The Cognition Project

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Richard Shiffrin, who offers a student’s perspective on the cognitive psychology scene at Stanford in the 1960s. He worked with Gordon Bower and Richard Atkinson and went on to become one of the most influential researchers studying human memory. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is about Roger Shepard, who created innovative methods to let us peek inside people’s heads. He ultimately used those tools to propose psychology’s first universal law. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.Continuing to trace the development of cognitive psychology, this episode tells the story of Gordon Bower. At a time when psychologists still had to demonstrate that this new approach to their science could offer insights that went beyond merely studying behavior, Bower devised clever methods for revealing the complexity of human minds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Richard Atkinson, who did groundbreaking work exploring the structure of human memory before going on to be the Director of the National Science Foundation, Chancellor of UC San Diego, and ultimately President of the entire University of California. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is the story of Dan Slobin, who offers both a perspective on the East Coast origins of cognitive science and how it evolved on the West Coast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Tom Bever, who took a circuitous path that led him through several important events in the cognitive revolution. Bever ultimately became an influential psycholinguist in his own right.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is the story of Jean Berko Gleason, who was a student at Harvard just as new ideas about studying language and the mind were emerging. Her work revealed that even young children seem to internalize the rules of language, an idea that we are going to revisit when artificial neural networks come into the story. Those artificial neural networks power today’s AI chatbots, but Berko Gleason remains skeptical. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This the story of Noam Chomsky, whose work on language was arguably one of the key components of the “cognitive revolution” that led to the creation of cognitive science. The interview took place in 2013. More recently, Chomsky has been in the news for his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein. If you would prefer to skip this interview you can hear a different perspective on the same period from the influential psycholinguist Lila Gleitman in the next episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.In this episode, we get the chance to hear the story of Lila Gleitman – one of the researchers who did foundational work in understanding how young children come to acquire language. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This bonus episode of The Cognition Project features the introduction of The Laws of Thought, Tom Griffiths's new book. The interviews in The Cognition Project were used as part of the research for the book, which tells the story of the quest for a mathematical theory of the mind, from the cognitive revolution to modern AI. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Susan Carey, who worked with Jerome Bruner both as an undergraduate and a graduate student before going on to make her own deep contributions to our understanding of how children’s minds work. As a consequence, she had a front row seat to the earliest days of cognitive science and helped it grow through her interactions with psychologists, linguists, and philosophers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.Today’s episode is with Molly Potter, who did ground-breaking work developing new methods for studying how our brains extract and store information from the world around us. She also had the chance to see some of the important moments in the creation of cognitive science firsthand. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.The first story in the series is that of Jerome Bruner, who was really the person who helped to launch the cognitive revolution. In the first half of the 20th century, psychologists decided that if they wanted to be scientists they should study behavior and its causes rather than subjective impressions and mental states. Bruner intentionally ran experiments that revealed the limits of this approach and started to show how mathematical ideas could be used to create a rigorous science of the mind. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.