[8][1][9] Important publications in triggering the cognitive revolution include psychologist George Miller's 1956 article "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"[10] (one of the most frequently cited papers in psychology),[11] linguist Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957)[12] and "Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" (1959),[13][14] and foundational works in the field of artificial intelligence by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon, such as the 1958 article "Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving".
However, whether Chomsky's position on language fits into the traditional rationalist approach has been questioned by philosopher John Cottingham.
[20] George Miller, one of the scientists involved in the cognitive revolution, sets the date of its beginning as September 11, 1956, when several researchers from fields like experimental psychology, computer science, and theoretical linguistics presented their work on cognitive science-related topics at a meeting of the 'Special Interest Group in Information Theory' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This was done by designing experiments that used computational models of artificial intelligence to systematically test theories about human mental processes in a controlled laboratory setting.
[1] When defining the "Cognitive Approach," Ulric Neisser says that humans can only interact with the "real world" through intermediary systems that process information like sensory input.
He says that modern cognitive scientists, like figures in the past such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), don't believe in the idea of the mind starting as a "blank slate."
[8] Pinker, who agrees with Chomsky's idea of innate universal grammar, claims that although humans speak around six thousand mutually unintelligible languages, the grammatical programs in their minds differ far less than the actual speech.
[8] Pinker claims another important idea from the cognitive revolution was that the mind is modular, with many parts cooperating to generate a train of thought or an organized action.
Henry L. Roediger III argues that the common narrative most people believe about the cognitive revolution is inaccurate.
He claims that behaviorist research is responsible for successful treatments of autism, stuttering, and aphasia, and that most psychologists actually study observable behavior, even if they interpret their results cognitively.
He believes that the cognitive revolution steered psychology away from behaviorism and this was good, but then another form of anti-mentalism took its place: computationalism.
[24] Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman argues in his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1991) that a positive result of the emergence of "cognitive science" was the departure from "simplistic behaviorism".
Exceptions include John Searle, Jerome Bruner, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Alan Gauld, Benny Shanon, Claes von Hofsten, and others.
Edelman argues that he agrees with the critical and dissenting approaches of these authors that are exceptions to the majority view of cognitivism.
However, both classical symbolic computational theories and connectionist models developed largely independently of biological considerations.
The authors point out that many researchers who previously carried out psychological and behavioral studies now give properly cognitive neuroscientific explanations.
They mention the example of Stephen Kosslyn, who postulated his theory of the pictorial format of mental images in the 1980s based on behavioral studies.
Later, with the advent of magnetic resonance imaging technology, Kosslyn was able to show that when people imagine, the visual cortex is activated.
The classical and 'intellectualist' view of cognition, considers that it is essentially processing propositional information of a verbal or numerical type.
Therefore, this perspective does not rule out 'classical' symbols –amodal ones, such as those typical of verbal language or numerical reasoning– but rather considers that these interact with imagination, perception and action situated in the world.