Slide 6 of 25
Notes:
Information processing psychology, was one of the first attempts at psychology as an information science.
Newell and Simon (1976) argued that a physical symbol system is the architecture of intelligent systems, that is, it is both a necessary and sufficient mechanism for producing intelligent performance. This assertion is called the strong physical symbol hypothesis or SPSS (Clarke, 1990). Intelligence requires the use of symbolic systems similar to those of formal languages.
A physical symbol system is a set of physical tokens or patterns, such as marks on paper, punches on computer tape, or patterns of magnetic domain orientation, and a set of explicit rules. The tokens can be strung together to yield a structure or expression. The rules describe how to manipulate the symbol tokens, for example, how to substitute one token or token string for another. The rules can themselves be coded as symbolic structures. The symbol tokens and rules can be implemented on a real physical artifact, such as a computer. The symbols can be given a systematic semantic interpretation (i.e., a symbol always stands for the same thing), but the operation of the system does not demand that the symbols be interpretable. The rules are defined relative to the characteristics of the symbols (called their form or shape), rather than relative to the things the symbols might stand for. The notion of a physical symbol system as an information processing device is derived from Turing's notions of a universal machine.
