The one hundred most influential works in cognitive science From the University of Minnesota's Center for Cognitive Sciences.
The titles link to the holdings of the Livingston Lord Library at Minnesota State University Moorhead and to the Carl B. Ylvisaker Library at Concordia College. Some of the journal articles are accessible to MSUM students, faculty, and staff through one of the databases to which the library subscribes; other articles are freely available on the web.
The works are listed in rank order, top to bottom, with the first listed being the most influential.
Syntactic structures by Noam Chomsky
Vision : a computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information by David Marr
Computing machinery and intelligence by A. M. Turing. Mind, 59 (236), 433-460 (1950)
The organization of behavior; a neuropsychological theory by Donald O. Hebb
Parallel distributed processing : explorations in the microstructure of cognition by David E. Rumelhart
Human problem solving by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon
The modularity of mind : an essay on faculty psychology by Jerry A. Fodor
Remembering : a study in experimental and social psychology by Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett
The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information by G. A. Miller. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97 (1956)
Perception and communication by Donald Eric Broadbent
The senses considered as perceptual systems by James J. Gibson
A mathematical theory of communication by Claude E. Shannon. Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379-423
On computable numbers : with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem by A. M. Turing. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, 42
A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity by W. S. McCulloch and W. Pitts. Bulletin of mathematical biophysics (1943), 5:115-133 (pp. 18-27)
Hemisphere deconnnection and unity in conscious awareness by R. W. Sperry. American Psychologist 23 (10), 723-733
Cognitive maps in rats and men by Edward C. Tolman. Psychological Review 55 (4), 189-208 (1948). A version of the paper is freely available here
Ferrier lecture : functional architecture of macaque monkey visual cortex by D. H. Hubel and T. N. Wiesel. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 198, 1-59
The conceptual framework of psychology by Egon Brunswik
A review of Skinner's "Verbal behavior" by Noam Chomsky. Language, 35(1), 26-58 (1959).
Cognitive psychology by Ulric Neisser
Signal detection theory and psychophysics by David Marvin Green and John A. Swets
A study of thinking by Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Goodnow, and George A. Austin
Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects by R. N. Shepard and J. Metzler. Science, 171, 701-703.
The sciences of the artificial by Herbert A. Simon ; 3d ed (1996) here
"The problem of serial order in behavior" by K. S. Lashley, in L. A. Jeffress, ed., Cerebral mechanisms in behavior; the Hixon symposium, pp. 112-136.
Psychophysics : introduction to its perceptual, neural, and social prospects by Stanley Smith Stevens
The architecture of cognition by John Robert Anderson
Thought and language (Myshlenie i rech'.) by Lev Vygotsky ; newly revised and edited translation here
Plans and the structure of behavior by George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram
Aspects of the theory of syntax by Noam Chomsky
Unified theories of cognition by Allen Newell
Cybernetics; or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine by Norbert Wiener ; 2d ed here
On the psychology of prediction by D. Kahneman and A. Tversky. Psychological review, 80(4), 237-251 (1973)
Single units and sensation : a neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology? by H. B. Barlow. Perception, 1, 371-394 (1972)
Principles of perceptual learning and development by Eleanor J. Gibson
The ecological approach to visual perception by James Jerome Gibson
Natural categories by E. Rosch. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 573-605 (1973)
What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain by J. Y. Lettvin, H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, & W. H. Pitts. Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 47, No. 11, pp. 1940-51 (1959)
Design for a brain : the origin of adaptive behavior by William Ross Ashby
Theory of games and economic behavior by John Von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern
The information available in brief visual presentations by G. Sperling. Psychological monographs, 74 (Whole number 498) (1960)
Minds, brains and programs by John R. Searle. The behavioral and brain sciences, 3 (1980). Unedited, penultimate draft available here
High-speed memory scanning in human memory by S. Sternberg. Science, 153, 652-654 (1966)
"A framework for representing knowledge" by M. Minsky, in P. H. Winston, ed., The Psychology of Computer Vision
Biological foundations of language by Eric H. Lenneberg
The child's conception of the world by Jean Piaget
Levels of processing : a framework for memory research by F. I. M. Craik and R. S. Lockhart. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 12, 599-607 (1972)
Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions by J. Ridley Stroop. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643-661 (1935)
Theory of self-reproducing automata by John Von Neumann
The perception of the visual world by James Jerome Gibson
Principles of gestalt psychology by Kurt Koffka
On the existence of neurones in the human visual system selectively sensitive to the orientation and size of retinal images by C. Blakemore & F. W. Campbell. Journal of Physiology, 203, 203-260 (1969)
Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding by Irving Biederman. Psychological Review, 94, 115-147 (1987) (Note this clarification to the article)
Philosophical investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
A feature integration theory of attention by A. Treisman and G. Gelade. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136 (1980)
The working brain : an introduction to neuropsychology by A. R. Luria
Foundations of cyclopean perception by Bela Julesz
The construction of reality in the child by Jean Piaget
The language of thought by Jerry A. Fodor
Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory by E. Tulving and D. Thompson. Psychological Review, 80(5), 352-373 (1973)
The formation of learning sets by H. F. Harlow. Psychological Review, 56(1), 51-65 (1949)
Mental models : towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness by P. N. Johnson-Laird
What computers can't do : a critique of artificial reason by Hubert L. Dreyfus (see also What computers still can't do : a critique of artificial reason)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn ; 3d ed. here
The bisected brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga
The intentional stance by Daniel C. Dennett
Posterior parietal association cortex of the monkey : command functions for operations within extrapersonal space by V. B. Mountcastle, J. C. Lynch, A. Georgopoulos, H. Sakata, and C. Acuna. Journal of Neurophysiology, 38, 871-908 (1975)
Judgments under uncertainty : heuristics and biases by A. Tversky & D. Kahneman. Science, 185, 1124-1131 (1974)
The analysis of proximities : multidimensional scaling with an unknown distance function by R. N. Shepard. Psychometrika, 27(2), 125-140 (1962)
Application of Fourier analysis to the visibility of gratings by F. W. Campbell and J. G. Robson. Journal of Physiology 197 : 551-566 (1968)
"Working memory" by A. D. Baddeley and A. D. Hitch, in G. Bower, ed., The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 8; pp 47-89.
Language, thought and reality : selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf by Benjamin Lee Whorf
"Two cortical visual systems" by L. G. Ungerleider and M. Mishkin, in D. J. Ingle, M.A. Goodale, and R. J. W. Mansfield, eds., Analysis of visual behavior.
Perceptrons : an introduction to computational geometry by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert
Sensory mechanisms, the reduction of redundancy, and intelligence by H. B. Barlow. NPL Symposium on the Mechanization of Thought Process (1959)
Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions by William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 20 (1957)
Working memory by Alan Baddeley
Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding : an inquiry into human knowledge structures by Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson
Chronometric explorations of mind : the third Paul M. Fitts lectures delivered at the University of Michigan, September, 1976 by Michael I. Posner
Segregation of form, color, movement and depth : anatomy, physiology and perception by M. Livingstone & D. Hubel. Science, 240 (4853):740-9 (1988)
Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis by G. Johansson. Perception & Psychophysics, Vol. 14 (2); 201-211 (1973)
The interpretation of dreams by Sigmund Freud
The nature of explanation by K. J. W. Craik
The coordination and regulation of movements by N. A. Bernstein
The integrative action of the nervous system by Sir Charles S. Sherrington
Toward a model of text comprehension and production by W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk. Psychological Review, 85(5), 363-394 (1978)
Neural Darwinism : the theory of neuronal group selection by Gerald M. Edelman
Lightness and retinex theory by Edwin H. Land and John J. McCann. Journal of the Optical Society of America, 61 (1), 1-11 (1971)
The hippocampus as a cognitive map by J. O'Keefe and L. Nadel. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2 (4) (1979)
The mentality of apes by Wolfgang Köhler
Language comprehension in ape and child by E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
"Circuitry of primate prefrontal cortex and the regulation of behavior by representational memory" by P. S. Goldman-Rakic, in Handbook of Physiology, vol. 5(1), 373-417
Speech perception in infants by P. D. Eimas, E. R. Siqueland, P. Jusczyk & J. Vigorito. Science 171 (3968), 303-306 (1971)
The operational analysis of psychological terms by B. F. Skinner. Psychological Review, 52, 270-277 (1945)
Mental rotation of the neuronal population vector by Apostolos P. Georgopoulos, Joseph T. Lurito, Michael Petrides, Andrew B. Schwartz, et al. Science, 243 (4888), Jan 1989, 234-236
Consciousness explained by Daniel C. Dennett
The interpretation of structure from motion by S. Ullman. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B., 203, 405-426 (1979)
Cognition in the wild by Edwin Hutchins
Acquisition of cognitive skill by J. R. Anderson. Psychological Review, 89, 369-406 (1982)
"Human memory : a proposed system and its control processes" by R. C. Atkinson and R. M. Shiffrin, in K. W. Spence and J. T. Spence (eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation : advances in research and theory (vol. 2)