Knowledge Representation in Cognitive Psychology
Abstract
Formalisms for representing human knowledge are currently being developed in cognitive psychology, a branch of human experimental psychology that is concerned with inferring and modelling, on the basis of behavioral data, the processes involved in complex mental activities such as perception, reading, and problem-solving. These formalisms are based on concepts from graph theory, formal logic, linguistics, computation theory, and artificial intelligence. Models based on such representations usually take the form of large computer simulations in a language such as LISP. Although these representation formalisms have clearly been very fruitful in developing theories and suggesting experiments, cognitive psychology is just now beginning to learn how to deal with the serious problems of the non-identifiability and the non-uniqueness of knowledge representations, a problem similar to the classic "black box" problem in automata theory. But these formalisms, with their emphasis on qualitative, symbolic, complex, discrete structures, as opposed to the earlier approaches using the mathematics of stochastic processes and continuous numeric variables, mark the development of a "new mathematics" in cognitive psychology.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1980
- Accession Number
- ADA111464
Entities
People
- David E. Kieras
Organizations
- University of Arizona