Measuring the mind

The mind as a black box?

The challenge for cognitive psychologists is to try to work out what is going on inside the black box. However, not all psychologists are entirely happy with this and, historically, a very different view was more popular.

Early on in the 20th century, psychologists were determined to only consider the input to and the output from the black box. They were focused on what kind of input brings about a given output. And because of this they discussed the difference between the stimulus (the input) and the response (the output). Now with this kind of psychology both the stimulus and the response can be directly observed and measured. This kind of enterprise is exactly analogous to the hard sciences (i.e., Physics and Chemistry) that deal with directly observable things.

Psychology characterised thus was known as Behaviourism – the science of behaviour.

Let’s pause slightly and consider the kind of things that go on in the hard sciences. The ultimate objective in these sciences is to describe the laws of nature. If we can provide such a law, then we can predict with certainty what will happen if particular circumstances obtain.

If we lower the temperature of water enough it will freeze.

For those familiar with Physics, success has been achieved in the generation of the laws of thermodynamics. For Behaviourists the aspiration was to develop a science of psychology in pursuit of the laws of behaviour.

The overall aim was to be able to predict the circumstances under which a given behaviour would occur and therefore set out the laws of behaviour.

Cognitive psychologists have other aspirations. Simply concentrating on stimuli and their associated responses misses out on investigating what might be described as the internal workings of the mind. Cognitive psychologists attempt to understand what is going on inside the black box.

A really useful analogy here is with understanding the operation of a modern computer – well ok a smart phone. If we are to understand the operation of a smart phone, we need to consider a lot more than how it reacts when we speak into it and press the touch screen.

It is possible to distinguish hardware from software.

• Hardware is simply all of the physical constituents of the phone its casing, screen, camera and all of the internal bits and pieces (the electronics, the computer chips, the sim card).

• Software refers essentially to all of the programming code that runs on the phone, that is, the operating system and the different apps.

We need to understand the nature of both the hardware and the software if we are to understand how a smart phone works.

For cognitive psychologists, the hardware/software distinction has been used by analogy to separate out discussion of the brain (the hardware) from discussion of the mind (the software). Cognitive psychologists are trying to figure out how this kind of software works.