{"slug": "happy-birthday-ai-and-happy-birthday-to-you-too-psychology", "title": "Happy Birthday, AI—and Happy Birthday to You Too, Psychology", "summary": "The 70th anniversary of the coining of \"artificial intelligence\" at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project also marks the birth of cognitive science and the cognitive revolution in psychology, as the same summer saw an MIT workshop that integrated psychology, AI, and information theory. The intertwined histories of AI and psychology highlight their shared conceptual and terminological roots.", "body_md": "######\n[Artificial Intelligence](/us/basics/artificial-intelligence)\n\n# Happy Birthday, AI—and Happy Birthday to You Too, Psychology\n\n## The 70th birthday of AI is also the birthday of cognitive science and psychology.\n\nPosted July 9, 2026\n[\nReviewed by Gary Drevitch\n](/us/docs/editorial-process)\n\n### Key points\n\n- In the summer of 1956, “artificial intelligence” was coined.\n- During that same summer, the conception of cognitive science took place.\n- Historically, terminologically, and conceptually, psychology and AI are married.\n\nJune 18, 1956 was a memorable day. It was the day the term “[artificial intelligence](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/artificial-intelligence)” was coined at the start of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial [Intelligence](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/intelligence) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. That workshop lasted from that day in June until August 17. The workshop was ambitiously aimed so that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”\n\nTextbooks on artificial intelligence highlight the Dartmouth workshop as the start of artificial intelligence, but whether it actually started 70 years ago, or earlier with the Turing test in 1950, or with Ada Lovelace’s algorithms in 1840, is a matter of debate. In any case, textbooks highlight the impact artificial intelligence has had on computer science since the 1950s. This is no surprise; many of the attendees of the Dartmouth workshop were computer scientists interested in building thinking machines. What often gets forgotten is that many of the attendees (e.g., Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester) had a strong interest in psychology or had a position in psychology (e.g., Alan Newell and Herb Simon), or were psychologists invited for the workshop but unable to attend (e.g., George Miller and Duncan Luce).\n\nWhat often gets forgotten as well is the fact that on September 11, 1956, a workshop similar to the Dartmouth event took place at MIT, aimed at gathering information-theory researchers to discuss their work on coding, communication, signal detection, computation, and language. Nathaniel Rochester presented on Hebbian cell assemblies, George Miller on [memory](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/memory) limits, and Alan Newell and Herb Simon on their problem solver. Some attendees were also present at the Dartmouth workshop, or at least were invited to it. George Miller later recalled the workshop as the “moment of conception” of cognitive science, the interdisciplinary field that brings together psychology, AI, linguistics, and [philosophy](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/philosophy), among other fields related to [cognition](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/cognition).\n\nThat MIT workshop also marked the start of what was later called “the cognitive revolution”, the shift in psychology away from [B.F. Skinner](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/behaviorism)’s behaviorism and back toward studying mind, cognition, and internal mental processes. Rather than solely emphasizing observable behavior, stimuli, responses, and reinforcements as an explanation for human psychology, the focus among psychologists started to shift to representations, rules, information processing, mental models, [attention](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/attention), memory, and computation. Whereas the Dartmouth workshop used computation to build intelligence, the MIT workshop used computation to explain cognition. And both workshops demonstrated the importance of interdisciplinary research when it comes to cognition and computation.\n\nHistorically, psychology and AI had been engaged but they got married in 1956. Even though one could argue that the mathematics behind artificial [neural](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/neuroscience) networks—now called deep learning, the very backbone of artificial intelligence—could have evolved without psychology, historically it is difficult to imagine the rise and impact of deep learning and artificial neural networks without the work of psychologists such as Donald Hebb, Frank Rosenblatt, David Rumelhart and Jay McClelland.\n\nThe relationship between psychology and AI is not merely historical. It is also terminological. Try to come up with a term in artificial intelligence that does not find its roots in psychology. It's very difficult. From concepts of intelligence and neural networks, consciousness and performance, to the process of learning—reinforcement learning or deep learning, training and recall—AI is heavily indebted to psychology for its terminology. Perhaps no wonder, if its goal is for a machine to be made that simulates human learning and intelligence.\n\nBut conceptually, too, AI is married to psychology. Sure, computers are not human brains, so at the implementational level they look very different. However, at the information-processing level, it is worthwhile to look at the similarities and differences between the two, to understand one with the knowledge of the other. And no matter how much we sometimes would like to think that AI has moved in a direction very much detached from psychology, soon we realize their [marriage](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/marriage) bond. Take robotics. Even though in many cases a robot does not at all need to look like a human to be very efficient in its task, we would like to build robots that look like us—robots that have legs and a little face with lights that look like eyes. Even though a robot with a shovel might be much better at robot football, a robot with legs appeals more to us.\n\nOr take the large language models we are so familiar with. We finally established a machine to simulate human intelligence—the goal of the Dartmouth workshop—through language and communication, and we are impressed by the fact that its intelligent answers are so humanlike. Or we *complain* that it behaves so humanlike, when it hallucinates information, gives wrong facts, and confuses basic logic, just like real humans do.\n\nWhile we celebrate the 70th birthday of artificial intelligence, we can also celebrate the 70th birthday of the cognitive revolution and cognitive science. And we ought to celebrate the 70th birthday of the psychology of AI. Happy birthday, AI, and happy birthday to you, psychology.\n\nReferences\n\nLouwerse, M. M. (2025). *Understanding artificial minds through human minds: The psychology of artificial intelligence*. Routledge.\n\nMiller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective. *Trends in Cognitive Sciences*, *7*, 141-144.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/happy-birthday-ai-and-happy-birthday-to-you-too-psychology", "canonical_source": "https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/keeping-those-words-in-mind/202607/happy-birthday-ai-and-happy-birthday-to-you-too-psychology", "published_at": "2026-07-09 13:04:34+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-09 13:19:06.471516+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Dartmouth College", "MIT", "Marvin Minsky", "Nathaniel Rochester", "Alan Newell", "Herb Simon", "George Miller", "B.F. 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