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The Cognition Project


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  • 10. From Rats to Hypotheses: Gordon Bower

    48:23||Ep. 10
    The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.Continuing to trace the development of cognitive psychology, this episode tells the story of Gordon Bower. At a time when psychologists still had to demonstrate that this new approach to their science could offer insights that went beyond merely studying behavior, Bower devised clever methods for revealing the complexity of human minds.

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  • 9. Computers and Memory: Richard Atkinson

    18:13||Ep. 9
    The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Richard Atkinson, who did groundbreaking work exploring the structure of human memory before going on to be the Director of the National Science Foundation, Chancellor of UC San Diego, and ultimately President of the entire University of California.
  • 8. Heading West: Dan Slobin

    01:07:19||Ep. 8
    The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is the story of Dan Slobin, who offers both a perspective on the East Coast origins of cognitive science and how it evolved on the West Coast.
  • 7. Chomsky, Chimpsky, and Beyond: Tom Bever

    01:24:25||Ep. 7
    The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Tom Bever, who took a circuitous path that led him through several important events in the cognitive revolution. Bever ultimately became an influential psycholinguist in his own right. 
  • 6. From Wugs to Chatbots: Jean Berko Gleason

    01:02:00||Ep. 6
    The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is the story of Jean Berko Gleason, who was a student at Harvard just as new ideas about studying language and the mind were emerging. Her work revealed that even young children seem to internalize the rules of language, an idea that we are going to revisit when artificial neural networks come into the story. Those artificial neural networks power today’s AI chatbots, but Berko Gleason remains skeptical.
  • 4. Generating Grammars: Noam Chomsky

    35:08||Ep. 4
    The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This the story of Noam Chomsky, whose work on language was arguably one of the key components of the “cognitive revolution” that led to the creation of cognitive science. The interview took place in 2013. More recently, Chomsky has been in the news for his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein. If you would prefer to skip this interview you can hear a different perspective on the same period from the influential psycholinguist Lila Gleitman in the next episode.
  • 5. Listening to Babies: Lila Gleitman

    55:17||Ep. 5
    The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.In this episode, we get the chance to hear the story of Lila Gleitman – one of the researchers who did foundational work in understanding how young children come to acquire language.