Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1916 to the son of a German-born electrical engineer and a versatile pianist. He graduated from the University of Chicago with an undergraduate degree in political science in 1937 and a doctorate in political science in 1943. He was awarded the Turing Award in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. Simon died on February 9, 2001, at the age of 85. A less cold trivia, Simon's Chinese name is Sima He, which he started on his second visit to China in 1980 as a member of the American psychological delegation. At the age of seventy, he picked up Chinese and began to learn.
The book consists of eight chapters and is actually a transcript of Simon's speeches during his visit to China. The lecture should be popular, and even so, for me, the amount of information is large enough.
There are three schools of thought that study complex behavior, namely neo-behaviorism, gestalt psychology, and information processing. What are their different views on complex behavior? Neo-behaviorism emphasizes objective experimental methods and requires strict control of experiments, and its methods are operationalist, that is, its results can be repeated by others. At the same time, it divides complex psychological phenomena into simple parts and studies relatively simple primary phenomena, the so-called reductionism. Gestalt psychology believes that problem solving depends on "epiphany"; that the basic laws of perception are innate to the organism and are not influenced by experience; and that complex phenomena are broken down into relationships between stimulus responses. The information processing school believes that both stimulation and the current psychological state of the participant determines how the participant responds. The so-called experience includes the state of the body and the content of memory storage. Behaviorism appears simpler, most operable, and does not rely on a priori as Gestalt psychology does. Gestalt psychology holds that behavior is innate and unaffected by experience, but its definition is vague and more subjective. The information processing school seems to synthesize the views of both schools, arguing that transcendental knowledge and acquired experience work together to produce behavior.
Memory and learning
How can I remember faster? What is it to remember enough?
I have to mention the EPAM program, which is a human reconfirmation memory model that can confirm five phenomena:
1. Machining time: The time required to process a block is 8 seconds.
2. Significance effect: The meaning of the learning material affects the time required for learning. The time it takes to associate meaningful blocks CAT‐DOGS is 1/3 of the time it takes to associate meaningless syllables CEF‐DAX.
3. Effects of symbol similarity
4. Learn once and learn multiple times: The EPAM program can tell people under what conditions to learn multiple times and what conditions to learn at once. This relies on two factors: the difficulty of learning the material; and the learner's strategy
5. Series Position Effect: Many years ago people noticed the fact that if participants were asked to learn 12 meaningless syllables, the first and last syllables would be learned first. The middle syllables learn slowly and make a lot of mistakes. In terms of recall effect, it is good at both ends and poor in the middle.
We can see from the EPAM program its guiding significance for real-world learning.
Humans are memorized by blocks, processing a block for about 8 seconds, assuming that to memorize the title of the book, we can divide it into two blocks "recognize" and "know", so that it takes 16 seconds for us to remember, but if we treat "cognition" as a block, then we only need 8 seconds to remember. In the reading should be almost all Chinese, perhaps you will feel that "cognition" is two words, remembering is not a problem at all, then we will think about common foreign language learning scenarios. If we were to memorize remarkable, when you memorized it as r-e-m-a-r-k-a-b-l-e, oh my God you figure out how long it will take! If it is re-mark-able, or even remark-able, the processing speed is very fast. Of course, the amount of information in each block is still a certain foundation, if you are completely unfamiliar with re, mark, able, then you may also need to subdivide to process.
To learn faster and more solidly, we need to pay attention to the meaningful effect. The more you understand the material content, the easier it is to process and memorize. At the same time, when learning, if the material is too difficult, it is difficult for us to learn, and if the material is too fast, it is also difficult to learn. This means that we have to find materials of the right difficulty and spend a lot of time.
As for the series of position effects, I immediately thought of the primacy effect and proximate effect mentioned in "Social Psychology", which was first proposed by the American psychologist Lockins. The primacy effect refers to the influence of the first impression formed by the two parties to the interaction on future exchanges when they first meet, that is, the effect of "preconceptions" and preset positions. The recency effect is the psychological effect of an individual on the formation of impressions of the latest external stimuli. That is, the primacy effect emphasizes the first impression, and the proximate effect emphasizes the latest stimulus. Both effects may exist at the same time, but one is always dominant. Knowing a stranger, maybe the first cause effect makes you have a bad impression of him, but in time you run into him again and find that he is not as bad as he thinks, then the proximate effect is in play.
Cognitive science has developed to this day, and we all know that human memory is divided into short-term memory and long-term memory. As mentioned earlier, the breadth of a person's memory is not in the amount of information, but in the way it is encoded. Miller proposed that the smallest unit of measurement of short-term memory is a "chunk" (chunk). Damage to the prefrontal lobe of the brain affects short-term memory, and damage to the temporal lobe (especially the left temporal lobe) affects long-term memory.
Short-term memory
The capacity is 5 to 7 blocks
The time for short-term memory storage (including recognition and remembering) is less than 1 second; the time to recover short-term memory is about 150 milliseconds, and this recovery time is the time spoken, which may be limited by the tongue.
Short-term memories are fast, but have a small capacity of only 4 blocks.
Note that the holding time is short if it is unstable; if it is repeated, the retention time can be very long.
Long-term memory
The memory speed of long-term memory is slow, but the memory capacity is unlimited.
The deposit time for each block takes 8 seconds
Things in long-term memory must be transferred to short-term memory before they can be restored and applied.
In a word, short-term memory is remembered quickly and forgotten quickly, and long-term memory is remembered slowly and slowly forgotten.
How do I fix the problem?
When we try to solve a problem, sometimes we get confused. Why don't I know what to do? Or do you know how to do it but still can't act? Simon clearly points out that "because of people's habits of thinking, ignoring a certain possibility when thinking about problems, not thinking of a step that seems to deviate from the goal but is actually close to the goal, or not making good use of the representational ability of the image, can make the otherwise easy problem very difficult." At the same time, he summarized four problem-solving strategies.
1． Goal recursion strategy.
2． Perceptual strategy. The perceptual strategy relies on external stimuli and is the strategy directed at stimuli.
3． Pattern strategy. The pattern strategy is also an internally guided strategy, which has no goal problems.
4． Rote memory strategy. This method is to memorize a series of steps that are done right by rote.
To better characterize the problem, you need to establish a symbology. He made a statement:
A well-established symbology should also have more functions, which can be summarized as follows:
(1) Input symbol:Paper, pencil plus hand movement, you can enter symbols for white paper.
(2) Output symbol:The paper itself cannot output the symbol, but our eyes can make it output. When we read, the text symbols are output from the paper and into the eyes.
(3) Store symbols.
(4) Copy symbol: recognize the three words "psychology", and copy these three words, stored somewhere is the copy symbol.
(5) Build symbolstructure: Form a symbol structure in the symbology by finding the relationship between various symbols.
(6) Conditional transfer: relying on the mastered symbol to continue to complete the behavior. If you already have a certain symbol system in your memory, plus external input, you can continue to complete this activity process.
We can think of this symbology as a metaphor. According to Simon, if we want to achieve something, we need to make inputs first and then expand the output. A、B、C...... Modules all operate in this way, establishing connections with each other, forming networks, and making the next migration.
That is, learning- reviewing- associating- transferring.
There are two ways to try to solve an ill-structured problem: one is to plan, to abstract the whole big problem, and to abstract the elements that help solve the problem; the other is the satisfaction method. The so-called satisfaction method is to only ask for a more satisfactory solution, and does not guarantee that this satisfactory solution is the best solution.
Ill‐structured problems are those in which the meaning, goal, or operator is unclear. Although he mainly talks about "calculation", I think these two methods can give us a variety of inspirations. Sometimes we want to change, such as becoming more disciplined, better, healthier, but this is big and empty, and only by taking concrete actions under big problems can we achieve the goal of "upward". Sometimes we want to eat a mouthful of fat, otherwise we will be discouraged, but in fact, the "satisfaction method" is also a kind of progress, and the "satisfaction method" will be continuously replaced in the future, and perhaps the "ideal law" can be achieved.
The analysis of experts and novices in the book is also very impressive. We often think that solving problems requires a clear goal first, and then gradually solving it from scratch, but this is actually the practice of novices. What would experts do? The expert will immediately start to solve the problem and reason immediately. Experts do not pay attention to intermediate processes, novices not only need to come step by step, but also need to consciously pay attention, which makes the speed of problem solving for novices slower. In addition, experts are good at characterizing problems, while novices can only follow the rules. However, if you ask the experts how they did it, they can't tell why. Of course, this is not a mystery, but because some knowledge cannot be explained in clear language, and can only be perceived by vague feelings.
Simon says it's much more fun to see the eight directions than to get into one corner. The content of Cognition is biased towards science, but we can clearly see the breadth of Simon's vision and the excellence of his ability to transfer, which may be one of the reasons why it can cross many boundaries and shine.