Mechanisms of Everyday Cognition

James M. Puckett, Hayne W. Reese

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317728474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Based on the proceedings of the twelfth biennial conference on life-span developmental psychology, most of the contributions in this volume deal with the mechanisms of everyday cognition. However, a broad spectrum of additional concerns is addressed within the domain of everyday cognition: its metatheoretical underpinnings, theory and theoretical issues, methods of investigation, empirical considerations, and social issues and applications. Addressing everyday cognition in infancy, childhood, adolescence, young and middle adulthood, and old age, this book is consistent with the chronological life-span theme of this series. The contributors collectively discuss some of the traditional concerns of life-span psychology: the dialectical nature of everyday cognition, individual differences, and contextual influences. Leading and concluding chapters provide overview, integration, and summary. In bringing together a wide array of age periods and points of view within the domain of everyday cognition, the editors hope that students and researchers in developmental psychology and cognitive science will find a useful cross-fertilization of ideas. A huge variety of theoretical perspectives is presented ranging from the position that everyday cognition and academic (laboratory) cognition are different manifestations of the same underlying processes to the position that the underlying processes are completely separate. Also of importance, a large assortment of research methods is illustrated including interviews, laboratory simulations, real-life observations and psychometric methods.

I Introduction and Overview

1 An Integration of Life-Span Research in Everyday Cognition: Four Issues

James M. Puckett
Texas A & M University-Kingsville

Hayne W. Reese
Leslee K. Pollina
West Virginia University

When all of us involved in the planning of the conference on which this book is based came to the point of deciding what to name the conference and the book, we were faced with an everyday problem. How best to market the idea of a conference and book on life-span everyday cognition? How best to reach the intended audience? We debated whether to call the type of cognition in which we were interested "everyday" or "practical." Although "practical" had certain philosophical connotations that we wished to convey, "everyday" seemed to be the term that had become the most widely adopted. In the end, true to the spirit of our subject matter, pragmatic considerations outweighed idealistic ones in choosing the label everyday.

Both practical and theoretical issues are considered in the primary contributions to this volume and in the two integrative chapters. The final chapter, organized in terms of the ten primary contributions, is intended to summarize them while providing some integration among them. In this introductory chapter we focus on general themes in an attempt to provide an integration of the primary contributions with the larger literatures of everyday and laboratory cognition.

Among the recurring themes in the primary chapters are four that we consider here:

1. Is cognition best studied by controlled or naturalistic methods or some combination?
2. What differences exist between everyday/practical/real-world and laboratory/traditional/academic tasks and situations?
3. What are the mechanisms of practical cognition?
4. Do the mechanisms of everyday cognition differ from those of laboratory cognition?

Method and Theory in Everyday Cognition

As might be suggested from the foregoing, the descriptors everyday, practical, and real-world are treated as being functionally equivalent for the purposes of this chapter. These terms are also treated as being more or less opposite the functionally equivalent descriptors academic, laboratory, and traditional. The members within each triad appear to be used interchangeably by many researchers.

Whatever labels we may choose to apply to them, the domains of practical and laboratory cognition have been dichotomized largely on two related bases: methodological and theoretical. The methodological basis for distinguishing between everyday and laboratory cognition, of course, concerns the relative merits of naturalistic vs. controlled observation (Intons-Peterson, 1992; Loftus, 1991; Poon, Welke, & Dudley, this volume; Winograd, this volume). In referring to the theoretical basis, we mean dimensions of tasks or dimensions of contexts that differentially characterize the real world and the laboratory (e.g., Chapman, this volume; Puckett, Reese, Cohen, & Pollina, 1991; Sinnott, 1989a; Willis & Schaie, this volume). In the evolution of research on everyday cognition, as we explain shortly, these bases appear to have played different roles in life-span psychology and in the larger domain of cognitive psychology.

However, we must be careful not to ascribe too much validity or significance to the method-theory distinction. Many researchers calling for naturalistic methodology do so in hopes of uncovering new theoretical principles (e.g., Neisser, 1991; Winograd, this volume). Likewise, researchers focusing on the theoretical properties of practical cognition (e.g., Siegel, Cuccaro, Parsons, Wall, & Weinberg, this volume; Sternberg, Wagner, & Okagaki, this volume; Walters, Blythe, & White, this volume) tend to utilize somewhat more naturalistic research settings and techniques than do strictly traditional laboratory researchers. That is, the methodological and theoretical bases may not be truly independent in the context of everyday cognitive research. The method-theory distinction, however, does provide one of many possible conceptual frameworks that might help organize the research domain of everyday cognition.

What Methods are Best for Studying Everyday Cognition?

For cognitive scientists in general, it can be argued that the methodological schism between practical and laboratory cognition is primary and that theoretical distinctions are secondary. The origin of current interest in everyday cognition appears to be a paper in which Neisser (1978) attacked the laboratory approach that emphasizes internal validity over external validity, charging that nothing interesting or important had resulted from roughly 100 years of effort in the laboratory. That paper and reactions (e.g., Banaji & Crowder, 1989) and counter-reactions (e.g., Ceci & Bronfenbrenner, 1991; Neisser, 1991) to it continue to drive interest and controversy in this area (e.g., Banaji & Crowder, 1991; Intons-Peterson, 1992).

In response to Neisser (1978), Banaji and Crowder (1989) defended the laboratory approach to cognition, asserting that whenever the goals of external validity and internal validity conflict, external validity should be sacrificed. This conflict concerning the role of different types of validity can be understood with reference to world views. Hultsch and Hickey (1978) argued that the relative weighting of external validity, internal validity, and the other types of validity identified by Cook and Campbell (1975) is different in different world views. Specifically, Hultsch and Hickey argued that the logical sequence of concerns in mechanistic perspectives begins with statistical conclusion validity and proceeds to internal validity, then construct validity, and finally external validity. In dialectical perspectives (organismic and contextualistic, as defined by Pepper, 1942), the logical sequence is reversed. Banaji and Crowder's (1989, 1991) position is consistent with the mechanistic perspective, whereas the primacy of external validity over internal validity is consistent with the dialectical perspective that has been explicitly adopted by many everyday researchers (e.g., Chapman, this volume; Sinnott, this volume). Thus, the debate about the relative importance of external and internal validity is likely to be futile unless the world view orientations of the debaters are explicitly identified (see also Poon et al., this volume, for a discussion of the role that misunderstanding of different types of validity has played in this debate).

Although Banaji and Crowder (1989) did acknowledge that external validity is desirable where feasible, they also declared that the everyday movement in memory research was bankrupt. Ceci and Bronfenbrenner (1991), Gruneberg, Morris, and Sykes (1991), Loftus (1991), Neisser (1991), Winograd (this volume) and others have taken issue with this characterization, defending the everyday approach with examples of useful research and expressing concerns with Banaji and Crowder's rationale. Continuing the exchange, Banaji and Crowder (1991) and Roediger (1991) reiterated and expanded on points made by Banaji and Crowder (1989). Roediger (1991) aptly applied a metaphor from current popular music in pointing out that "We [the laboratory methodologists] didn't start the fire." The relevant point for our present purposes, of course, is not who started the fire, but that it is still burning and that it was based first upon method, not theory.

Despite the divisive rhetoric, a consensus appears to be emerging that both naturalistic and controlled methods should be used in the study of cognition (Banaji & Crowder 1991; Ceci & Bronfenbrenner, 1991; Intons-Peterson, 1992; Landauer, 1989; Neisser, 1988; Poon et al., this volume; Roediger, 1991; Rubin, 1989; Winograd, this volume). The differences of opinion that remain appear to lie in the relative emphasis placed on each methodological approach. For example, on one end of this continuum, Winograd (this volume) provides numerous examples of research that has been conducted without traditional experimental controls, although he simultaneously advocates the use of laboratory methods and the use of laboratory-derived principles in explaining findings from the real world. On the other end of the continuum, Willis and Schaie (this volume) suggest the use of primarily traditional psychometric and controlled laboratory methods, although they also mention naturalistic observation.

Yet, despite a verbal commitment to the use of both controlled and naturalistic methods by an apparent majority of laboratory and everyday researchers, Poon et al. (this volume) demonstrate with a meta-analysis of everyday and laboratory research that most researchers in both camps utilize primarily controlled methods. Indeed, with the exception of Winograd (this volume), all the contributors present either primary or secondary analyses of data derived largely or wholly with the use of controlled methods. Ceci and Hembrooke (this volume), Chapman (this volume), Schooler and Loftus (this volume), Sinnott (this volume), and Willis and Schaie (this volume) present theoretical integrations of data collected under mainly controlled conditions. Poon et al. (this volume), Siegel et al. (this volume), Sternberg et al. (this volume), and Walters et al. (this volume) present more detailed descriptions of empirical studies in which the data were also collected under mainly controlled conditions.

In summary, there is some difference of opinion (apparently arising from differences in world views) concerning the relative emphasis to be placed on controlled and naturalistic approaches, but almost all researchers from both camps agree that both approaches should be used. Meanwhile, most psychologists who study cognition seem mainly to be using controlled methods.

What Theoretical Dimensions Distinguish Everyday and Laboratory Contexts?

A second basis of distinction between practical and laboratory cognition is theoretical. Theoretical distinctions between real-world and laboratory tasks seem not to have played a primary role in shaping the debate in cognitive psychology generally. Theoretical differences, however, appear to have played a prominent role in life-span research. Theoretical dimensions have been said to distinguish the tasks and contexts in the real world from the tasks and contexts in the laboratory (e.g., Arlin, 1989; Sinnott, 1989b), although not all researchers agree that these distinctions are necessarily warranted (e.g., Puckett et al., 1991). In any case, theoretical concerns seem to have played a more important role than have methodological concerns for many researchers within life-span developmental psychology.

To illustrate this point, old adults have consistently been found to perform more poorly on academic and laboratory cognitive tasks than do young adults (e.g., Kausler, 1991; Reese & Rodeheaver, 1985). As outlined by Sinnott (1989a), many gerontological researchers became increasingly convinced that this poorer performance was not attributable to a deficiency in overall cognitive abilities but rather resulted from difficulties in performing laboratory tasks, difficulties that would not be observed in real-world situations. Thus, the search began for the defining dimensions of laboratory and academic tasks and situations that would distinguish them from everyday tasks and situations.

As examples of the theoretical distinctions between the practical and laboratory domains, Sinnott (1989b) held that everyday tasks, as opposed to laboratory tasks, are more frequent ("Is this ever likely to happen to anyone,") and significant ("and if it did, would they care?"). Ceci and Hembrooke (this volume) emphasize the greater contextual richness and variability of real-world tasks. Willis and Schaie (this volume) also assert that a consensus exists among most researchers that certain aspects of problems such as greater task complexity and multidimensionality characterize real-world tasks, but they assert that agreement is not widespread on certain other dimensions. Some of these other dimensions, including ill- vs. well-defined, are nevertheless recognized by Sternberg et al. (this volume) and by Chapman (this volume). Walters et al. (this volume; see also Walters & Gardner, 1986) enumerate a number of additional characteristics of problems, for example, interpersonal and intrapersonal, that tend to describe everyday tasks more than they do academic ones.

Therefore it appears that for many life-span researchers in practical cognition, the theoretical dimensions that define the everyday and laboratory domains continue to be important with a significant diversity of opinion prevailing as to what these dimensions are. Perhaps the diversity exists because there has been little investigation of these dimensions (see Puckett et al., 1991, for additional review). This situation is in contrast to that for methodology, as described earlier, for which consensus is fairly high regarding the methods that should be used (i.e., both controlled and naturalistic) and regarding the methods that are actually used (i.e., mainly controlled; Poon et al., this volume).

Mechanisms in Everyday and Laboratory Cognition

Related to the issue of task dimensions just considered is the issue of the mechanisms underlying performance on everyday and laboratory tasks. As noted earlier, for example, some researchers propose that certain descriptions characterize real-world more than laboratory tasks, such as greater complexity of tasks and contexts (Ceci & Hembrooke, this volume; Willis & Schaie, this volume). Regardless of whether such descriptions are true of everyday tasks, a separate issue concerns which cognitive mechanisms underlie performance in real-world tasks. And yet another issue is whether the same cognitive mechanisms that are brought to bear in, for example, purportedly complex and rich real-world contexts are also brought to bear in purportedly more simple and sterile laboratory contexts.

Salthouse (1991) outlined six overlapping levels of analysis of cognitive phenomena that will be helpful in delimiting the scope of our discussion about mechanisms. These levels are world views, frameworks, theories, models, descriptive generalizations, and empirical observations. A world view (e.g., mechanistic, organismic, or contextualistic) encompasses often implicit assumptions about the way organisms function. Frameworks are loose collections of stated assumptions and concepts (e.g., associationism, information processing, and life-span frameworks). Theories are explicitly stated relations among concepts (e.g., Chapman, this volume). Models specify the relations between theory and empirical observations in terms of mechanisms, although one can theorize without the constraints of a formal theory regarding the identity and operation of mechanisms (e.g., Marx, 1976). Descriptive generalizations are summaries of empirical observations in terms of, say, a mathematical equation. Finally, empirical observations are closely tied to, but abstractions of, actual behavior.

As examples of these levels of analysis employed in this volume, Sinnott engages in discourse primarily at the levels of methatheory and framework, discussing what practical cognition can gain from examining assumptions shared with other ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• PART I: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
• PART II: TAXONOMY AND METHODOLOGY IN EVERYDAY COGNITION
• PART III: THEORY AND METATHEORY FOR LIFE-SPAN EVERYDAY COGNITION
• PART IV: EVERYDAY COGNITION ACROSS THE LIFE SPAN
• PART V: SUMMARY AND INTEGRATION
• Author Index
• Subject Index