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Person |
Description |
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Abelson, Robert |
Professor Emeritus at Yale. Abelson worked in mathematical psychology, particularly in statistics. |
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Anderson, James |
Anderson is currently Professor and Chair of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences at Brown and does research in neural modeling of cognitive and language processes. His work concentrates on applications of neural networks to cognitive science. |
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Anderson, John R. |
(b. 1947, Vancouver, BC, Canada: Ph.D. Psychology, Stanford University, 1972.) Anderson is well known for proposing ACT theory, intended to be a complete theory of higher-level human cognition, according to which human cognition arises as an interaction between declarative and procedural knowledge structures. |
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Babbage, Charles |
(b. 1792, London, UK, d. 1871, London, UK). Babbage is often referred as the "father of computing" because of his invention of the analytical engine, a prototype of which was completed far after his death. |
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Ballard, Dana |
(b. 1947-, Ph. D., UC, Irvine, 1974). His main research interest is in computational theories of the brain with an emphasis on human vision. In 1985, with Chris Brown, he led a team that designed and built a high speed binocular camera control system that is capable of simulating human eye movements. |
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Barsalou, Lawrence |
His interests lie in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, focusing on the acquisition, representation, and use of knowledge, especially in language, memory, and thought. |
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Bartlett, Sir Frederick Charles |
(b. 1886, Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, England, d. 1969, Cambridge, England, M.A. Moral Sciences, University of Cambridge). Bartlett is best know for his studies of memory and social psychology. His most significant and influential work is Remembering (1932), which examines the influence of social factors on memory in an experimental setting. |
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Boole, George |
(b. 1815, Lincoln, UK, d. 1864, Cork, Ireland). In his principal work, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (1854), Boole established a new branch of mathematics, symbolic logic, in which symbols are used to represent logical operations. |
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Brentano, Franz |
(b. 1838, Germany, d. 1917, Zürich, Switzerland, Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Tübingen, 1862). He is known especially for his distinction between psychological and physical phenomena on the basis of intentionality or internal object-directedness of thought, and his revival of Aristotelianism and empirical methods in philosophy and psychology. |
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Broca, Paul |
(b. 1824, Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, France, d. 1880, Paris, M.D., University of Paris, 184)9. Broca is best known for the localization of a speech area in the brain. Prior to his discovery, the doctrine of Pierre Flourens, that cognitive function was distributed homogeneously throughout the brain, was widely accepted. |
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Brodmann, Korbinian |
(b. 1868, Liggersdorf, Germany, d. 1918, Munich). M.D., University of Leipzig, 1898. His recognition that the human cortex is organized anatomically in the same way as the cortex of all other mammals enabled him to map it and to classify cortical types and layers on the basis of the morphogenesis of the cortex. |
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Brooks, Rodney |
His recent projects include ‘Cog’, a humanoid robot, ‘The Zoo’, a collection of humanoids, Mars Rovers, Mine Clearing Robots, ‘Vision MURI’, ‘The Intelligent Room’, Microrobots, and Mobile Robots. |
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Buchanan, Bruce |
(Ph.D. Philosophy, Michigan State University, 1966). Buchanan’s main research interest is artificial intelligence, in particular, intelligent computer methods for knowledge acquisition and machine learning, scientific hypothesis formation, and construction of expert systems for scientific problems. |
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Chomsky, Noam |
(b. 1928-. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1955). He is widely acknowledged to have inaugurated the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology with his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. In this review, Chomsky argued persuasively that language acquisition could not be explained with the resources of the classical theory of conditioning, and required the positing of innate representational structures governed by rules. |
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Church, Alonzo |
(b. 1903, Washington, DC, d. 1995, Hudson, OH, Ph.D. mathematics, Princeton, 1927). Church was a mathematician and a logician, and one of the founders of computer science. His work is of major importance in mathematical logic, recursion theory and in theoretical computer science. |
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Churchland, Patricia |
(b. 1943- Ph.D. Philosophy, Oxford, 1969). According to Churchland, the best way to address issues in the philosophy of mind is through the empirical study of the brain. |
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Churchland, Paul |
(Ph.D. philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, 1969). Churchland is famous for championing the thesis that our everyday, common-sense, ‘folk’ psychology, which seeks to explain human behavior in terms of the beliefs and desires of agents, is actually a deeply flawed theory that must be eliminated in favor of a mature cognitive neuroscience. |
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Damasio, Antonio |
(b. Portugal. Ph.D.). In his research on practical decision making, Damasio draws an intimate connection between emotion and cognition. He presents a "somatic marker" hypothesis which explains how emotions are biologically indispensable to decisions. |
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Dennett, Daniel |
(b. 1942-, D.Phil. Philosophy, Oxford, 1965). Broadly, he argues that the study of the human mind divides into two tasks: explaining consciousness and explaining intentionality. |
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Dreyfus, Hubert |
(b. 1929-, Ph.D. Philosophy, Harvard). Dreyfus has argued that the enterprise of Artificial Intelligence consists in turning the rationalist project of philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Husserl into an empirically rigorous research program. He contends that this project should be abandoned for many of the same reasons as rationalism. |
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Ebbinghaus, Hermann |
(b. 1850, Wuppertal, Germany, d. 1909, Halle, Germany, Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Bonn, 1873). In pursuit of his ambition to apply the scientific method to the study of ‘higher’ cognitive processes, Ebbinghaus invented a new method for the study of memory. |
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Fodor, Jerry A. |
(b. 1935-, Ph.D. Philosophy, Princeton, 1960). According to Fodor, "The basic idea in cognitive science is the idea of proof theory, that is, that you can simulate semantic relations - in particular, semantic relations among thoughts - by syntactical process." |
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Frege, Gottlob |
(b. 1848,Wismar, Germany, d. 1925, Bad Kleinen, Germany, Ph.D. mathematics - geometry, University of Göttingen, 1873). Frege constructed the first predicate calculus, developed a new analysis of basic propositions and quantification, formalized the notion of a proof in terms that are still accepted today, and demonstrated that one could resolve theoretical mathematical statements in terms of simpler logical and mathematical notions. |
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Gall, Franz Joseph |
(b. 1759, Tiefenbrunn, Baden, d. 1828, Paris, France, M.D., University of Vienna, 1785). Gall lectured on phrenology and believed that mind could be divided into separate faculties which were discretely localized in the brain, and that the exercise of or innate prominence of a faculty would enlarge the appropriate brain area that, in turn, would show up as a cranial prominence. |
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Gentner, Dedre |
Her research interests also include computational simulation of comparison processes and studies of analogy and similarity in cognitive development, as well as cross-linguistic investigations of language and thought. |
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Gibson, Eleanor J. |
(b. 1910, Ph.D. Psychology, Yale University, 1938). Gibson’s research has embraced learning in humans and animals, studies of controlled rearing in animals, development of reading skill, and especially perceptual development in infants and young children. |
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Gibson, James J. |
(b. 1904, McConnelsville, OH, d.1979, Ithaca, NY, Ph.D. Psychology, Princeton, 1928). Gibson is primarily known for his research in, and theories of perception. He became a leader of a new movement in that field by considering perception to be direct, without any inferential steps, intervening variables, or associations. |
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Grice, Herbert Paul |
(b. 1913, d. 1988) He held positions at Oxford University and, after 1967, at the University of California, Berkeley. Grice is best known for his work in the philosophy of language, in particular, his analysis of speaker's meaning, his conception of conversational implicature, and his project of intention-based semantics. |
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Hebb, Donald O. |
(b. 1904, Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada, d. 1985, Ph. D. Psychology, Harvard University, 1936). Hebb spent most of his academic career at McGill University in Montreal, where he became an influential theorist concerned with the relation between the brain and behavior. His most important book, The Organization of Behavior (1949), was influential in the development of connectionism. |
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James, William |
(b. 1842, New York, NY, d. 1910. M.D., Harvard University, 1871). James is bet know for The Principles of Psychology, which is an enormous two volume work that addresses the full spectrum of psychological phenomena discussed in James’ time, including brain function, habit, ‘the automaton-theory’, the stream of thought, the self, attention, association, the perception of time, memory, sensation, imagination, perception, reasoning, voluntary movement, instinct, the emotions, will, and hypnotism. |
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Kant, Immanuel |
(b. 1724, d. 1804). Kant's early philosophy of mind included rational and empirical psychologies and offered a solution to the mind/body problem. Later, Kant offered a strong critique of rational psychology and took a broadly skeptical attitude towards knowledge of the soul and the mind/body relation. |
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Köhler, Wolfgang |
(b. 1887, Revel, Estonia, d. 1967, Enfield, NH. Ph.D. Psychology, University of Berlin, 1909). Along with Wertheimer and Koffka, Köhler was one of the founders of the Gestalt school of psychology. He argued that there is a correspondence in form between physical events in the brain and the subjective events caused by them. |
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Lakoff, George |
(Ph.D. linguistics, Indiana University, 1966). Since 1975, after giving up on formal logic as an adequate way to represent conceptual systems, he has been one of the major developers of cognitive linguistics, which integrates discoveries about conceptual systems from the cognitive sciences into the theory of language. |
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McCarthy, John |
(b. 1927, Boston, MA. Ph.D. Mathematics, Princeton, 1951). McCarthy has been interested in artificial intelligence since 1948 and coined the term in 1955. His main current research (1995) is formalizing common sense knowledge and reasoning. |
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McClelland, James S. |
(b. 1948-. Ph.D. cognitive psychology,University of Pennsylvania, 1975). McClelland's main contribution lies in his cooperation with David Rumelhart and the PDP research group in re-introducing parallel distributed computational models of mental function to cognitive science in the United States in the mid-1980s. |
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McCulloch, Warren Sturgis |
(b. 1898, Orange, NJ, d. 1972). McCulloch received his M.D. from Columbia University's College of Surgeons and Physicians. He is perhaps best known for "A Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity", which he co-authored with Walter Pitts. This paper is widely credited with being a seminal contribution to neural network theory, the theory of automata, the theory of computation, and cybernetics. |
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Minsky, Marvin |
(Ph.D. Mathematics, Princeton, 1954). His research has led to both theoretical and practical advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, neural networks, and the theory of Turing Machines and recursive functions. He has made major contributions in the domains of knowledge representation, computational semantics, machine perception, and symbolic and connectionist learning. |
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Newell, Allen |
(b. San Francisco, d. 1992, Pittsburgh. Ph.D. Industrial Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1957). With Herbert Simon, he proposed the Physical Symbol System hypothesis in 1957. His work has centered on SOAR, an architecture for intelligent problem solving and learning. See computational models, symbolicism. |
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Piaget, Jean |
(b. 1896, Neuchatel, Switzerland, d. 1980, Geneva, Switzerland. Ph.D. Biology, University of Neuchatel, 1918). Piaget is widely considered the most influential developmental theorist of the twentieth century. According to Piaget, cognitive development is a progression from a state of egocentrism, characterized by the use of concrete concepts, toward the construction and use of abstract concepts. |
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Pitts, Walter |
(b. 1924, Detroit, MI, d. ??). Although lacking high school and college degrees, by the age of 17 Pitts was making mathematical contributions to the theory of neural networks. Pitts is best known for his contribution to "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943), which he co-authored with Warren McCulloch. |
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Putnam, Hilary |
(b. 1926, Chicago. Ph.D. philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles, 1951). Drawing on his expertise in the theory of recursive functions and Turing machines, Putnam formulated a philosophical position that he named 'functionalism' in the 1950s. |
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Rashevsky, Nicolas |
(b. 1899, Chernikov, Russia, d. 1972, Holland, MI). Trained in Russia as a mathematical physicist Rashevsky immigrated to the United States in 1924. At the University of Pittsburgh, he conceived the idea of building a mathematical biophysics on the model of mathematical physics. He also developed mathematized neural network theories of Pavlovian conditioning. |
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Rumelhart, David |
(Ph.D. mathematical psychology, Standford, 1967). During the last ten years, Rumelhart has concentrated his work on the development of neurally inspired computational architectures. However, Rumelhart began with an interest in characterizing long term memory in terms of semantic networks. |
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Searle, John |
(b. 1932, Denver, CO -, Ph.D. philosophy, Oxford). Searle is famous for arguing against the ‘strong Artificial Intelligence’ program, according to which all there is to having a mind is implementing the right computer program. See Chinese room. |
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Sellars, Wilfrid |
(b. 1912. d. 1989) He held positions at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and finally, from 1963 until his death in 1989, at the University of Pittsburgh. Sellars is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology. He was one of the first functionalists and one of the first to hold that intentional states are theoretical entities postulated for the sake of a certain kind of explanation and prediction of behavior. |
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Shannon, Claude |
(b. 1916, Gaylord, MI. Ph.D. Mathematics, MIT, 1940). In 1948, Shannon published his best known work, a paper (Bell Syst. Tech. J., 27, 379-423, 623-56) showing how information could be measured. |
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Simon, Herbert |
(b. 1916. Ph.D. Political Science, University of Chicago). About 1954, Simon and Newell conceived of using computer programming language to build theories of human symbolic behavior. Simon and his colleagues showed how a wide range of cognitive processes in problem solving and problem understanding can be explained in information-processing terms and modeled with computer programs. See computational models, symbolicism. |
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Thagard, Paul |
(Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Toronto, 1977). His current interests include analogy, conceptual change, visual thinking, decision making, and social aspects of science. See coherence, explanation. |
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Turing, Alan |
(b. 1912, London, UK, d. 1953, Wilmslow, Cheshire, UK. Ph.D. mathematics, Princeton, 1938). Turing was a major influence on the development of computational theory. The term Turing machine was introduced by Alonzo Church in his 1937 review of Turing’s paper in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Turing proposed the test of thinking in machines that bears his name in a 1950 article in the journal Mind (59, 433-60). See Turing machine, Turing test. |
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von Neumann, John |
(b. 1903 Budapest, Hungary, d. Washington, D.C., 1957. Ph.D. mathematics, University of Budapest, 1926). One of the foremost mathematicians of this century, von Neumann made many significant contributions to pure mathematics, the quantum theory, the theory of electronic computing devices, and the development of the first electronic computers (MANIAC, NORC). The standard computer architecture of today bears his name. See computational models. |
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Vygotsky, Lev Semyonovich |
(b. 1896 Gome’, Byelorus, d. 1934, Moscow). Vygotsky was one of the significant postrevolutionary Soviet psychologists. He argued for the inclusion within psychology of the study of consciousness, however he rejected introspection as a method. |
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Watson, John Broadus |
(b. 1878, Greenville, SC, d. 1958, Ph.D. Philosophy and Psychology, University of Chicago, 1903). Watson founded the school of behaviorism with his 1913 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association, entitled "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (published in Psychological Review) in which he disparaged introspectionist methodology and emphasized prediction and control of behavior as the proper goals of psychology. |
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Wiener, Norbert |
(b. 1894, Columbia, MO, d. 1964, Stockholm, Sweden, Ph.D. Philosophy, Harvard University, 1913). Wiener launched the discipline of ‘Cybernetics’ with the publication of his book, Cybernetics, in 1948. He defined ‘cybernetics’ as a discipline concerned with the comparative study of control mechanisms in the nervous system and high-speed computers. |
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig |
(b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, UK). Wittgenstein’s most important contribution to psychology is his articulation of skepticism about traditional philosophical theories of what it is to possess a concept, or understand a word, which explain these capacities in terms of explicit knowledge of necessary and sufficient conditions. |
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Wundt, Wilhelm |
(b. 1832, near Mannheim, Germany, d. 1920. M.D., University of Heidelberg, 1855). In his most influential psychological work, Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874) he argued that conscious states could be scientifically studied through the systematic manipulation of antecedent variables, and analyzed by carefully controlled techniques of introspection. |
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