Introduction to Michael Cole

John F. Kihlstrom

09/22/06

In some sense, Mike Cole’s career captures the history of cognitive science. He received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA in 1959, before cognitive science was a gleam in anyone’s eye, working with Ed Carterette on the coordination of vision and hearing, but also finding time to work with Ed Fantino on avoidance learning in rats. He then proceeded to Indiana University, where he worked on mathematical models of probability learning with Bill Estes. My first contact with him came via his paper on the measurement of category clustering in free recall, a phenomenon which I have long thought marked the beginnings of the cognitive revolution in the study of memory.

Indiana's requirement that graduate students learn two foreign languages led Mike to take up Russian, which in turn led to a postdoctoral fellowship in Moscow – in 1962, mind you, at the height of the Cold War – to work with Alexander Luria, whose laboratory was pursuing a distinctively Pavlovian approach to verbal learning and language.  At the time, of course, Luria was also engaged in inventing cognitive neuropsychology, and Mike was exposed to this new line of research, working on semantic conditioning in brain-damaged patients. But an offhand comment by Luria led Mike to an unpublished manuscript comparing the thought processes of people in Central Asia with those of the denizens of Moscow -- a piece of research that was consistent with, if not motivated by, Marxist notions of the cognitive consequences of economic development.  Something clicked, and Mike was on his way to developing what he called "comparative human cognition" – that is, the study of how cultural differences manifest themselves in how people think.

From Moscow it was back to the United States, by way of Africa, and positions at Yale and at Rockefeller, where he rejoined Estes in one of the most interesting psychology departments ever conceived by an academic administrator -- Estes working on mathematical psychology, George Miller on language, Peter Marler on birdsong, and Cole on cultural psychology. In 1975, after the folks at Rockefeller rethought their plans, and disbanded the department entirely, Cole moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he and his colleagues formed the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition, which attempts to link the cross-cultural study of cognition with issues in education. He is now University Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Human Development in the University of California system – with academic responsibilities not just in San Diego, but also system-wide.

In the time since Moscow, Prof. Cole has become the doyen of culture and cognition – not just in the United States, but in the world. Reflecting his early exposure to Luria and the historical tradition in psychology, he has been particularly interested in the role of historical changes in culture, such as literacy and schooling, in fostering cognitive development.  More recently, he has added ethnomethodological methods to the usual quiver of experimental and observational techniques to study the role of microcultures in the cognitive and social development of children.

Cole is the author of many articles and books, including The Cultural Foundations of Learning and Thinking (1971, with Gay, Glick, and Sharp); Culture and Thought (1974) and The Psychology of Literacy (1981), both with Sylvia Scribner, and Cultural Psychology: The Once and Future Discipline (1996). In 2006, he received the Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

This year the Cognitive Science program embarks on a new venture, developing a concentration in the sociocultural aspects of cognition, and also seeking to hire a new faculty member in that area – a search being conducted jointly with the Department of Linguistics.  We hope that through his visits with us this year, both in person and as a virtual presence via the Internet, Prof. Cole will help us think through how we want to organize the sociocultural component of the cognitive science program.