Aging, Representation, and Thought

Gestalt and Feature-Intensive Processing

Matthew Sharps

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351533164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The brain contains many distinct functional and anatomical regions. Despite these differences, brain tissues are sufficiently uniform in the fact that they can engage in various types of processing. How can functionally different kinds of processes, such as verbal memory and reasoning, visual and auditory memory, and mental imagery, all be supported by the relatively uniform electrochemical activity of a brain's neurons? How are they appropriately segregated and integrated as needed? In Aging, Representation, and Thought, Matthew J. Sharps provides an empirically based, functional answer to what is, from the standpoint of modern cognitive psychology, a critical theoretical issue.Sharps argues that the crucial factor is the degree to which information is subjected to processing that is more gestalt or feature-intensive in nature. Sharps shows that purely gestalt processing deals with information in large "chunks, " providing for relatively little incisive analysis. Purely feature-intensive processing, on the other hand, tends to ignore the overall nature and context of information in favor of comparatively minute analyses. It provides for relatively comprehensive analysis, but also for slow, cumbersome processing. Neither process, however, works in isolation, and Sharps demonstrates how information processing occurs on a continuum between the two extremes.Sharps' theoretical perspective is amply borne out by the results of specific experiments in all of the cognitive realms he addresses. He provides relatively comprehensive explanations for a variety of phenomena including the diminution of specific cognitive processes with age, and errors in eyewitness memory, reasoning, and decision-making at all levels of human activity. Aging, Representation, and Thought will be of interest to psychologists, students of adult development and aging, and management specialists.

1
The Paradox of Human Intelligence

In the summer of 2001, extraordinarily high numbers of shark attacks, some of them fatal, were recorded on the southeastern coasts of the United States. These were well publicized. Despite this, people continued to swim in the sea off the shark-infested beaches. In at least one case, a teenager saw the shark which attacked him before it became aggressive, but even in view of the recent attacks, he thought, “Just a shark; probably won’t bug me” (Bee Nation Briefs, 2001).

During that same summer, a number of people in Australia, encountering a dead whale being eaten by sharks, actually walked on the whale’s body while it was being consumed and petted its voracious consumers. Some of these people brought their children (Associated Press, 2001). At least one person was carrying a baby while petting the feeding sharks in question.

Also recently (Cowen, 1999), a sophisticated space mission was undertaken by NASA for the purpose of sending a spacecraft to Mars. This spacecraft was intended to orbit around the planet, photograph it, and transmit the information gained to the operators on Earth. Even a rough acquaintance with college physics allows one to understand the complexity of such an operation: enabling a rocket to escape Earth’s gravity while still maintaining pressures low enough for the survival of the equipment; injecting the vehicle into a pathway which takes into account the gravity of the sun as well as that of both Earth and Mars; slowing the vehicle to the degree needed for proper injection into a useful orbit around Mars, and obtaining the necessary attitude for observation. All of these activities obviously require high intelligence on the part of the operators and mission planners, to say nothing of the abilities required to create the spacecraft and the rocket to deliver it in the first place. Yet the spacecraft was lost as it was maneuvered in space. The reason was a simple failure on the part of the vehicle’s controllers to convert from English units of measurement to the metric units required by the orbiter’s programming. This resulted in catastrophic shifts in the vehicle’s velocity and orientation, and in the subsequent loss of the spacecraft.

In effect, the NASA operators, literally rocket scientists, “forgot to carry the two.”

How can people see sharks in dangerous waters and fail to act accordingly? How can highly intelligent experts make a simple mathematical error that results in the loss of a spacecraft?

In a related question, how can eyewitnesses to crimes make the fantastic numbers of errors of recall that have been documented, resulting in wrongful convictions (e.g., Sporer, Malpass & Koehnken, 1996)? Very frequently, the representations of criminals and crime scenes carried in the memories of witnesses are shockingly flawed. Psychologists serving as expert witnesses in the courtroom, including the present author, have repeatedly seen suspects originally described as blond and light-complexioned turn out to be dark brunettes, and vice versa. Semi-automatic pistols have turned into revolvers in the elastic memories of witnesses, then literally into ice picks, then back into handguns of indiscriminate features. Black trousers and white t-shirts have become light blue jeans and striped Oxford button-downs. Et cetera.

Some, but not all, of these types of errors may be exacerbated with age. Older adults do not, as a rule and on average, remember as well as young people do. Yet this statement must be qualified; older adults, for example, tend to possess verbal abilities under many task conditions which are preserved relative to their abilities to process images and pictures (Dror & Kosslyn, 1994; Nebes, 1990; Sharps, 1990; but see also Hertzog et al., 1993). This is not, of course, to say that older adults do not exhibit verbal memory deficits relative to young people; they certainly do, especially when provided with more syntactically complex verbal stimulus materials (e.g., Craik & Jennings, 1992; Hertzog et al., 1993; Light, 1990). However, it can be said that under a number of experimental circumstances, most notably the Brown-Peterson task (Brown, 1958; Craik, 1977; Peterson & Peterson, 1959) and even in some types of memory for text (see Ahlberg & Sharps, in press), the admittedly extant memory deficits that occur with age are not typically found to be as large or profound as those found in the pictorial realm, especially when complex pictures are utilized (e.g., Dror & Kosslyn, 1994; Sharps & Gollin, 1987a,b; Sharps, 1990, 1991, 1997, 1998). Even in the face of relatively poor pictorial memory, however, the recall performance of older adults in the pictorial realm can be artificially enhanced to the level enjoyed by the young (e.g., Waddell & Rogoff, 1981; McCormack, 1982; Sharps & Gollin, 1987a, 1988) if older adults are presented with appropriate stimulus conditions.

Consider also the fact that although some aspects of the memory of older adults may be deficient when compared to the memory powers of young adults, the reasoning powers of the aged, which ultimately must depend on their memories and metamemories, can in many contexts equal or exceed those of the young. This is especially true in those realms typically subsumed under the popular sobriquet of “wisdom” (Simonton, 1990), although, of course, there are contexts (such as spatial reasoning) in which age-related disparities exist (e.g., Salthouse, 1992).

How can these paradoxes of cognitive aging exist? If older adult memory deteriorates simply because of some sort of wear-and-tear inherent in the aging process, than why do some kinds of memory deteriorate more than others? And how can some types of reasoning fail to deteriorate at all? Reasoning by definition involves the processing of information. If the ability to remember that information is damaged, then how can reasoning performance itself exhibit no sign of this damage? There are mysteries here which wholly eclipse the concept that the mind “naturally” deteriorates with age.

Although failures to reason properly about sharks and spacecraft may initially seem unrelated to failures to remember suspects properly, and these in turn may appear unrelated to the difficulties with memory experienced by older adults, they are, in fact, very much interconnected. As will be discussed in this volume, the common denominator lies in the area of representation. There are fundamental commonalities in memory and thinking which must be understood if either type of cognitive activity is to be fully comprehended, and which are perhaps best understood, at least at a preliminary level, through an examination of cognitive aging as a model system.

Obviously, some of the cases cited above might be idiosyncratic. The teenager with the shark might have had something else on his mind. The people walking on the dead whale might have been inundated with the recent glut of televised nature programs extolling the harmlessness of giant carnivorous sharks. The NASA scientists and engineers might have had too many technical issues dividing their attention, or they might have been focused on agency politics at the time. There are obviously many competing possibilities in any given case of intellectual error. Yet the types of errors cited above, in which intelligent or at least reasonably intelligent people commit significant errors of judgement or memory, are sufficiently common to warrant psychological attention. It is also true that the perplexing and paradoxical age-related effects described above have been repeatedly and empirically confirmed.

Can these types of errors be explained in simple terms of failures to “pay attention?” A number of elegant attentional explanations for “absent-mindedness” (Baddeley, 2001) of a type that might be relevant here have been suggested over the years (e.g., Norman and Shallice, 1986; Reason, 1984; Shallice, 1982). Yet attentional anomalies cannot explain the radical reconfiguration of memory representations often seen in eyewitness identification errors, and it is difficult to see how one could fail to pay attention to the negative prospects of close contact with sharks, especially when the sharks in question are currently eating the whale one is standing on.

This is not to say that attentional processes are not involved in these types of events. They certainly are. But even so, we are still faced with the same fundamental question. If information is already present in the mind at some level, how can we fail to access that information as the need arises?

Cognitive errors, failures of memory and reasoning, occur across the life span. At least within some cognitive realms, their frequencies and magnitudes typically increase with age. But even in the young or the relatively young, such errors are by no means confined to situations in which quick thinking might be needed, as in a shark attack, or in very complex situations requiring enormous division of attention, as in a NASA control room, or even in situations in which strong emotions might play a part, as in a criminal courtroom. Such errors are observed even under conditions in which intelligent people have plenty of time to make their judgments.

In some cases, these errors are literally set in stone, or at least in brick. One of the lesser-known tourist attractions of San Francisco lies directly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay from which the Golden Gate issues north to Marin. It is Fort Point, a nineteenth-century artillery post that used to guard the bay against the possibility of invasion from the sea. The visitor can see the enormous walls and the intricate coast artillery guns themselves, still seated on their carriages in different places around the fort. One cannot fail to be impressed by the ingenuity, the intelligence, that must have been involved in the construction of the great coastal defense guns (see Burgin, 2000; Manucy, 1949/1985; National Park Service, 2000). The perfect shaping of the barrels to withstand the enormous pressures which developed in their rifled interiors; the clever sliding mechanisms which allowed the gigantic weapons to recoil without destroying their carriages; the intricate gearing and wheel mechanisms which allowed their crews to turn the great steel carriages themselves, using muscle power alone; all of these reflect the near-apotheosis of nineteenth-century ingenuity. These guns are cleverly designed, nearly perfect for their purpose, “pushing the envelope” of the materials available to nineteenth-century engineers. It is obvious, to any thinking observer, that these mighty weapons were designed by really smart people.

Who then put them inside a brick fort?

Yes, brick. Fort Point, like a number of other forts constructed around the same time, was made out of bricks, which rifled artillery on ships or elsewhere would have crumbled into dust with a few well-placed salvos. A prolonged series of salvos could have pulverized the entire fort. An interesting paradox emerges: the brilliant engineering of the guns was accompanied by the almost incredibly foolish placement of the same guns in a completely worthless defensive facility. The fort was effectively obsolete, literally before it was build.

A considerable period of time and a considerable amount of thought went into both the guns and the fort; here we do not see the rush of a shark attack, or the extraordinary complexity of a NASA mission. Yet the end result proved very similar. The finest weapons of the day were placed inside a facility which would admittedly have given medieval knights a run for their money, but which would have been destroyed very swiftly if faced by any weapons similar to those which the fort itself was built to house.

One can also see the great main door of the fort, intricately set with metal studs of the type used in the medieval world to fend off battle-axes. Fort Point is effectively a fortress of the Middle Ages, dropped into the middle of the nineteenth century and expected to defend itself; and as a thoughtful observer contemplates this literally concrete example of the paradox of human intelligence, especially in its setting beneath the brilliantly intricate buttressing of the Golden Gate itself, one must ask the question:

“What could they possibly have been thinking?”

This question summarizes the most important puzzle confronting modern cognitive psychology, the central paradox of human intelligence: How can people do brilliant things, but at the same time do stupid ones? How can people create brilliant weapons and then place them inside a useless fort? For that matter, how can people create a clever pesticide and then spread it around the environment to the point that its creators have to breathe it too? How can people develop the medical and agricultural technology that makes it possible to overpopulate a world, and then be dumb enough, so to speak, to actually do it? In a world of six billion human souls and rising, these questions lie not only at the heart of cognitive psychology, but also at the heart of human survival and quality of life on this planet.

This volume represents an attempt to address these questions. It does not provide a complete answer, nor necessarily the only answer. It is very probable that many of the details will prove to require modification, or will simply prove to be wrong. However, the data presented here, gleaned over seventeen years of experimental research, are at least internally consistent and consistent with the state of current knowledge. It is hoped that this volume will, at the least, encourage more research into these fundamental questions of the intellect.

On the Nature of Mind

Any consideration of this type is immediately faced with the problem of the basic architecture of cognition. How are cognitive processes arranged so that errors of the types described are even possible? Both logic and a consideration of the available literature must be used to form even a partial conception of this issue.

First, some logical consideration is needed. It is doubtful, indeed impossible, that any adult in the modern world is unaware that sharks can be dangerous. It is also doubtful that anyone is unaware that sharks eat meat, that whales are largely made of meat, that people are also made largely of meat, and that therefore standing on top of a whale currently undergoing consumption by sharks is a genuinely bad idea. It is also somewhat incredible that NASA scientists would have been unaware of the units of measurement used in programming their equipment.

These considerations lead to what might be called the first axiom of the present work: Information can be available in memory and yet have no effect on a given decision. Even if information is known, it may not influence a decision for which it would be relevant. Bad decisions are not only made in ignorance. Sometimes they are made even when information that should have prevented those decisions is known to the subject.

Now, in the absence of other determining factors (vested interest, emotional investment, etc.), this must mean that although relevant information is present in memory, it is not present in the immediate computational environment of the decision in question. This implies the existence of separable processing systems, in which these cognitive processes can proceed in isolation from one another; in effect, there is a strong suggestion of some sort of multistore processing system. The bad decision or thinking process is going on in one metaphorical cognitive space, and the necessary information which would prevent the bad decision or outcome is irrelevant because it is resident, somehow, in another. This concept would also help to explain the many of the mysteries still present in the cognitive aging literature; if one type of storage system were more susceptible to the negative effects of aging than another, then the different effects of the aging process which have been empirically observed with regard to different cognitive subsystems would of course be logically defensible.

Multistore models are hardly unfamiliar in cognitive psychology. The most redoubtable is probably that of Atkinson and Schiffrin (1968), which in one way or another still pervades the field, although the older concept of short-term memory (STM) has largely given way to the multistore-system of working memory (e.g., Baddeley, 1986). A variety of new strictures, restraints, emendations and modifications have been added to this model, especially given much evidence in the levels-of-processing tradition (e.g., Craik and Lockhart, 1972) that the boundaries between short- and long-term memory (LTM), and the connections between the two, are by no means as adamantine as originally conceived. However, there is no serious question that immediate memory has different characteristics than does memory over hours or weeks, or that either STM or LTM differ from the sensory store of the first half-second after stimulation. There are reasonable, empirically based distinctions among information systems in the human mind. The types of cognitive architecture which would be required to support the first axiom given above therefore can, and do, exist: there are divisions in the mind, as exemplified by the contrasting characteristics of relatively immediate and relatively long-term memory.

A more important division for present purposes, and the one used as a model system in the majority of the work to be discussed, lies between verbal and pictorial processing. An enormous body of research in the tradition of Paivio (e.g., 1971, 1975, 1990) has shown that verbal and imageric information are processed in fundamentally different ways (e.g., Kosslyn, 1980; Paivio, 1990; Shepard & Metzler, 1971).

So, given the existence of evidence of different subsystems based on the amount of time elapsed after encoding (sensory, working, and long-term memory), and the evident existence of processing distinctions based on the type of stimuli initially encoded (for example, verbal or pictorial materials), it seems unlikely that there will be much objection to the second axiom driving the present work: There must be divisions, inherent in information processing, between the processing of different kinds of information (e.g., pictorial and verbal), divisions which allow different kinds of information to be processed and to exist in relative isolation from one another.

But this comfortable and well-supported axiom in fact leads to a major difficulty. Although most modern authorities are in agreement, for example, that imagery and verbal processing are carried on in functionally interdependent but nevertheless separable systems (e.g., Paivio, 1990), one searches current literature on the neurological substrate of cognition in vain for a possible mechanism of such separation. It is of course true that images and words are primarily processed in different gross anatomical regions of the brain. However, and this might be taken as the third axiom, the ultimate nature of the representation of both kinds of information, indeed of all kinds of information, must lie in the electrochemical activity of the brain’s neurons.

So, there is a difficulty. Images and words are experienced differently by the given subject, and they are apparently processed differently. Yet ultimately they must be the same kind of information across anatomical regions of the brain itself, resident in the electrochemical activity of the brain’s neurons.

This dilemma could perhaps be resolved in part by means of an analogy from the purely biological realm: the ultimate-versus-proximate cause model of Mayr (e.g., 1982). The basic concept is that there are both ultimate and proximate causes of any given biological phenomenon. If one is drinking water, the proximate cause is a feeling of thirst. Ultimate causes include the facts that one is a mammal for whom regular water is required, the fact that one’s genes have ultimately coded for all of the proteins in the muscles used to drink, the fact that water exists at all, and so on. Obviously this is not a concrete dichotomy, but a continuum. For example, the activation of the thirst receptors, the hypothalamic involvement in thirst production, and the internal monitoring of blood volume are all factors which partake both of ultimate and proximate causality in the case of the thirst example. There are many factors whose influence lies somewhere between the ultimate and proximate levels.

How can such a relatively amorphous concept be of help, even analogously, in untangling the current dilemma? What is proposed here, as a “fourth axiom” which is not in fact an axiom at all but a thesis deriving from the first three, is that information must have ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Paradox of Human Intelligence
• 2 Minds through Time I: What Aging and Spatial Cognition Reveal about the Nature of Representation
• 3 Minds through Time II: What Aging and Nonspatial Cognition Reveal about the Nature of Representation
• 4 The Processing of Auditory Imagery
• 5 Gestalt and Feature-Intensive Processing: Toward a Unified Model of Human Information Processing
• 6 Bad Decisions, G/FI Processing, and Contextual Reasoning
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index