Physics And Computer Science Study The Behavior Of Complex...

If I can describe computational modelling as ‘the use of mathematics, physics and computer science to study the behaviour of complex systems by computer simulation’ (http://www.nibib.nih.gov/science-education/science-topics/computational-modeling) then that’s something I’m very familiar with, especially when modelling chemical processes in a manufacturing environment. In Chemistry, computational modelling is used for a range of different purposes (see Figure 1 below). You can use computer models to predict the behaviour of chemical reactions, changes to the properties of fluids as they flow through pipes and using computational models to simulate manufacturing process of synthesising chemicals before a chemical plant is built. Figure 1†¦show more content†¦Why use computers to model cognition? Computational modelling has become so popular in cognitive science (which I will refer to as cognitive modelling) and I will discuss a few that I think are the most important and of interest. The first involves the rise of cognitive psychology. The previous school of thought in psychology was behaviourism and in the early 20th century, John B Watson, instrumental in the birth of behaviourism, claimed that we can understand mental processes of an organism by analysing its behaviour. That given a stimulus, an organism’s reaction could be predicted. Even though behaviourism gave psychology credence as a scientific discipline allowing theories to be falsified, it did have its problems, namely that behaviourists where allowed to ignore the inner workings of the mind. B.F Skinner, an influential defender of behaviourism, argues that behaviourism looks at ‘the environmental histories of both the species and the individual.’ That environment selects behaviour.(Skinner, 1985) However, there were problems understanding cognition by simply studying the behaviour of an organism. This approach to psychology caused a lot of conflict and disagreements in the academic world (e.g. from Noam Chomsky, Ulrich Neisser). It was frustrating for psychologists working in this field to ignore the brain because, according to behaviourism, the internal