It should be noted that Turing was also an amateur cross-country runner, and just missed representing the UK in the 1948 Olympics

In 1944, he became the deputy director of the computing lab at Manchester University, where they were attempting to build the first true computer. In 1950, he published a paper, «Computing Machinery and Intelligence*, in Mind.

He began working on pattern formation in biology — what we would now call the mathematics of fractals — and on quantum mechanics. But on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by ingesting cyanide — making it look like an accident to spare his mother's feelings. He was 41.

Today, he is considered the father of Computer Science.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Ludwig was born near Vienna on September 19,1901. In 1918, he went to the University of Innsbruck, and later transferred to the University of Vienna, where he studied the history of art, philosophy, and biology. He received his doctorate in 1926, with a PhD dissertation on Gustav Fechner.

In 1928, he published Modern Theories of Development, where he introduced the question of whether we could explain biology in purely physical terms. He suggested we could, if we see living things as endowed with self-organizational dynamics.

In 1937, he went to the University of Chicago, where he gave his first lecture on General Systems Theory, which he saw as a methodology for all sciences. In 1939, he became a professor at the University of Vienna and continued his research on the comparative physiology of growth. He summarized his work in Problems of Life, published in 1940.

In 1949, he emigrated to Canada, where he began re-' iich on cancer. Soon, he branched into cognitive psychology, where he introduced a holistic epistemology that In- contrasted with behaviorism.

I n 1960, he became professor of theoretical biology In the department of zoology and psychology at the 11 !i i vorsity of Alberta. In 1967, he wrote Robots, Men, mill Minds, and in 1968, he wrote General Systems theory.

I .mlwig von Bertalanffy died of a heart attack on June 11, l!)72.

Noam Chomsky

In addition to the input (no pun intended) from the «artificial intelligence* people, there was the input from a group of scientists in a variety of fields who thought of themselves as structuralists — not allying themselves with Wundt, but interested in the structure of their various topics. I'll call them neo-structuralists, just to keep them straight. For example, there's Claude Levi-Strauss> the famous French anthropologist. But the one everyone knows about is the linguist Noam Chomsky.

He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, whereupon he married a fellow linguist, Carol Schatz. They would go on to have three children. He received his PhD in 1955, also from the U of Penn.

That same year, he started teaching at MIT and began his work on generative grammar. Generative grammar was based on the question «how can we create new sentences which have never been spoken before?* How, in other words, do we get so creative, so generative? While considering this questions, he familiarized himself with mathematical logic, the psychology of thought, and theories about thinking machines. He found himself, on the other hand, very critical of traditional linguistics and behavioristic psychology.

In 1957, he published his first book, Syntactic Structures. Besides introducing his generative grammar, he also introduced the idea of an innate ability to learn languages. We have born into us a «universal grammar* ready to absorb the details of whatever language is presented to us at an early age.

His book spoke about surface structure and deep structure and the rules of transformation that governed the relations between them. Surface structure is essentially language as we know it, particular languages with particular rules of phonetics and basic grammar. Deep structure is more abstract, at the level of meanings and the universal grammar.

Jean Piaget

q Another neo-structuralist is Jean Piaget. Originally a biologist, he is now best remembered for his work on the development of cognition. Many would argue that he, more than anyone else, is responsible for the creation of cognitive psychology. If the English-speaking world had only learned to read a little French, this would be true without a doubt. Unfortunately, his work was only introduced in English after 1950, and only became widely known in the 1960*s — just on time to be a part of the cognitive movement, but not of its creation.

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchstel, Switzerland, on August 9, 1896. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature with an interest in local history. His mother, Rebecca Jackson, was intelligent and energetic, but Jean found her a bit neurotic — an impression that he said led to his interest in psychology, but away from pathology. The oldest child, he was quite independent and took an early interest in nature, especially the collecting of shells. He published his first ♦ paper*when he was ten — a one page account of his sighting of an albino sparrow.

He began publishing in earnest in high school on his favorite subject, mollusks. He was particularly pleased to get a part time job with the director of Nuechstel's Museum of Natural History, Mr. Godel. His work became Well known among European students of mollusks, who Hieumed he was an adult. All this early experience with science kept him away, he says, from «the demon of philosophy».

Later in adolescence, he faced a bit a crisis of faith: Encouraged by his mother to attend religious instruction, he found religious argument childish. Studying various philosophers and the application of logic, he dedicated himself to finding a «biological explanation of knowledge* . Ultimately, philosophy failed to assist him in his search, so he turned to psychology.

After high school, he went on to the University of Neuchstel. Constantly studying and writing, he became sickly, and had to retire to the mountains for a year to recuperate. When he returned to NeuchBtel, he decided he would write down his philosophy. A fundamental point became a centerpiece for his entire life's work: «In all fields of life (organic, mental, social) there exist 'totalities' qualitatively distinct from their parts and imposing on them an organization*. This principle forms the basis of his structuralist philosophy, as it would for the Gestaltists, Systems Theorists, and many others.

In 1918, Piaget received his Doctorate in Science from the University of NeuchBtel. He worked for a year at psychology labs in Zurich and at Bleuler's famous psychiatric clinic. During this period, he was introduced to the works of Freud, Jung, and others. In 1919, he taught psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. Here he met Simon and did research on intelligence testing. He didn't care for the «right-or-wrong» style of the intelligent tests and started interviewing his subjects at a boys school instead, using the psychiatric interviewing techniques he had learned the year before. In other words, he began asking how children reasoned.

In 1921, his first article on the psychology of intelligence was published in the Journal de Psychologie. In the same year, he accepted a position at the Institut J. J. Rousseau in Geneva. Here he began with his students to research the reasoning of elementary school children. This research became his first five books on child psychology. Although he considered this work highly preliminary, he was surprised by the strong positive public reaction to his work.

In 1929, Piaget began work as the director of the Bureau International Office de l'Education, in collaboration with UNESCO. He also began large scale research with A. Szeminska, E. Meyer, and especially Barbel Inhelder, who would become his major collaborator. Piaget, it should be noted, was particularly influential in bringing women into experimental psychology. Some of this work, however, wouldn't reach the world outside of Switzerland until World War II was over.

In 1940, He became chair of Experimental Psychology, the Director of the psychology laboratory, and the president of the Swiss Society of Psychology. In 1942, he gave a series of lectures at the College de France, during the Nazi occupation of France. These lectures became The Psychology of Intelligence. At the end of the war, he was named President of the Swiss Commission of UNESCO.

Also during this period, he received a number of honorary degrees. He received one from the Sorbonne in 1946, the University of Brussels and the University of Brazil in 1949, on top of an earlier one from Harvard in 1936. And, in 1949 and 1950, he published his synthesis, Introduction to Genetic Epistemology.

In 1952, he became a professor at the Sorbonne. In 1955, he created the International Center for Genetic I'lpistemology, of which he served as director the rest of Ins life. And, in 1956, he created the School of Sciences It the University of Geneva.

Рая г II

Unit 7

Не continued working on a general theory of struc-
tures and tying his psychological work to biology for
many more years. Likewise, he continued his public serv-
ice through UNESCO as a Swiss delegate. By the end of
his career, he had written over 60 books and many hun-
dreds of articles. He died in Geneva, September 16,1980,
one of the most significant psychologists of the twenti-
eth century. U
Jean Piaget began his career as a biologist. As he
delved deeper into the thought-processes of doing sci-
ence, he became interested in the nature of thought it-
self, especially in the development of thinking. Finding
relatively little work done in the area, he had the oppor-
tunity to give it a label. He called it genetic epistemol-
ogy, meaning the study of the development of knowledge.

He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in regard to objects in their environment. These skills were certainly simple ones, sensorimotor skills, but they directed the way in which the infant explored his or her environment and so how they gained more knowledge of the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills. These skills he called schemas.

For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and thrust it into his mouth. He's got that schema down pat. When he comes across some other object — say daddy's expensive watch, he easily learns to transfer his «grab and thrust» schema to the new object. This Piaget called assimilation, specifically assimilating a new object into an old schema.

When our infant comes across another object again — say a beach ball — he will try his old schema of grab and thrust. This of course works poorly with the new object. So the schema will adapt to the new object: Perhaps, in this example, « squeeze and drool» would be an appropriate title for the new schema. This is called accommodation, specifically accommodating an old schema to a new object.

Assimilation and accommodation are the two sides of adaptation, Piaget's term for what most of us would call learning. Piaget saw adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning that Behaviorists in the US were talking about. He saw it as a fundamentally biological process. Even one's grip has to accommodate to a stone, while clay is assimilated into our grip. All living things adapt, even without a nervous system or brain.

Assimilation and accommodation work like pendulum swings at advancing our understanding of the world and our competency in it. According to Piaget, they are directed at a balance between the structure of the mind and the environment, at a certain congruency between the two, that would indicate that you have a good (or at least good-enough) model of the universe. This ideal state he calls equilibrium.

As he continued his investigation of children, he noted that there were periods where assimilation dominated, periods where accommodation dominated, and periods of relative equilibrium, and that these periods were similar among all the children he looked at in their nature and their timing. And so he developed the idea of stages of cognitive development. These constitute a lasting contribution to psychology.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Before cognitive psychology was a «perspective*, a movement*, or an «orientation*, it was a subject. Cog-Itive psychology was the psychology of thinking, remembering, imagining, and so on. And that goes back

Quite a ways before the twentieth century. In fact, it would go back as far as those ancient Greeks. But there is one psychologist who is fondly remembered as the founder of the scientific study of memory, and that is Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on January 23, 1850, in Barmen, Germany. His father was a wealthy merchant, who encouraged his son to study. Hermann attended the University of Halle and the University of Berlin, and received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1873. While traveling through Europe, he came across a copy of Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics, which turned him on to psychology.

Ebbinghaus worked on his research at home in Berlin and published a book called On Memory: An Investigation in Experimental Psychology in 1885. Basically, his research involved the memorization of nonsense syllables, which consisted of a consonant, a vowel, and another consonant. He would select a dozen words, then attempt to master the list. He recorded the number of trials it took, as well as the effects of variations such as relearning old material, or the meaningfulness of the syllables. The results have been confirmed and are still valid today.

He also wrote the first article on intelligence testing of school children, and devised a sentence completion test that became a part of the Binet-Simon test. He also published textbooks on psychology in 1897 and 1902 that were very popular for many years. Hermann Ebbinghaus died in 1909, a clear precursor to today's cognitive movement.

Donald О. Hebb

Moving to the twentieth century, there are three psychologists who are most responsible for the beginnings of the cognitive movement, and for its incredible popularity today. They are Donald Hebb, George Miller, and Ulric Neisser.

Donald Olding Hebb was born in 1904 in Chester, Nova Scotia. He graduated from Dalhousie University in 1925, and tried to begin a career as a novelist. He wound up as a school principle in Quebec.

He began as a part-time graduate student at McGill University in Montreal. Here, he began quickly disillusioned with behaviorism and turned to the work of Kohler and Lashley. Working with Lashley, he received his PhD from Harvard in 1936.

He took on a fellowship with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where his research noted that large lesions in the brain often have little effect on a person's perception, thinking, or behavior.

Moving on to Queens University, he researched intelligence testing of animals and humans. He noted that the environment played a far more significant role in intelligence than generally assumed.

In 1942, he worked with Lashley again, this time at the Yerkes Lab of Primate Biology. He then returned to McGill as a professor of psychology, and became the department chairperson in 1948.

The following year, he published his most famous book, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. This was very well received and made McGill a center for neuropsychology.

The basics of his theory can be summarized by defin-ing three of his terms: First, there is the Hebb synapse. Ilepeated firing of a neuron causes growth or metabolic changes at the synapse that increase the efficiency of that synapse in the future. This is often called consolidation theory, and is the most accepted explanation for neural looming today.

Second, there is the Hebb cell assembly. There are groups of neurons so interconnected that, once activity begins, it persists well after the original stimulus is gone. Today, people call these neural nets.