In the West, human cognition studies can be traced to the ancient Greeks, Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle's viewpoint is likened to a bottum-up cluster analysis technique for the formation of cognitive concepts. For example, a "table" is an average or center of some feature space of all tables perceived, and a new table is so classified if it resembles the average table enough to fit into the cluster, "table" (Stark and Ellis, 1981).
On the other hand, the Platonic position is such that the immortal, rational soul possesses a complete pre-existing catalogue of "ideals". Thus, insofar as a "table" resembles the ideal "table", it is so recognized (Stark and Ellis, 1981).
The antagonists may be characterized as empiricists and rationalists. While the empiricists insist that all knowledge come from experience, the rationalists argue that one comes into this world with complete innate knowledge (Anderson, 1980).
The debate intensified from the 17th to the 19th centuries, with Locke, Hume, and Mill on the empiricists' side, and Descartes and Kant on the rationalists' side. This debate is still very much with us.
The beginning of cognitive psychology as a science is in 1879, with the establishment of the first psychology laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany. The method of inquiry was mainly by introspection.
But, the introspection approach ran into trouble in Europe, for different laboratories were reporting different types of introspection, giving rise to contradictions. The irrelevance of the introspection method and its apparent contradiction set the ground for the great behaviorist revolution in American psychology (Watson, 1930). According to this, pschology was entirely concerned with external behaviors, not the analysis of the mind underlying the behavior. Thus, it all but eliminated cognitive psychology for 40 years (Anderson, 1980).
But, the success of cognitive psychology in the past 25 years in analyzing complex intellectual processes testifies to the importance of such concepts as mental structures and processes.
Three inter-disciplinary fields exerted the major influence on modern cognitive psychology, namely: (1) human-factor work and information theory, (2) artificial intelligence, and (3) linguistics. Psychologist Broadbent was most influential in integrating ideas from the field of research in human skills and performance and the filed of information theory to result in the information-processing approach.
In studying the design of computers that learn, we have gained much knowledge about the cognitive processes within us. Newell and Simon conrtibuted much in educating cognitive psychologists on the implications of artificial intelligence, and in educating the artificial intelligence people on the implications of cognitive psychology. A host of concepts, such as informatin processing, short-term memory, long-term memory, etc., has been taken from computer science and used in cognitive psychological theories.
In the 1950's, Chomsky developed a mode for analyzing the structure of language (i.e., the Transformation Theory). His linguistic analysis proved critical in enabling the cognitive psychologists to fight off the prevailing behavioristic concepts, which were incapable of explaining those complexities. George Miller in the 1950's and 1960's was instrumental in identifying new ways of studying language.
However, high-level programming languages exist for specifying the behavior of the computer. A cognitive theory should be like a computer program. That is, it should be a precise specification of the bahavior, but offered in terms sufficiently abstract to provide a conceptually tractable framework for understanding the phenomenon.
The task of the cognitive psychologist is a highly inferential one. He must proceed from observations of the behavior of humans performing intellectual tasks to conclusions about the abstract mechanisms underlying the behavior.
The important characteristic of an information-analysis is that it involves tracing a sequence of mental operations and their products (i.e., information) in the performance of a particular task.
The emphasis on performance accounts for the two most popular measures in cognitive psychology--frequncy of success on a task, and performance speed. The performance orientation of information-processing psychology helps to make this study more directly applicable to issues of improving human cognition.
Cognitive psychologists propose theories about what is happening inside a subject's head on the basis of the subject's external behavior. Clearly, there is no way to know for certain what is actually going on inside. What is important is that the theory be accurate in predicting a subject's action under a certain condition. For instach, where two study techniques are being compared, a good theory would predict which technique will result in a subject's learning more items (Anderson, 1980).
The theories to be presented here are the best available understanding human cognitive functioning, and we desire to make use of this body of knowledge for practical applications. Specifically, we desire to investigate the fundamental question of "how to look". What is the role of the eye in "actively looking" at a character? Eye movements are intimately related to perception, visual memory, and pattern recognition. Eye movements play an essential role in vision. In particular, eye movements are controlled by cognitive models already present in the brain (Stark and Ellis, 1981).
But, how is information recognized? How are perceptual patterns perceived? The cognitive process in the human being may be regarded as an information-processing process which may be analyzed into a sequence of ordered steps. Fundamental topics of importance are: (a) How is information perceived?, (b) How are concepts formed?, and (c) How does human memory work?
Specifically, we want to know, "How can we make the information contained in a Chinese character easy to use?" By that we mean easy to understand as well as easy to remember.
The human mind processes information in a sequence of steps, namely: the external stimuli flow into the very short-term memory (VSTM), through the short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM), and back out again. In terms of information processing, understanding means processing by the STM. So, making information easy to understand means enabling the STM to create large chunks of information quickly and accurately.
Remembering means retrieving information from the LTM, in which is stored the abstracted and condensed form of what was received by the STM. During recall, the mind re-generates words and images from the condensed data stored. Thus, understanding is primarily determined by the organization of knowledge, while remembering primarily by the contents of knowledge.
We shall go into more detail on how these may be fruitfully applied to the learning of Chinese characters.
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Chinese Characters and Cognitive Psychology