인지 혁명

심리학에 미친 영향

진화심리학:

A number of forces converged in psychology to bring back the legitimacy of looking inside the head to explore the psychology underlying behavior. Once force came from the mushrooming violoations of the fundamental “laws” of learning. A second came from the study of language, in Noam Chomsky’s powerful agruments for a universal language organ (see Universal grammar) with an underlying structure that turned out to be invariable across languages. A third force came with the rise of computers and the information-processing metaphor. All three forces coalesced into what become known as the cognitive revolution.

The cognitive revolution returned to psychology the respectability of looking inside the heads of people rather than at just the external contingencies of reinforcement. The revolution was required, in part, simply because external contingencies alone could not successfully account for the behavior being observed. Furthermore with the rise of the computer psychologists began to be more explicit about exact causal processes they were proposing. …

But most cognitive psychologists carried over one unfortunate assumption from the behaviorist paradigm: the equipotentiality assumption of domain-generality. The domain-general learning processes proposed by behaviorists were simply replace by domain-general cognitive mechanisms. Missing was the idea that there might be privileged classes of information that the cognitive mechanisms were specifically design to process. …

The idea that there might be some information-processing problems that the human mind was specially designed to process was missing from the cognitive revolution in psychology. Humans went from being blank slates on which contingencies of reinforcement do the writing (learning theory) to general-purpose computeres on which cultures write the software (cognitive theory). It was this gap, along with accumulated empirical findings and convergence from a variety of empirical sciences, that finally set the stage for the emergence of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology furnished the missing piece of the puzzle by providing a broad specification of the kinds of information-processing problems that human mind was designed to solve - problems of survival and reproduction. —p31-33, Evolutionary psychology (book)