Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!bbn!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!pitt!cisunx!vangelde From: vangelde@cisunx.UUCP (Timothy J Van) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: AI (GOFAI) and cognitive psychology Message-ID: <11009@cisunx.UUCP> Date: 13 Jul 88 04:48:34 GMT Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Sys Lines: 25 What with the connectionist bandwagon, everyone seems to be getting a lot clearer about just what AI is and what sort of a picture of cognition it embodies. The short story, of course, is that AI claims that thought in general and intelligence in particular is the rule governed manipulation of symbols. So AI is committed to symbolic representations with a combinatorial syntax and formal rules defined over them. The implemenation of those rules is computation. Supposedly, the standard or "classical" view in cognitive psychology is committed to exactly the same picture in the case of human cognition, and so goes around devising models and experiments based on these commitments. My question is - how much of cognitive psychology literally fits this kind of characterization? Some classics, for example the early Shepard and Metzler experiments on image rotation dont seem to fit the description very closely at all. Others, such as the SOAR system, often seem to remain pretty vague about exactly how much of their symbolic machinery they are really attributing to the human cognizer. So, to make my question a little more concrete - I'd be interested to know what people's favorite examples of systems that REALLY DO FIT THE DESCRIPTION are? (Or any other interesting comments, of course.) Tim van Gelder