Introduction to Psychophysical Approaches to Cognition

This chapter discusses psychological approaches to cognition. It describes some of the attributes popular in current usage of sensory and cognitive processes. The Platonian split between bodily and mental processes continues to inform the modern partition of psychological processes into perceptual and cognitive. Plato's partition of the mind and particularly his denigration of sensory knowledge did not leave room for the development of good psychological theories of perception, learning, or memory. Aristotle did succeed in creating such theories precisely, because he discarded much of the Platonian dualism, especially as far as psychology is concerned. Among his other contributions, Aristotle largely anticipated the modern discipline of memory psychophysics, coming close to proposing a (re)perceptual, analogous account of memory. S.S. Stevens provides a critical function for conscious, cognitive processes in his psychophysics. Stevens mentions that any sensory judgment presupposes an intentional process of abstracting the judged dimension from the totality of the stimulus. The operation of matching requires the abstraction of a commensurate dimension on the basis of which the sensory analysis is prosecuted.