The Second Cognitive Revolution

Abstract

The first cognitive revolution was the work of Jerome Bruner, George Miller and others in the mid 20th century. Bruner’s “Judas Eye” experiments seemed to show that perception, judgement, classification and so on depended not just on the stimulus received by the human organism but also on the application of pre-existing cognitive schemata. For example, his experiment on the perception of the shape of coins showed that what was seen depended not just on the image projected on the retina but also on the value of the coin to the participant. The first cognitive revolution opened the way for a wide variety of rules, schemata, conventions and so on to be proposed as the explanation of the patterns of human activity, including social life. How such schemata were involved in cognition led to the idea of the mind as an information processing device, and ultimately to the computational models of thinking, perceiving and acting inspired by the conjectures of Alan Turing.