Classic (Online) Readings in Cognitive Science

Notes:

1. Some articles are online at the relevant journal's website and accessible from buffalo.edu computers on campus (or at home by logging into the library's website);
   just click on the hyperlinked article title.

2. To access articles from Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Review, or American Psychologist:
   1. Link to: UB Libraries Electronic Journals.
      • If you are off-campus, you may need to enter your UBIT username and password.

   2. Type the journal title into the Search box and click the "Search" button.
      • Other journals (e.g., Language, Proc. IRE) can be accessed in a similar fashion;
        most have much simpler interfaces than the one described here for Psych. Bul., Psych. Rev., and Amer. Psych.!

   3. Click on "Journals@Ovid PsycArticles".
   4. Find the volume and number that you are looking for (click the red "Next" button to go to earlier issues).
   5. Click the "Table of Contents" button for the issue you want.
   6. Find the article in the table of contents, and then click either
      "Complete Reference" for a full citation with abstract, or
      "Ovid Full Text" to download a PDF copy of the article.

3. Some articles are locally stored in one of my password-protected paper repositories.
   To get a username and password, see Bill Rapaport.

1. Watson, John B. (1913), "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It", Psychological Review 20(2) (March): 158-177.
   • This is not, of course, a paper in cognitive science; it is, however, a clear statement of the methodological dispute between cognitive science's "predecessor" approach (behaviorism) and its predecessor: introspective psychology.
   • Papers such as Miller 1956 and Chomsky 1959 dealt the death blow to behaviorism and marked the rise of cognitive science.

2. McCulloch, Warren S., & Pitts, Walter H. (1943), "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity", Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 5: 115-133.
   • For an excellent summary and discussion of the historical importance of this paper for cognitive science, philosophy of mind, connectionist AI, and computer science, see:
     • Piccinini, Gualtiero (2004), "The First Computational Theory of Mind and Brain: A Close Look at Mcculloch and Pitts's ‘Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity’", Synthese 141(2) (August): 175–215.

3. Chomsky, Noam (1956), "Three Models for the Description of Language", IRE [now, IEEE] Transactions on Information Theory 2(3) (September): 113-124.
   • Note: This article, which introduced transformational grammar and such now-famous examples as "colorless green ideas sleep furiously", appeared in the same issue of this journal as Newell & Simon 1956, below!

   • See also Chomsky 1959, below.

4. Miller, George A. (1956), "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", Psychological Review 63(2) (March): 81-97.
   • A shorter, and in some ways more readable, presentation of relevant ideas is:
     Miller, George A. (1956), "Human Memory and the Storage of Information", IRE Transations on Information Theory 2(3) (September): 129–137;
     • On "chunking":
       "…it does seem reasonable to assume that the hierarchical organization of language—sounds or letters, syllables, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs—is not an accidental pattern, but truly represents the preferred mode of operation of our mental machinery" (p. 134).
       • Note how this hierarchical organization is really just a kind of recursion, hence a kind of computation.

5. Newell, Allen; & Simon, Herbert A. (1956), "The Logic Theory Machine—A Complex Information Processing System", IRE [now, IEEE] Transactions on Information Theory 2(3) (September): 61-79.
   • Note: This article, which describes what some consider to be the first AI program, appeared in the same issue of this journal as Chomsky 1956, above!

     See also:

   • Newell, Allen; Shaw, J.C.; & Simon, Herbert A. (1958), "Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving", Psychological Review 65(3): 151-166.

   • See also:
     Newell, Allen; & Simon, Herbert A. (1961), "Computer Simulation of Human Thinking", Science 134(3495) (22 December): 2011-2017.

6. Rosenblatt, F. (1958), "The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain", Psychological Review 65(6): 386-408.
   • This reports work done at what was then the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, now known as Calspan, located down the road from UB, on Genesee St. opposite the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport!
   • For instructions on how to download Psych. Review articles, see above.

7. Chomsky, Noam (1959), Review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in Language 35(1) (January-March): 26-58.
   • See also Chomsky 1956, above.

8. Lettvin, J.Y.; Maturana, H.R.; McCulloch, W.S.; & Pitts, W.H. (1959), "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain", Proceedings of the IRE 47(11) (November): 1940-1951.
   • 

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9. Miller, George A.; Galanter, Eugene; & Pribram, Karl H. (1960), Plans and the Structure of Behavior (New York: Henry Holt).
   • Ch. 1: Images and Plans

10. Fodor, Jerry A. (1965), "Explanations in Psychology", in Max Black (ed.), Philosophy in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press): 161–179.
    • An article-length version of his later, classic book:

      Fodor, Jerry A. (1968), Psychological Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology (New York: Random House).

11. Sperry, R.W. (1968), "Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness", American Psychologist 23(10) (October): 723-733.

12. Wason, P.C. (1968), "Reasoning about a Rule", Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 20(3): 273-281.
    See also:
    • Wason, P.C.; & Shapiro, Diana (1971), "Natural and Contrived Experience in a Reasoning Problem", Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 23(1): 63-71.

13. Shepard, Roger N.; & Metzler, Jacqueline (1971), "Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects", Science 171(3972) (February 19): 701-703.

14. Tversky, Amos; & Kahneman, Daniel (1971), "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers", Psychological Bulletin 76(2): 105-110.
    Also see:
    1. Kahneman, Daniel; & Tversky, Amos (1973), "On the Psychology of Prediction", Psychological Review 80(4) (July): 237-251.

    2. Tversky, Amos; & Kahneman, Daniel (1974), "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases", Science 185(4157) (September 27): 1124-1131.

    3. Tversky, Amos; & Kahneman, Daniel (1983), "Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment", Psychological Review 90(4) (October): 293-315.
       • Contains the well-known "Linda the feminist bank-teller" example.

15. Rosch, Eleanor; & Mervis, Carolyn B. (1975), "Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories", Cognitive Psychology 7: 573-605.
    See also:
    • Mervis, Carolyn B.; & Rosch, Eleanor (1981), "Categorization of Natural Objects", Annual Review of Psychology 32: 89-115.

16. Lakoff, George; & Johnson, Mark (1980), "Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language", Journal of Philosophy 77(8) (August): 453-486.

17. McClelland, James L.; & Rumelhart, David E. (1981), "An Interactive Activation Model of Context Effects in Letter Perception: Part 1. An Account of Basic Findings", Psychological Review 88(5) (September): 375-407.
    See also:
    • Rumelhart, David E.; & McClelland, James L. (1982), "An Interactive Activation Model of Context Effects in Letter Perception: II. The Contextual Enhancement Effect and Some Tests and Extensions of the Model", Psychological Review 89(1) (January): 60-94.
    • For instructions on how to download Psych. Review articles, see above.

Other sources:

1. "The Top 100 Works in Cognitive Science"

2. "10 Classics from Cognitive Science"