The Neurophysiology of Information Processing and Cognition

Abstract

In the first textbook of physiological psychology in 1874, Wundt (128) expressed his conviction that the central problem of the field was the analysis of the physiologi­ cal bases of consciousness and subjective experience. Two generations later, the behaviorist movement, motivated partly by the excesses of introspective psychology and partly by imitation of operationalism in physics, succeeded in exorcizing both the language of conscious experience and the study of consciousness and mental states. Ever since, the dominant trend in studies of learning, including the neuro­ physiology of learning, has followed a strict behaviorist line. Reductionist ap­ proaches, such as the measurement of habit strengths and response rates and the tracing of neural circuits, have led to the accumulation of a vast amount of empirical knowledge but little insight into basic mechanisms. Sensory neurophysiology has followed a similar philosophical and methodological program, culminating for some in the extreme position that entire percepts may be represented by the firing of one or a few neurons (3, 69), or that higher order perceptual and cognitive functions are represented in localized anatomical regions. However, the study of how univariate sensory features, or stimulus attributes, differentially affect various anatomical structures ignores the problem of how the organism constructs an integrated, mul­ tivariate, and multidimensional perception of its environment.