A Collège de France - CNRS coproduction
Abstract
The opening lecture focused on the laws of psychology and the research strategies that could establish them.
"Psychology is the science of mental life" Thus, in 1890, William James defined the field of what was to become cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is an integral part of the life sciences, exploiting all the methods of biology, from genetics to brain imaging; but it is also a science of mental life, attempting to set out the general laws of thought, an intimate and subjective domain that might have been thought inaccessible to the scientific method.
The diversity of cultures, personalities and human skills seems to make the project of a unified psychological science, capable of enunciating laws of general scope, a risky one. In fact, over the past twenty years, experimental psychology laboratories have become increasingly specialized, each focusing on a narrow aspect of cognition.
Beyond the vagaries of the evolutionary and cultural history of the human species, could it be that our mental life is governed by a few general principles of cerebral architecture? In the spirit of the psychophysical program of Fechner, Wundt, Ribot or Piéron, psychology must set itself an ambitious goal: to push the analysis of higher cognitive functions to a level of formalization comparable to that of physics, through the formulation of mathematical theories and neuro-informatic models. Psychological laws, even if they can be expressed in the form of formal algorithms, will only be understood in depth when they have been related to the different levels of organization of the nervous system. Brain imaging thus presents an exceptional opportunity to deepen the field of psychology. Far from being merely a "neo-phrenology", it gives access to the functional architecture and mechanisms of cognitive functions, more directly than the traditional study of behavior.
