Back to the Future and Forth to the Past

Abstract

In the movie Back to the Future, Marty McFly accidentally travels back in time to 1955 to find his parents back in high school. Being stuck in the past, Marty needs to go back to the 1980s, in other words, the future. Hence, the movie’s title. If a cognitive engineer could travel back in time to, say, the early 1950s, what would they be able to discover? Today, most researchers would believe not much of interest was going on in the 1950s, as American academic psychology was still heavily dominated by behaviorism.