Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we seek to trace the way in which psychologists' concepts of the mind have evolved over the roughly ninety years since the study of empirical psychology began in America. We examined metaphors used by psychologists to describe mental phenomena, based on a corpus of mental metaphors used in the journal Psychology Review from 1894 to the present. The cheif finding was that the nature of the mental metaphors changed over time. Spatial metaphors and animate-being metaphors predominate in the early stages, declining later in favor of systems metaphors predominate in the early stages, and artificial intelligence. A secondary finding was that the numbers of mental metaphors varied: They are more prevalent in the early and late stages of the century that in the mid-stages. These patterns are interpreted in terms of the evolution of psychologists' models of the mind.