The Shape of Code

I have just discovered “Experimental Psychology” by Robert S. Woodworth; first published in 1938, I have a reprinted in Great Britain copy from 1951. The Internet Archive has a copy of the 1954 revised edition; it’s a very useful pdf, but it does not have the atmospheric musty smell of an old book.

The Archives of Psychology was edited by Woodworth and contain reports of what look like ground breaking studies done in the 1930s.

The book is surprisingly modern, in that the topics covered are all of active interest today, in fields related to cognitive psychology. There are lots of experimental results (which always biases me towards really liking a book) and the coverage is extensive.

The history of cognitive psychology, as I understood it until this week, was early researchers asking questions, doing introspection and sometimes running experiments in the late 1800s and early 1900s (e.g., Wundt and Ebbinghaus), behaviorism dominants the field, behaviorism is eviscerated by Chomsky in the 1960s and cognitive psychology as we know it today takes off.

Now I know that lots of interesting and relevant experiments were being done in the 1920s and 1930s.

What is missing from this book? The most obvious omission is equations; lots of data points plotted on graph paper, but no attempt to fit an equation to anything, e.g., an exponential curve to the rate of learning.

A more subtle omission is the world view; digital computers had not been invented yet and Shannon’s information theory was almost 20 years in the future. Researchers tend to be heavily influenced by the tools they use and the zeitgeist. Computers as calculators and information processors could not be used as the basis for models of the human mind; they had not been invented yet.