Page 3 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

xiv Preface

gon, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. When I
took cognition at MIT, there were only two textbooks about cognition as a field
(ifitcould even be thoughtofasafield then): UlricNeisser’s Cognitive Psy-
chology and Michael Posner’s Cognition: An Introduction. Professors Carey and
Garrett supplemented these texts with a thick book of hand-picked readings
from Scientific American and mainstream psychology journals. Reading journal
articles prepared the students for the debates that characterize science. Susan
and Merrill skillfully brought these debates out in the classroom, through inter-
active lectures and the Socratic method. Cognition is full of opposing theories
and controversies. It is an empirical science, but in many cases the same data
are used to support different arguments, and the reader must draw his or her
own conclusions. The field of cognition is alive, dynamic, and rediscovering
itself all the time. We should expect nothing less of the science devoted to
understanding the mind.
Today there are many excellent textbooks and readers devoted to cognition.
Textbooks are valuable because they select and organize a daunting amount of
information and cover the essential points of a topic. The disadvantage is that
they do not reflect how psychologists learn about new research—this is most
often done through journal articles or ‘‘high-level’’ book chapters directed to
the working researcher. More technical in nature, these sources typically reveal
details of an experiment’s design, the measures used, and how the findings are
interpreted. They also reveal some of the inherent ambiguity in research (often
hidden in a textbook’s tidy summary). Frequently students, when confronted
with the actual data of a study, find alternate interpretations of the findings,
and come to discover firsthand that researchers are often forced to draw their
own conclusions. By the time undergraduates take a course in cognition (usu-
ally their second or third course in psychology) they find themselves wonder-
ingiftheyoughtto major in psychology, and a few even think about going to
graduate school. I believe they ought to know more about what it is like to read
actual psychology articles, so they’ll know what they’re getting into.
On the other hand, a book of readings composed exclusively of such primary
sources would be difficult to read without a suitable grounding in the field and
would leave out many important concepts, lacking an overview. That is, it might
tend to emphasize the trees at the expense of the forest.
Therefore, the goal of this anthology is to combine the best of both kinds
of readings. By compiling an anthology such as this, I was able to pick and
choose my favorite articles, by experts on each topic. Of the thirty-nine selec-
tions, ten are from undergraduate textbooks, six are from professional journals,
sixteen are chapters from ‘‘high-level’’ books aimed at advanced students and
research scientists, and seven are more or less hybrids, coming from sources
written for the educated layperson, such as Scientific American or popular books
(e.g., Gardner, Norman). This book is not intended to be a collection of the most
important papers in the history of cognitive psychology; other authors have
done this extremely well, especially Lloyd Komatsuin his excellent Experiment-
ing with the Mind (1994, Brooks/Cole). It is intended as a collection of readings
that can serve as the principal text for a course in cognitive psychology or cog-
nitive science.