Джон Роберт Андерсон: Когнитивтік психолог және зерттеуші ғалым

Canadian born American psychologist

John Robert Anderson (born August 27, 1947) is a Canadian born American psychologist. He is currently professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

In cognitive psychology, John Anderson is widely known for his cognitive architecture ACT R and rational analysis. He has published many papers on cognitive psychology, including recent criticism of unjustified claims in mathematics education that lack experimental warrant and sometimes (in extreme cases) contradict known findings in cognitive psychology. He was also an early leader in research on intelligent tutoring systems, such as cognitive tutors, and many of Anderson's former students, such as Kenneth Koedinger and Neil Heffernan, have become leaders in that area.

Anderson's research has used fMRI brain imaging to study how students learn with intelligent tutoring systems. Most of his studies have looked at neural processes of students while they are solving algebraic equations or proofs. Anderson and colleagues generated a cognitive model that predicted that while students were learning an algebra proof, neuroimages showed decreased activation in a lateral inferior prefrontal region and a predefined fusiform region. This decrease in activity showed an increased fluency in retrieving declarative information, as students required less activity in these regions to solve the problems.

In another study, Anderson and colleagues used a video game task to test the Decomposition Hypothesis, or the idea that a complex cognitive task can be broken down into a set of information processing components. The combination of these components remains the same across different tasks. The study used a cognitive model that predicted behavioral and activation patterns for specific regions in the brain. The predictions involved both tonic activation, which remained stable across brain regions during game play, and phasic activation, which was present only when there was resource competition. The study's results supported the Decomposition Hypothesis. Individual differences were also found in participants' learning gains, which indicated that the rate of learning for a complex skill is dependent on cognitive capacity limits.

1976. Language, memory, and thought. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1980. Cognitive psychology and its implications. San Francisco: Freeman. Eighth edition, Worth Publishers, 2014. 1983. The architecture of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1990. The adaptive character of thought. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2000. Learning and Memory: An Integrated Approach. Wiley. 2007. How can the human mind occur in the physical universe? New York: Oxford University Press.