Preface

Daniel J. Levitin

What Is Cognition?

Cognition encompasses the scientific study of the human mind and how itprocesses information; it focuses on one of the most difficult of all mysteriesthat humans have addressed. The mind is an enormously complex systemholding a unique position in science: by necessity, we must use the mind tostudy itself, and so the focus of study and the instrument used for study arerecursively linked. The sheer tenacity of human curiosity has in our own life-times brought answers to many of the most challenging scientific questions wehave had the ambition to ask. Although many mysteries remain, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we find that we do understand much about the fun-damental laws of chemistry, biology, and physics; the structure of space-time,the origins of the universe. We have plausible theories about the origins andnature of life and have mapped the entire human genome. We can now turnour attention inward, to exploring the nature of thought, and how our mentallife comes to be what it is.There are scientists from nearly every field engaged in this pursuit. Physiciststry to understand how physical matter can give rise to that ineffable state wecall consciousness, and the decidedly nonphysical ‘‘mind stuff’’ that Descartesand other philosophers have argued about for centuries. Chemists, biologists,and neuroscientists join them in trying to explicate the mechanisms by whichneurons communicate with each other and eventually form our thoughts, mem-ories, emotions, and desires. At the other end of the spectrum, economists studyhow we balance choices about limited natural and financial resources, andanthropologists study the influence of culture on thought and the formation of societies. So at one end we find scientists studying atoms and cells, at the otherend there are scientists studying entire groups of people. Cognitive psycholo-gists tend to study the individual, and mental

systems

within individual brains,although ideally we try to stay informed of what our colleagues are doing. Socognition is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, and this collection of readings isintended to reﬂect that.

Why Not a Textbook?

This book grew out of a course I took at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology (MIT) in 1975, from Susan Carey and Merrill Garrett (with occasionalguest lectures by Mary Potter), and courses I taught at the University of Ore-

gon, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. When Itook cognition at MIT, there were only two textbooks about cognition as a ﬁeld(if it could even be thought of as a ﬁeld then): Ulric Neisser’s

Cognitive Psy-chology

and Michael Posner’s

Cognition: An Introduction

. Professors Carey andGarrett supplemented these texts with a thick book of hand-picked readingsfrom

Scientiﬁc American

and mainstream psychology journals. Reading journalarticles prepared the students for the

debates

that characterize science. Susanand Merrill skillfully brought these debates out in the classroom, through inter-active lectures and the Socratic method. Cognition is full of opposing theoriesand controversies. It is an empirical science, but in many cases the same dataare used to support different arguments, and the reader must draw his or herown conclusions. The field of cognition is alive, dynamic, and rediscoveringitself all the time. We should expect nothing less of the science devoted tounderstanding 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 thatthey do not reflect how psychologists learn about new research—this is mostoften done through journal articles or ‘‘high-level’’ book chapters directed tothe working researcher. More technical in nature, these sources typically revealdetails of an experiment’s design, the measures used, and how the findings areinterpreted. They also reveal some of the inherent

ambiguity

in research (oftenhidden in a textbook’s tidy summary). Frequently students, when confrontedwith the actual data of a study, find alternate interpretations of the findings,and come to discover firsthand that researchers are often forced to draw theirown conclusions. By the time undergraduates take a course in cognition (usu-ally their second or third course in psychology) they find themselves wonder-ing if they ought to

major

in psychology, and a few even think about going tograduate school. I believe they ought to know more about what it is like to readactual psychology articles, so they’ll know what they’re getting into.On the other hand, a book of readings composed exclusively of such primarysources would be difﬁcult to read without a suitable grounding in the ﬁeld andwould leave out many important concepts, lacking an overview. That is, it mighttend to emphasize the trees at the expense of the forest.Therefore, the goal of this anthology is to combine the best of both kindsof readings. By compiling an anthology such as this, I was able to pick andchoose 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 andresearch scientists, and seven are more or less hybrids, coming from sourceswritten 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 mostimportant papers in the history of cognitive psychology; other authors havedone this extremely well, especially Lloyd Komatsu in his excellent

Experiment-ing with the Mind

(1994, Brooks/Cole). It is intended as a collection of readingsthat can serve as the principal text for a course in cognitive psychology or cog-nitive science.

xiv Preface