Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing

An Introduction

R. Lachman, J. L. Lachman, E. C. Butterfield

• Editorial: Psychology Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317757757
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicología
• Categoría: Historia y teoría en psicología

First published in 1979. Basic research, at its essence, is exploration of the unknown. When it is successful, isolated pieces of reality are deciphered and described. Most of the history of an empirical discipline consists of probes into this darkness-some bold, others careful and systematic. Most of these efforts are initially incorrect. At best, they are distant approximations to a reality that may not be correctly specified for centuries. How, then, can we describe the fragmented knowledge that characterizes a scientific discipline for most of its history? A dynamic field of science is held together by its paradigm. The author's think it is essential to adequate scientific education to teach paradigms, and believe that there is an effective method. The method emphasizes the integral nature, rather than the objective correctness, of a given set of consensual commitments. They believe that paradigmatic content can be effectively combined with the technical research literature commonly presented in scientific texts. This book represents the culmination of those beliefs.

1 Science and Paradigms: The Premises of This Book

Abstract

1. Introduction
   Technical competence in a science is possible without perspective, and perspective is possible without technical skill.
   1. Perspective and Content are Both Important to Science Education.
   2. Beginning Definitions of Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing A scientific field can be defined by its content, general approach, and specific approach. The content of cognitive psychology is the human higher mental processes, and the general method is the same as other sciences. The specific approach covered in this book is the information-processing paradigm.
   3. Some Preliminary Examples of Cognitive Behavior Automobile driving is the kind of activity that cognitive psychologists believe involves many important cognitive capabilities. We use this activity to introduce some of the emphases and assumptions of information-processing psychology.
   4. The Significance of Information Processing and Cognitive Psychology Paradigmatic views often find their way into the larger society, and we think the information-processing approach will have such an impact. Presently, it is most visible in cognitive science; but it is being extended. We advocate learning it along with other approaches.
2. Cognitive Psychology as an Experimental Science
   1. Psychology Is a Research Science, Not a Mature System This means that many psychological questions have not been clearly asked, let alone answered. The student should not approach an active research science seeking only established facts and agreed-upon theories. Learning about an unsettled research science involves learning the current questions, approaches, and controversies. These have their source in aspects of scientific practice that are often ignored in traditional descriptions of scientific method.
   2. A Fundamental Premise: The Rational and Conventional Rules of Science Every scientist operates within two sets of rules. One is the rational rule system of the scientific method, which has been widely described. The other is conventional and paradigmatic; it results from consensus among a group of scientists that a particular approach is worthy,
      1. The Rational Rules While other human institutions make statements about mankind, scientific statements are unique. The rational rules of science are designed to obtain knowledge for its own sake. They are morally neutral and constructed to verify theoretical statements by observational methods.
      2. The Conventional Rules The rational rules supply more guidance in how to make observations than in what to observe. Intelligent, well-trained, and honest scientists can disagree about what to observe and what a particular observation means. Groups of scientists tend to form, however, within which there is considerable consensus on what observations are worth making and how they should be interpreted. The tacit rules followed by these subgroups constitute the conventional component of their science, their paradigm.
   3. Normal and Revolutionary Science Thomas Kuhn (1962) suggested that advanced sciences cycle between "norma!" and "revolutionary" science. During periods of normal science, there is a sense of progress within the context of a particular paradigm, and little questioning of its premises. However, as experiments are done, anomalies arise that cannot be handled within the existing paradigm. When there is sufficient weight of these anomalies, the discipline may go into crisis and alter some of its most fundamental paradigmatic commitments. Although Kuhn's contribution has been criticized, we think it is an excellent descriptive account of scientific activity and, with some modification, is highly appropriate to psychology.
   4. Paradigms in Psychology Psychology has always been, and still is, multiparadigmatic. However, at one time the dominant view was behavioristic. This has changed, partly due to the arrival of the information-processing approach. In cognitive psychology, the information-processing view was once revolutionary. It is now the dominant paradigm in cognition, and cognitive psychology now appears to be in a state of normal science.
3. Characteristics of Paradigms
   Paradigms are not the same as theories. We suggest six dimensions along which paradigms may be defined and differentiated.
   1. Intellectual Antecedents These are the prior sources of the ideas and concepts that a scientist brings to his work.
   2. Pretheoretical Ideas The working scientist draws on assumptions and tacit beliefs about the nature of the reality he is studying. These guide research and aid in the formulation of experimental questions.
   3. Subject Matter The decision to study one facet of behavior and not another amounts to a judgment about which questions should be answered and which deferred.
   4. Analogies When a scientist is studying a poorly understood system, it is useful to borrow concepts and ideas from better-understood systems. This borrowing is tantamount to analogizing the two systems and can be used to develop theories and formulate research questions.
   5. Concepts and Language The terms in a paradigmatic language can be imported from the paradigm's intellectual antecedents, or from a discipline which is the source of an important analogy, or invented within the paradigm. The language used within a paradigm reflects the pretheoretical ideas of its users.
   6. Research Methods Whereas the rational rules dictate observational methods, paradigms tend to develop preferences for particular kinds of observations, experimental designs, and variables.
4. Paradigms, Information Processing, Psychology, and Society
   It usually takes a long time for a paradigm to have an impact on the wider society outside the discipline in which it is used. We think that the information-processing view of human capacities will eventually permeate institutions outside cognitive psychology. Therefore, we have taken considerable trouble to present as explicitly as possible the pretheoretical ideas, intellectual antecedents, subject matter, concepts and language, analogies, and research methods of the information-processing paradigm.

The Lesson of the Copernican Revolution. In the Ptolemaic system, as in the cosmogony of the Bible, man was assigned a central position in the universe, from which position he was ousted by Copernicus. Ever since, writers eager to drive the lesson home have urged us, resolutely and repeatedly, to abandon alt sentimental egoism, and to see ourselves objectively in the true perspective of time and space. What precisely does this mean? In a full "main feature" film, recapitulating faithfully the complete history of the universe, the rise of human beings from the first beginnings of man to the achievements of the twentieth century would flash by in a single second. Alternatively, if we decided to examine the universe objectively in the sense of paying equal attention to portions of equal mass, this would result in a lifelong preoccupation with interstellar dust, relieved only at brief intervals by a survey of incandescent masses of hydrogen—not in a thousand million lifetimes would the turn come to give man even a second's notice. It goes without saying that no one—scientists included—looks at the universe this way, whatever lip-service is given to "objectivity". Nor should this surprise us. For, as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.

—From the opening paragraph of Personal Knowledge (Polanyi, 1962)

I. Introduction

Science is an organized human activity having much in common with other human institutions. People can function effectively in a complex institution without necessarily understanding its history, social purpose, or properties. A businessman may know little of his nation's economy, yet earn great wealth. A general may not understand the causes of war, yet still win battles. A lawyer may know nothing of the history and social function of law, yet still win court cases. Beginning students sometimes do excellent technical work without necessarily knowing its importance. Scientists are human beings working within human institutions, just as are businesspeople, generals, and lawyers. Some of them can and do produce competent research without knowing its value, nor its place in the mosaic of knowledge, nor even the forces that directed them to the problems solved by their own findings. The point is that technical competence is not the same as perspective, in science or other human institutions. It is possible to have one without the other. The objective of this book is to provide both: a knowledge of the content of cognitive psychology, along with a perspective on that content.

Just as technical competence is possible without perspective, so perspective is possible without, technical skill. People can grasp unifying views without practicing a specialty. They can understand war without fighting. They can understand law without trying cases. They can understand the economy without investing a dollar. Similarly, a student can gain a broad perspective on the sciences, or on a particular science, without earning a Ph.D. and setting to work in a laboratory.

A. Perspective and Content Are Both Important to Science Education

A few students intend to earn a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and earn their living working in a laboratory; but the vast majority have no such intention. In this book, we hope to present the science of cognitive psychology so it can be grasped equally well by students who aspire to scientific specialization and those who do not. This requires that theories and data be analyzed relative to their place in the overall pattern of knowledge. Presenting technical facts, laws, and scientific theories is not enough, even though that is sometimes all one finds in science books and courses. We believe it is essential to bring broad perspectives to the teaching of science. Science and the student would benefit if more effort were spent on the pattern of knowledge to which theories and the data relate.

Science would benefit in two ways. Scientific research would be of better quality if all researchers understood where their work fit in the scheme of things, and the importance of science would be more widely understood and appreciated among the general public. Students would benefit by gaining greater enjoyment and understanding from a scientific education that imparted perspective. They would be excited by discovering adjoining pieces of the puzzle of knowledge, rather than bored by memorizing lists of experiments whose relations to one another sometimes seem obscure. Becoming educated should be intellectually exciting. It is science's big ideas and sense of discovery, not just its technical details, that carry its excitement. This is fortunate, because it is impossible in the 4 years of a diversified undergraduate education to master the details of even one scientific subdiscipline. On the other hand, it is quite possible to achieve a broad appreciation of a science on the way to a baccalaureate degree. But here is a dilemma: Most science courses are taught by specialists. A few of them may lack perspective on their own fields; for others, perspective has become so nearly second nature that they forget to teach it. Textbooks are also written by specialists. Only a rare textbook integrates a technical literature so that it is understandable and interesting to the general student and the aspiring scientist alike.

Our goal in this book is to present an overview and perspective that will bring coherence and significance to cognitive psychology and to the information-processing approach to cognition. In the process, we present many experiments and their results. As we describe these experiments, we explicitly address why they were done and how they reflect the basic commitments of the scientists who did them. Of course, we also cover what they seem to show about human beings—their properties and their nature. Together, the intellectual motivation for research and the interpretations of experiments render cognitive psychology coherent and exciting.

B. Beginning Definitions of Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing

Cognitive psychology is one branch of an extremely broad field. Many content areas fall within the field of psychology, such as brain physiology, social interaction, and intrapsychic dynamics. The topic area of cognition, then, is one way to distinguish cognitive psychology from other branches of the general discipline. Psychology also includes many different methods of study; there are literary psychologists, intuitive psychologists, humanistic psychologists, and scientific psychologists, among others. Different methods can be used to study what is apparently the same subject matter. For instance, social interaction is studied both by scientific psychologists in the experimental laboratory and by humanistic psychologists in the encounter group. In order to mark out an area of study such as "cognitive psychology," then, we must specify both the content and the general approach.

The subject matter of cognitive psychology could be broadly defined as "how the mind works," but as such it would be completely intractable. The cognitive psychologist, like any other student of nature, must limit the subject matter to keep it comprehensible and manageable. Therefore, those aspects that seem especially important to most cognitive psychologists are studied— the "higher mental processes," including memory, perception, learning, thinking, reasoning, language, and understanding. Most students of the higher mental processes, moreover, have made a commitment to the observational methods of science rather than to a literary, intuitive, or humanistic point of view. The typical cognitive psychologist is, therefore, a scientist motivated to understand a natural system consisting of the human higher mental processes.

The commitment to use the scientific method in studying the higher mental processes obviously sets limits on one's scholarly investigations. However, a multitude of further decisions must be made, implicitly or explicitly, before the first experiment is begun. What assumptions are reasonable? What ideas are relevant in creating hypotheses about the nature of mental processes? What hypotheses are plausible and worthy of study? What should be studied first, and what should be deferred until later? Scientific psychologists can legitimately differ in the way they resolve these questions. However, within scientific disciplines, there tend to form subgroups whose members adopt very similar resolutions. When a sufficiently large number of scientists in a field agree to a considerable extent on how such questions are to be resolved, they are said to share a paradigm. Information-processing psychology is one paradigm for studying cognitive psychology, and it happens that in recent years it has become the dominant paradigm in the study of adult cognitive processes.

As we shall use the term, paradigm refers to the common set of ideas a subgroup of scientists brings to their subject matter. We develop the concept of paradigm in considerable detail in the rest of this chapter, for it is a pivotal concept in our treatment of the literature on cognition. Although the same term has been used to refer to particular laboratory techniques, our usage is quite different. It is also different from "theory," but these differences are explored later.

Because of the enormous complexity of most natural and social systems, no scientist can study the totality of a major system. Research can begin only after manageable-sized subsystems have been defined. Significant research requires the knowledge, foresight, and luck to formulate the properties and states of a subsystem that corresponds reasonably well to the real world. The scientist's paradigm plays a central role in this very significant task. Cognitive psychologists within the information-processimg paradigm have a particular way of deciding which subsystems comprise the higher mental processes, some insights and intuitions about what they are like, and some commitments regarding how they should be studied. They have defined the area of study as the way man collects, stores, modifies, and interprets environmental information or information already stored internally. They are interested in knowing how he adds information to his permanent knowledge of the world, how he accesses it again, and how he uses his knowledge in every facet of human activity. Information-processing-oriented cognitive psychologists believe that such collection, storage, interpretation, understanding, and use of environmental or internal information is cognition. They believe understanding these processes is fundamental to understanding reading, speech production and comprehension, and creative thought. Indeed, many cognitive psychologists believe that this research will aid in understanding other human characteristics, such as emotion, personality, and social interaction. Some cognitive psychologists believe that the properties they study—speech, understanding, and thought—distinguish human beings from every other natural system on earth.

C. Some Preliminary Examples of Cognitive Behavior

So far, our discussion of information-processing psychology has been both brief and abstract. It is greatly extended in the next two chapters. Before that, however, it might be useful to concretize our brief description through a familiar activity, analyzed from the information-processing psychologist's point of view.

Most readers of this book probably know how to drive an automobile. Driving is the kind of activity that information-processing psychologists consider representative of tasks requiring many important cognitive processes. Although you are probably unaware of most of them, you perform countless internal acts as you drive your car. This is one characteristic of information-processing approaches to cognition: Many of the cognitive processes that interest information-processing psychologists occur without conscious awareness on the part of the individual who is performing them.

Consider your typical drive to your college or university. As you drive, you make various turns, each one signalled by some familiar landmark. These landmarks are so well known that you probably are not aware of "seeing" them each time. However, the information-processing psychologist is convinced that you must perceive each familiar landmark anew each time. You must recognize it as the same landmark that you have seen and used on previous occasions. How do you do this? From the information-processing viewpoint, you must have represented the landmark's appearance in your memory. When you see it again, you match up your current perception of the landmark to its stored representation; this is the process of recognition. Recognition also makes available to you other stored information about the significance of the landmark. Thus, when you have recognized it you can know whether you should turn right or left, proceed straight ahead, get ready to turn, and so on. Information-processing psychology is fundamentally committed to the concept of representation: Everything you know is considered to be represented in your memory. How these representations are put to use is one of the central questions in many areas of cognitive psychology.

We have mentioned two kinds of information about the landmark: perceptual knowledge about its appearance and conceptual knowledge of its significance. Both kinds of information are presumably represented, and they are called into play whenever a driver correctly executes the actions necessary to get to his or her destination. Another question that intrigues information-processing psychologists is the manner in which different kinds of information are represented. The area of cognition is also characterized by an assumption that represented information is somehow coded for storage in the human nervous system. This means that external events are converted into an internal form according to some specifiable sets of rules. Perhaps there is a different code for perceptual and conceptual information; or perhaps there is a single code that can be reached on the basis of visual or conceptual stimuli. Many areas of cognitive psychology are concerned with the various forms in which content may be coded.

As you drive, you take in vast amounts of environmental data. You "see" dozens of other cars, many buildings and trees, signs and signals. Some of this material is almost immediately forgotten; for example, another driver who is behaving normally is unlikely to be remembered later. However, if a driver behaves erratically, you may subsequently recall his actions. Subjectively it seems as if you see only the erratic drivers. But the information-processing psychologist considers that you could not ...