Here’s a link to the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Minnesota top 100 cognitive science papers of the last century.  Definitely a useful reference.  Debates about modularity, connectionism, the mind as computational, limits on human rationality, and so forth all emerged from these papers.  Not a lot of culture, inequality or anthropology in the bunch, and a definite bias towards psychology as universal rather than also being variable and contextual–but, hey, this site has to work on something…

And if you haven’t seen it, Edge asked top scholars in 2008, What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?

In looking at the first page of answers, I am struck by how much scientists are now reworking the views developed in those top 100 cognitive science papers.

So, Joseph LeDoux: “Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.”

Continue reading “Cognitive Science and the Advance of Ideas”