What is cognition? The view from the early cognitive psychologists

[The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6 (The Embodied Mind) ofThe Myth of Mirror Neurons, which describes how early cognitive psychologists viewed their break from behaviorism as resting on the idea ofinformation processing. The term "cognition" was later applied to this movement and ended up leading to some confusion because of the colloquial definition of cognition as applying to higher-level mental abilities...]Computation and the information processing approachThe question then became, how does the brain process information?  The digital computer was being developed around the same time and served as a convenient heuristic to think about how the brain might achieve such a feat.  The basic idea is that there is information on the one hand and a set of processing routines (mental apps or computational algorithms) on the other.  The information serves as input to the processing routines, which then transform it according to the set of computations defined in the program (e.g., if x, then y) and the processing routines output the results of the transformations.  The output can then be stored as new information, serve as input to other programs, and control devices like a display or printer.  Inputs to a computer -- key presses, mouse jiggles and pokes, image captures -- don ’t directly control what’s displayed on the monitor or what the printer prints; rather, those inputs are processed by...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Source Type: blogs