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From: gray@hplb.CSNET.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Taking AI models and applying them to biology...
Message-ID: <27746.8706111248@ghiggins.lb.hp.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 11-Jun-87 08:48:05 EDT
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Posted: Thu Jun 11 08:48:05 1987
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In article <622@unicus.UUCP>, craig@unicus.UUCP (Craig D. Hubley) writes:

> I was semi-surprised in recent months to discover that cognitive psychology,
> far from developing a bold new metaphor for human thinking, has (to a degree)
> copied at least one metaphor from third-generation computer science.

Psychology freely borrows *any* models that will help it get a grip on
characterising and explaining the phenomena of cognition. Over the years,
analogies of the workings of the mind have been constructed from : windmills,
hydraulic systems, telephone switching exchanges and latterly, the computer (or
more properly, information-processing devices). The one thing that all these
analogies have in common is that they draw on the technological state-of-the-art
of the time. (The "internal combustion engine" analogy is a new one to me).

David Longerbeam's comment about the requirement for empiricism is valid in this
instance. Donald Hebb assumed a separation of STM and LTM in a 1949 paper (and
that's going back quite some time, only a year after Shockley's invention of the
transistor). It is unlikely that the computer-architecture construct of
"archived storage" played any part in Hebb's dichotomising of human memory. It
appears that this is one example of a model developed within cognitive
psychology, independently of developments in computer architecture. (I'm not
well-versed in comp.sci. history - but it seems reasonable to conjecture that
Hebb was unaware of the notions of "archived storage" when he was developing his
dichotomisation).


> This description of the human memory system, though cloaked in vaguer terms,
> corresponds more or less one-to-one with the traditional computer
> architecture we all know and love ...
>
>         - senses have "iconic" and "echo" memories analogous to buffers.
>         - short term memory holds information that is organized for quick
>         processing, much like main storage in a computing system.
>         - long term memory holds information in a sort of semantic
>         association network where large related pieces of information
>         reside, similar to backing or "archived" computing storage.

I think that this is somewhat of an over-simplification. There are quite a few
phenomena arising from studies of "iconic", "echoic", "short-term" and
"long-term" areas of human memory which do not fit so tamely into a
computer-architecture model. Thus, there has *not* been uncritical acceptance of
either that the "iconic" and "echoic" aspects of memory are passive or that
memory can be simply dichotomised into into STM and LTM sections. In the absence
of anything better, the analogies will do for now, but there are too many
phenomena which don't fit in to these analogies for them to anything but
convenient for the moment.

One of the disciplinary traits actively promoted in psychology (be it cognitive,
social, experimental, etc.) is a high degree of circumspection. (There is a
tradition that one never sees a one-armed psychologist - "on one hand .... and
on the other ... "). Thus models and analogies *can* be freely borrowed from
other areas and exploited for what they offer, for as long as they exhibit some
level of descriptive utility. It is instructive to note that contemporary
cognitive psychologists no longer use windmills or telephone exchanges (or even
the internal combustion engine) as analogies of the workings of the mind. These
particular analogies have outlived their usefulness and have been discarded (I
hope!).

Graham Higgins                          ||  The opinions expressed above
Hewlett-Packard Labs                    ||  are not to be contrued as the
Bristol, U.K.                           ||  opinions, stated or otherwise,
gjh@hplb.csnet  +44  272 799910 xt 4060 ||  of Hewlett-Packard