differences systematically in terms of shared underlying brain structures,
behaviors, and emotions.
1.1 OPENING THE BLACK BOXThe cognitive turn in psychology started in the 1950s, when the ruling
paradigm of psychological research was behaviorism. According to the behav-
iorist approach (Skinner, 1974; Watson, 1994) all psychologists can study
is an organism’s reactions (responses) to external impulses (stimuli). Behav-
iorists were especially dissatisfied with the speculative nature of Freudian
psychoanalysis and Jungian depth-psychology and deemed the scientific
study of mental processes impossible or impractical. The foundations of
behaviorism were laid by the development of experimental methods in the
late nineteenth century, exemplified by Ivan Pavlov’s work with dogs. Pavlov’s
discovery of classical conditioning is a text-book example of the methods of
the behaviorist school. In a series of sessions, Pavlov’s dog learned to associate
a tone (conditioned stimulus) with the presentation of food (unconditioned
stimulus), thus salivating (conditioned response) whenever the tone was
presented. Another form of conditioning, known as operant conditioning,
will be discussed in Chapter 6.
The cognitive turn meant a rejection of the behaviorists’ agnosticism
concerning mental states and brought new approaches to the study of
mental states and mental representations. One of the impulses for the study
of mental structures came from early computer science (Bechtel et al., 2001;
Eysenck & Keane, 2005, pp. 1–30). Based on the kinds of internal operations
that computers could perform on the data stored in their memory, scholars
started to theorize about the structure and functioning of the human mind.
For example, scholars built tree-like databases, the structure of which was
believed to resemble how the human mind stores information, and the distances
on the tree were compared to the speed at which human participants made
associations between the same items that were stored in the computer’s
database (e.g., Scott & Nicholson, 1991, pp. 18–36). Models of how the mind
represents and manipulates knowledge were a central concern for cognitive
scientists in the beginning.
Another impulse for the scientific study of the human mind came from
developments in neuroscience. Neuroimaging technologies allow researchers
to observe brain activity (Dolan, 2008; Aguirre, 2014). The electro-encephalograph
(EEG) is based on a similar principle as the more familiar electro-cardiograph,
but instead of measuring electrical impulses in the heart it picks up electric
signals emitted by the cells of the brain (neurons). Other neuroimaging tools
measure the energy consumption of brain cells, by measuring either blood
10 Cognitive Science and the New Testament