Perspicacity

Recent discussions with colleagues about the 'flow of experience' and the implications for research have caused me to reconsider Williams James' (1909, p. 165 - 166) words about the "stream of consciousness:"

It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as we shall see in the chapter on Imagination, made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in 'states of consciousness,' relations are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say the river consists of nothing but pailful, spoonful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of wither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the images is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, - or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood. [Emphasis added].

For me the dynamic coupling of perception and action is the source of the stream that James is describing.  Although there are significant exceptions (e.g., Gibson), Psychology as a field has tended to ignore the dynamics of human experience and continues to study isolated buckets of water from the stream in hopes that one day the buckets will add up to an understanding of the stream.  In pursuit of 'experimental control' over the phenomena, I fear that experimental psychology first squeezes all the interesting dynamics out of the phenomena that they hope to understand.

Gavan Lintern is the first to write a review of our book What Matters? for publication. Gavan's review will be published in Frontiers in Psychology. Here is a link to the review:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00264/full?

Gavan Lintern is the first to write a review of our book What Matters? for publication. Gavan's review will be published in Frontiers in Psychology. Here is a link to the review:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00264/full?

Here is an interesting post with regard to the reproducibility crisis in psychology. I agree with the author's [Doug Marman] point that in response to the crisis there is a danger that psychology may actually "objectify" human experience out of psychology experiments. See an earlier post on this site about "Cargo Cult Science"

Lenses of Perception February 22, 2017

Here is a video of a talk that I gave to colleagues in Semantic Computing with respect to "What Matters"

Target Article in She Ji:

Target Article:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240587261630017X

Response to commentaries:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872616300703

 

Paper now available. Published in Applied Ergonomics

Supporting productive thinking.

Quantifying the Limits of Human Information Processing

Early discoveries related to the information processing capacity of human's were welcomed by Applied Cognitive Psychologists, because for the first time they could provide their engineering colleagues with precise numbers. For example, the Hick-Hyman Law and Fitts' Law allowed quantitative estimates of the bandwidth of the human information processing channel (approximately 7-10 bits/sec); and G.A. Miller's famous paper provided a quantitative estimate of the capacity of working memory of from 5 to 9 chunks.

Thus, when the engineers asked how much information to put into a display - the psychologists could provide a number - probably not more than 7 or 9 chunks. However, the smart engineers (and the smart psychologists) were not very satisfied with this estimate. They realized that the numbers were meaningless unless it was possible to specify what constituted a chunk with respect to the domain being represented.

The Power of Chunking

If you read G.A. Miller's paper thoroughly, you will discover that the ultimate conclusion is that, due to the power of chunking, there seems to be no practical limit to the capacity of working memory. Miller describes how a colleague was capable of remembering long strings of binary digits, by using various strategies for recoding them into chunks.

It is a bit dramatic to watch a person get 40 binary digits in a row and then repeat them back without error. However, if you think of this merely as a mnemonic trick for extending the memory span, you will miss the more important point that is implicit in nearly all such mnemonic devices. The point is that recoding is an extremely powerful weapon for increasing the amount of information that we can deal with. In one form or another we use recoding constantly in our daily behavior. (Miller, 1956, p. 95

In this example, the stimulus (strings of binary digits) had no intrinsic structure - so the chunking strategies used were essentially mnemonic tricks (e.g., using an octal coding). That is, the chunking structure is imposed by the observer as an alternative internal representation.

Building on de Groot's observations of chess, Chase and Simon illustrated the power of chunking in relation to expertise. Their research showed that Expert Chess players had superior ability to recall positions after a very brief exposure to a chess game, than more junior players. While the recall of junior players seemed to be in the range of 7 or so pieces, experts could often reproduce the entire game. However, these differences in recall between expert and junior players were essentially eliminated when the recall task involved pieces randomly positioned on the chess board.

It appears that the 'chunking' ability that allowed the superior recall of the experts was dependent on preserving the structure of the game of chess. When the constraints of the game were eliminated, the recall advantage disappeared. This suggests that chunking structure was not an arbitrary mnemonic structure, but rather it was dependent on the intrinsic structure of chess (e.g., the rules of the game, the intentions of the players, the strength or weaknesses of positions relative to winning the game).

Chunking, Attunement, & Coordinative Structure

Perhaps, chunking facilitates memory and problem solving in a fashion analogously to how coordinative structures facilitate motor control. The superior memory capability and the ability of expert chess players to see a good option quickly suggest that they are tuned to the functional constraints of the game of chess, in the same way that a specific coordinative structure might be tuned to accomplish a specific motor function (e.g., see discussion of golf shots in previous post on requisite variety).

With regards to the discussion of requisite variety in an earlier post, the tuning to the functional constraints of the game would tend to make the signals more salient (e.g., the strengths/weaknesses of various positions) and reduce the noise (i.e., possibilities inconsistent with the constraints of the game). When the functional constraints of the game of chess are removed - the advantages of this tuning disappear.

In a similar way, Gibson's ecological optics and the related notion of optical invariance, can also be seen as an ecological basis for chunking. In other words, the optical structure provides a means for tuning into the natural constraints (or natural dimensionality) associated with control of locomotion - making the relative signals salient (allowing direct perception).

This also has clear implications for designing graphical interfaces - as emphasized in Ecological Interface Design. The key is to design representations (e.g., analogs or metaphors) that make the structure or constraints of a process salient. Thus, helping people to tune into meaningful chunks or dimensions with respect to the process control problem. The key challenge then, is to discover the natural structure intrinsic to the process being controlled (e.g., the constraints, laws or invariants). This is the ultimate goal of work analysis (e.g, Vicente (1999).

Chunking to highlight the deep structure of a problem

A key point here is to get beyond the numbers (7 + or - 2) and to get beyond the idea that chunking is a simple mnemonic trick in order to appreciate that it is possible to parse problems into functionally meaningful chunks. This is illustrated by Wertheimer's (1959) concept of productive thinking. He shows that productive thinking depends on representations that parse a problem in terms of its deep structure. The key point is that the practical power of chunking comes when an observer is tuned to and uses the natural structure of the problem (e.g., constraints, patterns, invariants, categories)  in productive ways. 

 

 

 

Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality

In his second book Lila, Pirsig tells an anecdote about a Native American Indian who responds to a question about the type of a particular dog with the answer "That's a good dog." The questioner laughs at this response, as if the question was not understood. But Pirsig notes that for Native American's "good" is a quality of the dog that can be directly experienced. That is, "good" is not a subjective interpretation, an opinion of the observer, but an ontologically basic property of the experience. In other words, "good" is a property that can be directly perceived.

This is an aspect of the dynamics of circles that is not well appreciated - in addition to affording and specifying - satisfying is fundamental to the dynamics of abduction or adaptive control.

In the classical Western view, properties such as 'goodness' are subjective or derivative. As such, they fall outside of the sphere of science and are relegated to the arts. In pursuit of objectivity, Western science has defined all questions associated with value as irrelevant or extrinsic to its mission to understand reality. The implication is that value is not real. It is not an ontological primitive. It is a derivative property that is open to interpretation.

However, the stability of a system that is intimately coupled with an ecology depends critically on the ability to discriminate between the 'good' (e.g., nutritious, safe, growth enhancing) and the 'bad' (e.g., poisonous, threatening, stifling). Thus, the implication of Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality is that for the dynamics of experience - qualities such as good and bad are ontologically basic. Much more so than the objective properties of Western Science (e.g., position, velocity, size, weight).

The objective properties of Western Science were specifically chosen to describe a reality that was independent from an observer. However, a science of experience is interested specifically in the properties that relate to stability of the coupling between perception and action (or the coupling between the actor and the ecology). These properties include constraints on action (affording), constraints on perception (specifying), and constraints on value (satisfying). Each specified as duals that depend jointly on properties of the relations between actor and ecology.

It is the constraints on value (satisfying) that determine the attractive potential of the field of experience -- whereas the constraints on action and perception will determine what attractors can be realized and what repellers can be avoided.  In other words, the constraints on value determine the relations between the ecology and the health of the actor (e.g., consequences). And the constraints on information and action determine the capacity of the actor to discriminate and control action to realize the healthy consequences  and avoid the dangerous consequences.

The key point of the Metaphysics of Quality is that the constraints on value (i.e., what is good and bad; healthy or dangerous) are as ontologically basic to experience as the constraints on action and information.  These three types of constraint jointly shape motion through the field of experience.

In relation to the previous post - emotions may be that aspect of experience that reflects attunement to properties associated with value. Falling in love is an example of detecting an attractor. For example, we fall in love with an object (e.g., a house, a car, another person) and then the constraints on perception and action determine whether the object can be obtained or not. A person without emotions is like a boat without a destination - adrift on the seas, fully functional (i.e., controllable) but with no reference for preferring one direction to another.