Neuroscience and AI: Revolutionizing Psychology
By Ma Weijun, Associate Professor, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University
Since 2020, psychology has witnessed significant advancements in both natural science and humanities orientations, propelled by the influence of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, positive psychology, and other fields. These interdisciplinary areas of research have also seen further development. Looking ahead to the next three decades, neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) are expected to bring about major revolutions in the research paradigms and applications of psychology.
Firstly, neuroscience and AI have played a core role in the rapid development of psychology. Since 2000, the natural sciences, particularly neuroscience and genetics, have seen explosive growth, with a constant stream of new technologies and research findings. In the field of neuroscience, the development of EEG, fMRI, and fNIRs technologies has been rapid and increasingly sophisticated. These advancements have been crucial in driving the development of psychology, especially cognitive and computational neuroscience, which utilize these tools. The progress in these areas can be described as rapid and even revolutionary. Interdisciplinary fields within psychology, such as social cognitive neuroscience, have also been significantly influenced and have developed swiftly. The rapid development of AI, including machine learning and large language models, has had a profound and even transformative impact on psychological research and applications. In the foreseeable future, the development of machine learning and large language models will shift the paradigm of psychological research and applications from "experiment + experience" to "experiment + experience + AI."
Secondly, the development of interdisciplinary psychology has been very vigorous, with the emergence of many new research areas and findings. These include various interdisciplinary fields of psychology, such as artificial intelligence psychology, educational neuroscience, social cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychoanalysis, clinical neuroscience, neuroeconomics and neuromarketing, developmental neuroscience, personality neuroscience, neurophenomenology, neuroexistentialism, brain-computer interface research, and neuroscientific studies of consciousness. The rapid development of these interdisciplinary fields has also spurred the growth of psychological applications.
Thirdly, the application of psychology has seen rapid development. Humanistic psychology emphasizes individual subjective experiences and the effectiveness of psychological applications. Natural science-oriented psychology has driven the development of humanistic psychology, which values experience, leading to significant advancements in the application of psychology. For example, there has been rapid development in the application of positive psychology, psychological counseling and therapy, phenomenological and existential psychology, neuromarketing and neuroeconomics, brain-computer interface research, and big data and AI in psychological research. Applied psychology has become a significant counterpart to basic psychology.
Lastly, the development of humanistic psychology has been relatively slow. Compared to the rapid growth of natural science-oriented psychology and interdisciplinary psychology, humanistic psychology has developed more gradually. Limited by research methods, its development has not been as rapid as that of natural science-oriented psychology. Humanistic psychology emphasizes subjective experience. How it can survive by combining digital humanities with neuroscience and AI to better capture human subjective experiences is an important path forward, in an era where neuroscience and AI dominate psychology.
Published on January 9, 2025