Three

THREE - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING
p 64
An ant, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The
apparent complexity of its behavior over time is largely a
reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it
finds itself.

p 65
...I should like to explore this hypothesis but with the word
"man" substituted for "ant".

...I would like to view this information-packed memory less as
part of the organism than as part of the environment to which it
adapts.

p 66
...there are only few "intrinsic" characteristics of the inner
environment of thinking man that limit the adaptation of thought
to the shape of the problem environment. All else in thinking
and problem-solving behavior is artificial -is learned and is
subject to improvement through the invention of improved designs
and their storage in memory.

  PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCIENCE OF THE ARTIFICIAL
- Search Strategies
p 68
[Analysis of a cryptarithmetic problem]

- The Limits on Performance

  LIMIT ON SPEED OF CONCEPT ATTAINMENT
p 74
...the bottleneck [...] must lie in the small amount of rapid-
access storage (so-called short-term memory) available and the
time required to move items from the limited short-term store to
the large-scale long-term store. [Referred to as STM and LTM;
short-term memory limits also known as "cognitive strain"].

  THE PARAMETERS OF MEMORY - FIVE SECONDS PER CHUNK
p 80
The theory that has been most successful in explaining these and
other phenomena reported in the literature on rote verbal
learning is an information-processing theory, programmed as a
computer simulation of human behavior, dubbed EPAM.
... The EPAM theory gives us a basis for understanding what a
"chunk" is. A chunk is a maximum familiar substructure of the
stimulus.
...EPAM postulates constancy in the time required to fixate a
chunk ["fixation parameter"].

  THE PARAMETERS OF MEMORY - SEVEN CHUNKS OR IS IT TWO?
p 81
The second limiting property [...] is the amount of information
that can be held in short-term memory ["short-term capacity
parameter"].

  THE ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY
- Stimulus Chunking
- Visual Memory
p 89
[Analysis of the memorisation of a chess board] ...we are lead
to the hypothesis that memory is an organization of list
structures (lists whose components can also be lists), which
include descriptive components (two-termed relations) and short
(three-element or four-element) component lists.


  PROCESSING NATURAL LANGUAGE
p 91
[Debate on language universals]... producing utterances and
understanding the utterances of others depend on some
characteristic of the human central nervous system which are
common in all languages but also essential to other aspects of
human thinking besides speech and listening.

The kind of assumptions I made earlier about the structure of
human memory are just the kinds of assumptions one would want to
make for a processing system capable of handling language.
Indeed there has been extensive borrowing back and forth between
the two fields. Both postulate hierarchically organized list
structure as a basic principle of memory organization.

- Semantics in Language Processing
p 92-94
[Ambiguities, and their solving with lists] I saw the man on the
hill with the telescope.


  CONCLUSION
p 95
...behavior is adapted to goals, hence [...] artificial...

p 97
I have said nothing about physiology. [...]
I have discussed the organization of the mind without saying
anything of the structure about the structure of the brain.

p 98
[...] as we link information-processing psychology on the inner
side, we also be linking psychology to the general theory of
search [..] on the outer side -the side of the task environment.
[...] the theory of design *is* that general theory of search.