Cognitive Psychology in Crisis: Ameliorating the Shortcomings of Representationalism
Channel: Patric Nordbeck
Date: 30/04/2013

This lecture was my own initiative, and not official in any way. I saw it as an opportunity to present parts of my thesis to an intelligent audience in order to get some good criticism and comments on it. There will be a few corrections to what is said in the lecture. I should have used my notes more. Also, I obviously had to cut a lot of stuff out that would change certain content matter mentioned, and there are lots more to do with the concepts in radical embodied cognitive science and ecological psychology than what I mention.


9:25 I've used a blog post by Eric Charles to structure this section. As he mentions in his post, there is a long list of things that we do know about the brain, but, this list was a mirror on the brain mapping project and has more relevance to my criticism on how we usually see the brain, and what we actually know to the contrary. Also, it is not "my examples", they are Eric's.

14:00 mapping white matter pathways, was what I had forgotten.

18:45 it should be mentioned here also that theory-ladenness plays a role, in that the assumptions guides our hypotheses and conclusions -and does so in an all too restrictive sense. Assuming memory exists, we look to find memory, and fit our results to this assumption.

29:30 was not Gibson himself, but Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk in a paper called The "Visual Cliff".

32:20 so, the main point here is that there is no clear-cut distinction in representationalism when perception ends and memory begins, and no clear-cut distinction between memories and imagination. Embodied Cognition posits that perception does not end and the dichotomy of past-present doesn't exist.

37:25 the actual definition is posted in my blog (http://pnpsyphi.blogspot.com/2013/04/virtual-affordances-electronic-sports.html).

39:25 easily confused with connectionism. Connectionism was argued against by Fodor and Pylyshyn, and so doesn't belong with representationalism.

41:50 and thank you for watching!


Most sources used in the video;
Blogs and blogposts
Scandinavia And The World (illustrations); http://satwcomic.com/
Eric Charles blog post; http://fixingpsychology.blogspot.se/2013/04/what-do-we-know-for-sure-about-brain.html
Wilson and Golonka's blog; http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.se/
Skeptical Neuroimaging Analysis workshop; http://sna.neura.edu.au/

Books
James Gibson - The ecological approach to visual perception
Anthony Chemero - Radical embodied cognitive science
Pfeifer and Bongard - How the body shapes the way we think
Gerd Gigerenzer - Rationality for mortals
Bem and de Jong - Theoretical issues in psychology

Articles
Tim van Gelder - What might cognition be if not computation
Fodor and Pylyshyn - Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis

Find me on;
Blog; http://pnpsyphi.blogspot.se/
Twitter; http://twitter.com/pnPsyPhi