ABSTRACT
The computer metaphor has had a long and productive history in cognitive psychology. One of its first uses was in the presentation of the Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) model of human memory. The memory system was described as a computer under the control of a remote operator: structural features of memory were described as hardware or built-in programs, while memory control processes were described as the commands and programs under the control of the remote operator. The computer metaphor has yielded many fruitful results, including further insights into human memory (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981; Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997) and the characterization of cognitive processes as serial or parallel (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Sternberg, 1966; Townsend & Ashby, 1983). Recently, the connections between computer science and cognitive psychology have been made tighter, as algorithms used in computer science have been proposed as candidates for cognitive processes (Daw, Courville, & Dayan, 2008; Griffiths, Vul, & Sanborn, 2012; Sanborn & Silva, 2013; Sanborn, Griffiths, & Navarro, 2010; Shi, Griffiths, Feldman, & Sanborn, 2010). Importation of ideas has run both ways: studying computational problems in psychology has also led to the development of new methods in computer science (Anderson & Matessa, 1992; Griffiths & Ghahramani, 2005).
