Handbook of Learning and Cognitive Processes (Volume 1)

Introduction to Concepts and Issues

W. Estes

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317704409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From the Foreword: "Is it possible at present to identify a core cluster of theoretical ideas, concepts, and methods with which everyone working in the area of learning and cognition needs to be familiar? Would it be possible to make explicit the relationships that we feel do or must exist among the various subspecialties, ranging from conditioning through perceptual learning and memory to psycholinguistics, and to present these in a sufficiently organized way to help specialists and non-specialists alike in relating particular lines of research to the broader spectrum of activity?

These questions were posed to a substantial number of investigators who are currently most active in developing the ideas and doing the research. Their response constitutes this Handbook …"

First published in 1975, Volume 1 of this Handbook attempts to present an overview of the field and to introduce the principal theoretical and methodological issues that will persistently recur in the expanded treatments of specific research areas that comprise the later volumes. Deferring to the current Zeitgeist rather than to chronology, they begin with the present state of cognitive psychology, then introduce the comparative approach, and conclude this volume with a rapid, three-chapter review of the evolution of ideas from conditioning to information processing.

1

The State of the Field: General Problems and Issues of Theory and Metatheory

W. K. Estes

Rockefeller University

I. A PROVISIONAL DEFINITION

Just as the physical sciences can be conceived as the study of energy in its many aspects, the behavioral and social sciences can be characterized in terms of their concern with the processing and transformation of information. The adaptation of living organisms to an ever-changing environment depends upon the ability to acquire information about environmental regularities and to use this information as the basis of adaptive response. This process occurs on two very different time scales. Over the long time scale, of the order of centuries, species acquire and store information in a genetic code—the basis for so-called instinctive or species-specific behavior. Over the short time scale, information is acquired by individuals and stored in the nervous system in a manner still largely unknown. Further, the storage of information by individuals in a capacious but impermanent memory is augmented by various types of records that require the individual to remember only the code and not the contents in order to reproduce indefinitely large quantities of stored information. The scientific study of the processing of information on a short time scale defines the field of learning and cognitive psychology.

The two most conspicuous aspects of cognitive activity are perhaps power and fragility. Successful operation of cognitive functions has yielded civilization as we know it—science, philosophy, mathematics, the arts, commerce, government. But failures are fully as striking. Millions of individuals never acquire the rudimentary intellectual skills needed for everyday functioning in a social environment. Many more are hampered in their social adjustments by inability to communicate effectively in either speech or writing. Many more are able to acquire intellectual and communicative skills but are frustrated by an inability to comprehend enough of complex social institutions to have a fair chance to share in the benefits. Still others reach relatively high levels of mental functioning only to find their powers slipping away under the influence of disease, drugs, stress, or aging. It is only natural then that an increasing number of thoughtful and socially concerned individuals should be coming to believe that one of the most urgent tasks for our society is the development of a body of scientific knowledge that will enable us to understand more of the capacities and limits of human information processing and to guide efforts to remedy deficiencies or failures of cognitive functioning.

The various subdisciplines engaged in this task may be grouped under the currently popular generic label cognitive psychology. Theoretically, cognitive psychology might be defined in terms of the study of all aspects of information processing by organisms. But to be practical, at least for purposes of the Handbook, we need to apply some limitations. Without trying to draw too fine a line, we shall deal primarily with studies which focus on the storage, retrieval, and utilization of information rather than on the neurophysiological mechanisms by which these functions are accomplished. Further, although observed behavior of organisms must be our principal index concerning states of information, we shall largely exclude from our consideration a large body of work of a more or less engineering character in which the methods of operant conditioning, behavior modification, or the motor skills laboratory are utilized for the shaping of behavior as an end in itself.

II. VARIETIES OF RESEARCH

What the study of learning and cognitive processes appears to be depends on where one looks. To illustrate, suppose that we were to inspect on a typical day some of the studies currently being conducted by members of my laboratory group. In one experimental chamber we might see human subjects observing displays of letters on a screen while their eye movements are monitored electrically by an apparatus so contrived that the display disappears when the individual moves his eyes—thus permitting the experimenter to determine how much a person can see in a single look. In another room adult subjects are participating in an experiment in which the apparatus is controlled by a computer so as to simulate the operation of a public opinion poll. A bit further away a study is in progress in which the short-term memory of monkeys is being tested, the investigator hoping to discover whether these animals are able to maintain retention by a process similar to rehearsal. If we proceed still further from the heart of the laboratory, we might see a group of bilingual children in a city preschool “playing a game” with an experimenter who seeks to understand how the children acquire the ability to deal with number concepts. And at the same time, though we could not conveniently view the operation, halfway around the globe some of our colleagues are studying the acquisition of similar skills by African children who grow up in a quite different cultural setting.

Some of the studies involve highly sophisticated instrumentation and deal with precise measurement of narrowly circumscribed behaviors that seem remote from anything occurring outside of the laboratory. Others deal with tasks similar to or even drawn directly from practical problems arising outside the laboratory. In some studies the experimenter goes to extreme lengths to prevent the subjects from introspecting. In others, introspection is encouraged, and the reports are recorded as an interesting part of the data.

This wide variation in content, methods, and orientation of researches is typical of a field in which techniques must be found to study phenomena too complex to yield to any one approach and in which the research is directed toward objectives no one yet knows how to realize.

Viewed from the outside, perhaps the most salient features of present-day cognitive psychology are, on the one hand, the volume and heterogeneity of research, and, on the other, the absence of any semblance of plan or order. Trying to read through any year’s volumes of research articles is much like walking through a field which has been sown by mixing all varieties of seed, from asters to zinnias and alfalfa to wheat, and scattering them at random. Innumerable small plots are cultivated industriously but autonomously, today’s harvest in any one yielding the germ of the next, except perhaps for haphazard wind-blown inputs from neighbors.

This appearance in a way is deceptive. Behind the noisy surface of research output there is actually a substantial measure of plan and order. The order exists, however, not in the activity nor in the products themselves, but only in the mind of the scientifically trained observer who possesses the key to the system. The key is theory. The organizing influence of ideas, concepts, and attitudes generates significant categorizations of phenomena, imposes gradients of subordination, makes it possible to retrieve from diverse sources the information required to solve a problem. Thus, to understand cognitive psychology, one must understand its theories.

III. METATHEORETICAL ISSUES AND ORIENTATIONS

The form taken by a theory is dictated partly by facts, partly by philosophical and methodological presuppositions that constrain and shape the thinking of those who do the theorizing. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, to find that research on learning and cognition has tended to be polarized with respect to a number of issues which are familiar from the histories of other sciences. One of these is the problem of objectivity, which in psychology is most conspicuously manifest in the persisting opposition of behavioral and cognitive approaches. A second reflects differing views concerning the proper level of generality for psychological laws. A third is the increasingly acute problem of relevance to practical affairs. In this section I shall summarize some ideas that may help relate these issues to the treatments of theory and method that constitute the body of the Handbook.

A. Mind and behavior

Long before experimental psychology made its earliest appearance, other biological and physical sciences had accumulated imposing records of accomplishment with regard to prediction and control of natural phenomena. These achievements were attributable in great measure to the successes of the sciences in achieving objectivity, communicability, and verifiabihty of findings and reducibility or interconnectedness of their theories. It was natural that any other disciplines that hope for the same successes should strive to emulate the methods.

In study of learning and thought, the problem of objectivity surfaced in the guise of the now nearly century old opposition of introspectionist versus behavioristic approaches. It appeared to the early structuralists (for example Titchener, 1909) that introspections could be as repeatable and measurable phenomena as overt behaviors, provided only that they are obtained under sufficiently rigorously controlled conditions. Repeatability of observations did indeed appear to be achievable, but no method was forthcoming to meet the similarly important requirement of agreement among independent observers; and, perhaps worse, the results of introspective studies proved refractory to any theoretical connection with results of researches in other disciplines.

The behavioristic approach (Watson, 1924), in contrast, seemed on sound ground with respect to these desiderata. Observations and measurements of overt behavior could be made as objective as observations and measurements on pendulums or raindrops and, thanks to Pavlov (1927), the concepts emerging from the observations appeared reducible or at least relatable to those of physiological and neural sciences. In consequence, over the greater part of the period during which the psychology of learning and cognition has taken shape, most investigators have, with different degrees of willingness and enthusiasm, subjected themselves to the discipline of methodological behaviorism.

Contemporaneous with the hegemony of associationism and behaviorism, there was always present in the background an alternative, phenome-nologically oriented approach in terms of concepts of mental functioning drawn from the vocabulary of everyday life. However, harnessed to the introspectionist methodology, conceptions of learning and cognition couched in terms of mental processes did not begin to grow to the stature of formal theories until the recent relaxation of the hold of behavioristic thinking.

Only in the very last few years have we seen a major release from inhibition and the appearance in the experimental literature on a large scale of studies reporting the introspections of subjects undergoing memory searches, manipulations of images, and the like. This disinhibition appears to be a consequence of a combination of factors. Among these are new developments in methodology that help with the problem of verifiability and a broadening body of theory that helps to solve the problem of connectedness with other disciplines. Further, new sources of conceptual analyses, especially those arising from information-processing systems, make mental operations seem less subjective to the extent that they appear more and more to resemble processes that are realizable in machines, or at least in programs that can be run on machines.

The construction of theory in terms of mental processes seems finally to have come into respectability with the advent of digital computers and demonstrations that, by simulating covert processes in computer models, one can achieve both the appearance of greater objectivity and the fact of greater testability. Thus, the present-day investigator of learning and cognition tends to choose between the behavioral and cognitive approaches, not on general philosophical grounds, but on the basis of the way they actually prove in practice their value as guides to research, organizers of findings and mediators of applications.

B. The Problem of Generality

Issues bearing on the suitable level of generality for cognitive theories have been less conspicuous in the literature than those having to do with objectivity, but they have been no less vexing for individual investigators, who must decide how to design and interpret their research. Should the laws and principles of learning and memory apply similarly to all organisms, except perhaps with variations in parameter values, or should different laws apply to different species and different ages within a species? Should cognitive psychology be only the study of a cluster of processes present solely in mature human beings as a consequence of their mastery of language or should it be a study of principles of learning and memory as a manifestation of processes common to both animal and man, young and old, perhaps with elaboration as we go up either scale?

The entire array of conceptual systems—association theory, functional-ism, and behavior theory—which dominated research on both human and animal learning over the first half of the century had in common a view of a hypothetical ageless organism. The hypothetical individual, of course, increased his capabilities for action as a function of experience, but once past an early stage of neural maturation his processes of learning and memory followed the same laws regardless of age (and indeed in some views almost regardless of species). Consequently, we find nearly all of the formal theories of learning and cognition written without reference to the boundary conditions that are to be assumed relative to characteristics of the learner.

The tendency to theorize in terms of an abstract organism may seem unnecessarily sterile, making cognitive psychology both autistic relative to other disciplines and remote from practical affairs. Still, this theoretical strategy should not be too facilely criticized. With a subject matter of such enormous complexity, simplifications are essential if research and theory are even to get a start. Thus, isolation of manageable fragments has had to have first priority. It is good scientific practice to impose simplifications ruthlessly when necessary—but then to remove the simplifying assumptions and discover where and how one can generalize.

In cognitive psychology, the instigation to begin peeking behind the curtain of the abstract organism has begun to arise under the influence of developments in ethology, cross-cultural research, and linguistics. The consequent emergence of at least incipient trends toward theorizing that take account of age and species differences is timely but in a sense by no means new. Rather, we have almost come a full cycle. In the earlier period of the study of learning and animal behavior, it was widely assumed with little justification that a great part of animal behavior was instinctive. Much theoretical and empirical effort was required to clarify the extent to which the original concept of instinct was a tautology and to begin to elucidate the extent to which apparently innate behavior patterns were shaped at least in part through learning processes. But, as usual, the pendulum swung too far, and we saw the development of learning theories that put forth general laws with no attention to the boundary conditions of their applicability with respect either to age or to phylogenetic level of the organism. Then the way back to a more balanced frame of reference had again to be earned by years of arduous research in which findings emerging from the field studies of the ethologists and the laboratory studies of comparative experimental psychologists (for example, Breland & Breland, 1966; Garcia, McGowan, & Green, 1972) brought home the fact that the raw material for the processes described in general laws of learning is not an initial state of subidiocy in which the elements of the nervous system are largely connected at random, but rather an elaborate organization characteristic of a species.

Much the same sequence occurred at the level of human learning, the current corrective influences arising jointly from a vast increase in information concerning linguistic development and the belated appearance of research efforts dealing with human learning in widely different cultural settings (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971; Cole & Scribner, 1974). Here again, inputs from without were complemented by developments fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1. The State of the Field: General Problems and Issues of Theory and Metatheory
• 2. Cognitive Psychology: An Introduction
• 3. Cognitive Theory Applied to Individual Differences
• 4. Comparative Psychology and Human Cognition
• 5. From Classical Conditioning to Discrimination Learning
• 6. From Discrimination Learning to Cognitive Development: A Neobehavioristic Odyssey
• 7. Learning, Motivation, and Cognition
• Author Index
• Subject Index