novums of Ian Watson’s The Embedding (1973), Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), and Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), which imagine that language (and thought) is fundamentally constructive of perceived reality. These stories ask broader, cosmological questions about the nature and accessibility of ultimate reality – with Watson’s novel ultimately proposing a mystical riposte to cognitivism’s model of the mind.

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Citations in the corpus

What can the brain teach us about building artificial intelligence? (2016, background): ““Analysis-by-synthesis” theories of perception maintain that sensory data can be more richly represented by modeling the process that generated it (Bever & Poeppel, 2010; Eden, 1962; Halle & Stevens, 1962; Neisser, 1966).”
Counterfactuals in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Evidence from Human Reasoning (2019, background): “A counterfactual’s probability may be determined by beliefs [Over et al., 2007], or by the possibilities that people envisage [Khemlani et al.”
Explainable AI: Beware of Inmates Running the Asylum Or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Social and Behavioural Sciences (2017, background): “Recent work shows that people prefer explanations that are simpler (cite few causes) [Lombrozo, 2007], more general (they explain more events) [Lombrozo, 2007], and coherent (consistent with prior knowledge) [Thagard, 1989].”
Anti-Retroactive Interference for Lifelong Learning (2022, background): “The learning process of new tasks results in catastrophic forgetting [10] of previous knowledge due to retroactive interference [25], which means that the content of later learning competes with the previous memory and interferes with the previous learning.”
Navigating Into the Future or Driven by the Past (2013, unknown): “This has puzzled researchers for decades (Bartlett, 1932; Neisser, 1966).”
Creating a larger role for environmental psychology: The Reasonable Person Model as an integrative framework (2009, background): “Effective information processing depends not on treating every new situation as unique, but on detecting the underlying similarities in terms of the patterns of information they offer (Kaplan,1976; Neisser, 1967).”
Computational visual attention systems and their cognitive foundations: A survey (2010, unknown): “An important tool in research on visual attention is visual search [Neisser 1967; Styles 1997; Wolfe 1998a].”
The phonological loop: Some answers and some questions (2007, unknown): “Consider, for example, the visual subsystem that Neisser (1967) termed iconic memory.”
Free-energy and the brain (2007, unknown): “Conceptually, empirical Bayes and generative models are related to ‘analysis-bysynthesis’ (Neisser 1967).”
The role of intersensory redundancy in early perceptual, cognitive, and social development (2012, unknown): “Thus, for experienced perceivers, prior knowledge, categories, goals, plans, and expectations typically guide information pick-up (e.g. Bartlett 1932 ; Chase and Simon 1973 ; Neisser 1976 ; Schank and Ableson 1977 ).”
Modeling the role of salience in the allocation of overt visual attention. (2002, unknown): “Ever since Broadbent (1958) first proposed the filter theory of selective attention, the two-stage framework has pervaded conceptual and computational modeling efforts (Cave & Wolfe, 1990; Findlay & Walker, 1999; Neisser, 1967; Theeuwes, 1993; Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Wolfe, 1994).”