Cognition and Learning

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter traces ideas about cognition and learning from the ancient Greeks to modern times. Its treatment is divided into three sections. The first section, The Philosophical Period, describes the epistemological approach to cognition, in which theories about mental activity were framed with an eye toward the search for justifiable knowledge. The impact of the Scientific Revolution is emphasized. It created a new concept of mind—the Way of Ideas—that ultimately pushed thinkers away from philosophical concerns to psychological ones. The second section, The Early Scientific Period, begins with the founding psychology of consciousness and moves through the behaviorist movement of c. 1920–1950, in which under the impact of evolutionary theory the topic of learning—adaptive behavior change—took precedence over the topic of cognition. The third section, The Modern Scientific Period, examines contemporary cognitive science, the fruit of seeing the mind as like a computer program. The three founding concepts of this new approach to cognition and learning, feedback, information, and computationalism are described, and the two chief architectures of cognition, the symbol system hypothesis and the connectionist, or subsymbolic hypothesis are compared and contrasted.