Showing papers by "Jerome S. Bruner published in 1961"

The act of discovery.

Abstract: The active participation in the learning process by the child might result in the following hypothesized benefits: an increase in intellectual potency so as to make the acquired information more readily viable in problem solving, the enaction of the learning activities in terms of the intrinsic reward of discovery itself (as contrasted with the drive-reduction model of learning), learning the heuristics of discovery, and making material more readily accessible in memory. From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:1FD21B. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1962-00777-001)

Individual and collective problems in the study of thinking

Abstract: A Dutch colleague has done us the service of classifying and counting the articles appearing between 1950 and 1954 in the Psychological Abstracts under the heading of “Cognition” (van de Geer, 1957). Of the total in this category (a rather staggering total of about 4471 titles) nearly one third deal with learning and memory and nearly two thirds with perception; the remainder, about 6 per cent, concern themselves with the topics of thinking and imagination. I have no data for the six years since then, but I have the strong impression of a most vigorous and disciplined renewal of activity in the field. Sir Frederic Bartlett (1958) has published a major book on thinking, likening it to the symbolized internalization of motor skills. Several major books from the Geneva laboratory have been written and translated into English in the last few years, perhaps the most important of which is the very challenging The Growth of Logical Thinking (1958) in which Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget take the child to the brink of adulthood a t which point concrete operations are replaced by the propositional or formal operations we know as adult thought. Luria (1959) in the Soviet Union has carried ahead the tradition established by Vigotsky’s work and has begun to show the manner in which language and symbolizing serve to free the organism from the control of stimuli so that it may gain control over its own activities through the transformations of thought. At the Cognition Project a t Harvard, my associates and I have shown the way in which aspects of thinking can be conceived of as planful strategies designed to gain and organize information while a t the same time regulating the risks of failure and the strains of overload brought about by man’s highly limited capacity for processing information a t any given moment of time. The field of psycholinguistics has flourished as a result of the influences of linguistics and of information theory. At last we have stopped treating Benjamin Whorf (1956) as a delightful oddity whose claims were the intriguing stuff we could put into introductory lectures while assuring our colleagues that his concept of linguistic relativity was patently absurd. We have learned about the tremendous power of the discontinuous variables of structural linguistics : phonemes, allophones, lexemes, distinctive features and, hopefully some day, sememes. There have been challenging experimental contributions in psycholinguistics by brilliant scholars and experimentalists such as Miller et al. (1960), Brown and Lenneberg (1954), and Osgood et al. (1957). Since Hebb’s pioneering book on the Organization of Behavior (1949) in which a concept of structure in thought was given a hypothetical neural stiltus, there have been numerous advances both on the neurological side, notably in the concepts of centrifugal control of information intake and on the side of behavioral changes predicted by the general Hebbian theory, in-