1. The Fall of Behaviorism & The Rise of Mind
By the mid-1950s, radical behaviorism's claim that all complex human behavior could be reduced to peripheral chains collapsed under three major empirical challenges:
- Karl Lashley & Serial Order (1948): In "The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior", Lashley proved that rapid skilled sequences (e.g., fluent speech, playing an allegro piano arpeggio) occur too quickly for each motor action to wait for sensory feedback from the preceding action. Behavior must be governed by centralized, hierarchical, internal cognitive control structures.
- Biological Constraints on Learning:
- The Garcia Effect (Conditioned Taste Aversion): John Garcia showed rats associate nausea with taste after a single trial despite hours of delay, violating behaviorist laws of temporal contiguity.
- Instinctive Drift (Keller & Marian Breland, 1961): Operantly conditioned animals (raccoons, pigs) progressively reverted to innate instinctual behaviors despite heavy reinforcement.
- Noam Chomsky’s Review of Skinner (1959): In a devastating critique of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, Chomsky demonstrated that human language is generative, creative, and rule-governed. Children acquire language rapidly despite the "poverty of the stimulus", necessitating an innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD) and Universal Grammar.
2. The Computational Foundation: The Mind as Software
The Cognitive Revolution was fueled by the rise of electronic computers, cybernetics, and information theory during World War II:
| Computer Architecture (Hardware/Software) | Cognitive Analogue | Human Cognitive Architecture (Mind/Brain) |
|---|---|---|
| Physical Circuits (Hardware) | Brain / Central Nervous System (Biology) | |
| Software / Programs / Code | Mind / Cognitive Rules & Mental Representations | |
| Sensory Input (Keyboard / Camera) | Sensory Receptors (Eyes, Ears, Tactile) | |
| Working Memory / RAM | Short-Term / Working Memory (Active Processing) | |
| Hard Drive Storage | Long-Term Memory (Permanent Knowledge) | |
| Screen Output / Execution | Behavioral Response / Speech / Motor Action |
- Alan Turing (1912–1954): Conceptualized the Turing Machine (1936), demonstrating that cognition can be modeled as algorithmic manipulations of binary symbols. Proposed the Turing Test (1950) for artificial intelligence.
- Claude Shannon (1948): Formulated Information Theory, measuring information mathematically in bits (binary digits) and framing human cognition as a channel of limited processing capacity.
- Norbert Wiener (1948): Founded Cybernetics, explaining purposeful, goal-directed behavior through mechanistic feedback loops (servomechanisms).
3. The Birth of Cognitive Science: September 11, 1956
Historians pinpoint September 11, 1956, at the MIT Symposium on Information Theory, as the official birth of Cognitive Science: