Cognitive neuroscience and the progress of psychological science: Once more with feeling (and other mental constructs)
✍ Scribed by Stephen S. Ilardi; David Feldman
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 33 KB
- Volume
- 57
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0021-9762
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
On the Nonsuperfluous Nature of Cognition
In his critique of the cognitive neuroscience (CN) perspective, Plaud (2001) avers, "not once in the annals of scientific scrutiny has a 'cognition' been experimentally manipulated or studied directly apart from its behavioral parameters" (p. 1110). Depending upon what Plaud intends by the term "apart from its behavioral parameters," this claim is either mistaken or, at best, merely misleading. Certainly, there exist numerous published reports of the direct biological manipulation of cognitive phenomena, ranging from the induction of self-deprecatory thoughts during an acute neuronal catecholamine depletion challenge (Berman et al., 1999) to the altered recall of affectively toned autobiographical memories during anesthetic inactivation of the right cerebral hemisphere (Ross, Homan, & Buck, 1994). Such experimental manipulations of cognition, which illustrate the proximal causal influence of neurophysiology on cognitive events, may legitimately be said to occur "apart from behavioral parameters."
Perhaps, however, Plaud's (2001b) claim rests on the premise that the measurement of the target phenomenon (e.g., memory, self-appraisal, etc.) in the aforementioned examples is dependent to some degree upon the participant's communication of his or her cognitive processes via "verbal behavior." If so, then Skinner's (1957) related suggestionthat all verbal behavior is itself accounted for on the basis of RB's articulated learning principles-could conceivably provide a basis for claiming that the verbal communication of cognitive processes (even those processes manipulated biologically) must occur within the penumbra of "behavioral parameters." This argument fails, however, in light of the fact that Skinner's radical behaviorism (RB) is decidedly not an adequate explanatory account of human verbal abilities (Gallistel, 2000;Hayes & Wilson, 1993; see also Chomsky, 1959Chomsky, , 1966)). Indeed, Skinner's classic monograph, Verbal Behavior, represents a "just so story" about language acquisition spun almost entirely in the absence of corroborating empirical investigations (Leahey, 2000). Moreover, as discussed at length in Ilardi and Feldman (2001b), even Hayes's innovative extension of the Skinnerian RB