ABSTRACT
The cognitive revolution is widely believed to have begun in 1956 and for one of its most eloquent advocates, George Miller, on a precise day: September 11th, which was the second day of a meeting of the “Special Interest Group in Information Theory” at Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT) It had a truly stellar array of participants who went on to play important roles in the development of cognitive science. They included Allen Newell and Herbert Simon talking about their computer-based logic machine, a group from MIT described their use of the largest computer yet developed to simulate Hebb’s concept of neural cell assemblies, John Swets described the transformation of sensory psychophysics resulting from the application of signal detection theory, of which more later, a statistical analysis of syntax was presented by Victor Yngve and finally Noam Chomsky introduced his revolutionary transformational grammar. It convinced Miller that there was a viable interdisciplinary area that could integrate experimental psychology, theoretical linguistics, computer science and social science into a new discipline. The field initially went by a range of different names, Cognitive Studies in Harvard, Information Processing Psychology at Carnegie Mellon and cognitive science at the University of California San Diego. It was the latter name that was subsequently adopted by a major funder, the Sloane Foundation, in initiating an extensive and ambitious research programme, and cognitive science has since become the dominant name for this broad interdisciplinary field.
