Conscious Working Memory and Attentional Capacities - Essay Example

Psychology [Name Of Student] [Name Of Institution] PSYCHOLOGY INTRODUCTION From Freud to the present, psychoanalytic theorists have tried to explain hypnosis. Reviews of these positions (Gruenwald, 2004; Silverstein & Silverstein, 1990a, 1990b) have pointed out that in many cases theoretical developments were responses to paradigm shifts within psychoanalysis rather than to the accumulation of empirical evidence. For example, during the period of advances in ego psychology in the 1940s and 1950s, new theories of hypnosis incorporated ego psychological standpoints and remained relatively free of the drive-based explanations that had characterized earlier theories. Thus, important theoretical developments have taken place, but there has been little effort to assess the validity of any of the theories, although such efforts can have important implications. In this paper I will discuss the extent to which experimental evidence supports the unconscious causes of human behavior. DISCUSSION It is a natural, indeed pervasive; trait of the human mind to reason analogically (e.g. Oppenheimer, 1956) and the attempts of humans to describe how their minds operate (the mind describing the mind) is no exception. These analogical descriptions of the human mind have been influenced by scientific advances as well as by popular technologies. This is true even though science and technology themselves are products of the mind, creating the ludicrous phenomenon of the products of the mind's inventiveness serving as analogies of the way the mind functions. Chemistry made great advances in the late 18th and early 19th century, so it is not surprising that Thomas Brown (1824), whose lectures were collected and published after his death in 1820, used the terminology of chemistry in his description of how the mind operates. “What the chemist does, in matter, the intellectual analysis does in mind” (p. 129), he said and, further, “as, in chemistry, it often happens, that the qualities of the separate ingredients of a compound body are not recognizable by us … so, in the spontaneous chemistry of the mind, the compound sentiment … has … so little resemblance to these constituents of it … that it requires the most attentive reflection of it to separate … the assemblages which even a few years may have produced” (p. 124). The ‘chemistry of the mind’ was an approach that emphasized both the constituents of the mind — the building of associations into complex mental phenomena — and the manner of analyzing it. It was extremely influential in the further development of empiricism, but Brown recognized an imperfection in comparing the psychologist to the chemist. Although “it is the labor of the intellectual inquirer to analyze, as it is the labor of the chemist to reduce the compound bodies.… the process, and the instruments by which the analyses are carried on, are, indeed, as different as matter is from mind.… [Whereas] the aggregates of matter we analyze by the use of other matter … the complex mental phenomena we analyze virtually by mere reflection; the same individual mind being the subject of analysis, the instrument of analysis, and the analyzing (sic) inquirer” (pp. 120–121). (The italics in all three of the above quotations are in the original.) One could give other examples, but we can fast-forward to our own era and ask how many psychologists now take seriously the idea that the latest of the mind's achievements, the computer, can provide us with a model of how the mind works? It must be very many, so burdened are we with long flow charts and computer simulations of the mind's activities. The eminent Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgang Köhler, believed he had demonstrated field effects in certain perceptual phenomena and speculated that field effects in the brain play an important role in mental life, for example in the reorganization of thoughts to produce new relationships which, in turn, lead to new insights. Indeed, I have been strongly influenced by Köhler, who gave the following description of reorganization taking place outside conscious awareness: When we considered the concept of organization in perception, we found that, for the most part, organization as an action does not occur within the mental [conscious] world. Only the result of the organizing process is usually experienced. Now we find that the same holds for certain more important intellectual achievements. These achievements are often made possible by an abrupt reorganization of given materials, a revolution, the result of which suddenly appears ready-made on the mental scene. From where does it come? Where does the revolution as such take place? It can occur only in that strangest of all systems, the brain, which seems, better than the active self [conscious behavior], able to do precisely such things — but, to repeat, only when the crucial material has first been thoroughly examined and made ready in active mental work. (Köhler, 2001, pp. 163–64). The idea that our actions can be influenced by processes within our mind that we are unaware of predates its popularization by Sigmund Freud (e.g. Whyte, 2000), although now, as in the past, it goes by many different names. It seems to me that no one who admits to dreaming can deny the reality of the unconscious — by whatever term it is known. By definition, when I am asleep I (that is, the aware ‘I’) am no longer in conscious control of my thoughts, yet somehow my mind has organized my memories and, on occasion, has incorporated outside noises into a narrative. The dream may be chaotic and frightening, or it may be pleasant or neutral, but it is not consciously controlled. The fact that the dream is an organized narrative tells us that the mind is capable of the most complex kind of organization without the T of awareness. This is a most important fact, for if this kind of organization can take place during sleep there is no reason why it cannot also take place while we are awake, when the T is presumably in control. If this is so, unconscious processes will influence conscious thought and behavior in many ways. Ordinarily, because of the enormous shadow cast by Freud, we think of unconscious influences primarily in terms of our emotional life, but experimental work exploring its effect on cognition has been increasing. In a relatively casual search I found that two journals had each devoted a special section of one issue to discussions of the unconscious (American Psychologist, 2004, Vol. 47, No. 6 and Canadian Psychology, 1997, Vol. 28, No. 2), to say nothing of the recent articles, books and chapters on the subject. The question no longer is whether there are unconscious processes; the question is whether they are relatively ‘dumb’ and carry out only routine or automatic procedures, or ‘smart’ and play a very large role in learning and thinking, or perhaps both, depending on what the situation requires (Loftus & Klinger, 2004). Of course that is not the only question; it is not nearly as simple as that. For one thing, non-conscious processes can be either innate or acquired and ultimately accessible or forever inaccessible (in which case their presence must be inferred). A number of different experimental paradigms that are being used as probes of the unconscious have been summarized by Kihlstrom (1997), who has offered a taxonomy of the subconscious. There are, for example, routinised processes that do not require active attention and which Kihlstrom calls, in his taxonomy, unconscious “in the strict sense of the term” (p. 1447). These include automatic processes, such as perceptual size constancy (innate), as well as highly practiced skills (acquired), such as typing. There are pre-conscious processes, where “a great deal of information processing takes place outside of working memory” (Kihlstrom, 1997, p. 1447); that is to say, outside of awareness. The pre-conscious is tapped by subliminal perception and implicit memory experiments, of which there are a growing number, and which have made productive use of priming procedures. There are, finally, the clinical manifestations that psychoanalysts and others have always pointed to as evidence for the existence of a vast area of influences that operate outside of awareness. These include the effects of hypnosis, the consequences of amnesia and neurological damage, and the manifestations of multiple personality and other dissociative phenomena, all of which Kihlstrom labels subconscious. In sum, Kihlstrom partitions the cognitive unconscious (a term introduced in an influential paper by Rozin in 2002) into “truly unconscious mental processes … [that operate] … on knowledge structures that may themselves be preconscious or subconscious” (p. 1445). These, in turn, range from the dumb automotive processes to the smart cognitive processes in which “a great deal of complex cognitive activity can be devoted to stimuli that are themselves outside of phenomenal awareness” (p. 1448). Two years later, Reber (2001) speculated that the basic, automatic processes, such as those involved in perception, frequency encoding, and so on, take place in the primitive unconscious, whereas “any functions that involve meaning or affect… are the province of the sophisticated unconscious” (p. 231). It seems more likely, however, that there is a range of processes taking place outside of awareness, rather than merely a dichotomy (cf. Lewicki & Hill, 2001). For the more automatic functions that take place without conscious effort or awareness (such as tagging the frequency and location of event), the variability due to age, intelligence, and pathology is quite limited (e.g. Hasher & Zacks, 1994; Ellis et al., 2001; Reber et al., 1991) and a number of authors have suggested that these functions must have been critical for the organism's survival and, therefore, highly resistant to interference and destruction. Consequently, they must have emerged very early in the development of our species. Reber et al. (1991) described them as “the functional instantiations of a phylogenetically primitive system that developed before the emergence of conscious functioning” (p. 888; see also Reber, 2004). An interesting example of this process is given by Ericsson et al. (1990), who asked an unexceptional undergraduate to participate in a memory span task for about an hour a day, 3 to 5 days a week for more than 1 1/2 years. If the subject immediately recalled correctly the random digits read to him, the next entirely new sequence was increased by one digit; if he made an error, the new sequence was decreased by one digit. By the end of the study (it continued for a total of 2 years, according to Ericsson & Staszewski, 2001), the subject had increased his digit span from seven to 84 digits and could recall correctly over 84% of all digit sequences given in a session comprising 200–300 digits in various sequences. During the course of the experiment, he described the mnemonic technique he had developed. Because he was a long-distance runner and naturally interested in the running times of races of various distances, he grouped three and four digits as running times. For example, 3492 was coded as 3 min 49.2 s, or close to what was then world record time for the mile. Later, he supplemented this strategy by using ages and dates as mnemonic aids. His method was to follow two four-digit sets with two three-digit sets and then a five- or six-digit rehearsal set. But even had he always grouped four digits into one bit of information, his span could not increase much beyond 33 or 34, assuming a basic memory span of seven bits (7 × 4) plus the final rehearsal buffer of five or six digits. Consequently, in order to raise his span still further, he needed additional organizational strategies. What he did was to incorporate more sets into a single bit so that, for example, three sets of four-digit groups became a single bit, as did three sets of three-digit groups. These seven more-inclusive bits, plus the rehearsal buffer, permitted him to reach 80 digits. At the 3-month mark, when apparently he was up to about 25 digits, he was switched for one session to letters of the alphabet and his memory span dropped to six consonants. Clearly, the memory span improvement was specific to the material. But how was he able to recall a set of three four-digit groups as a single bit? What mnemonic or organizational strategy did he use? All we are told is that he increased the number of groups within each super group and later introduced another level of organization by subdividing these super groups. CONCLUSION There is a limit — some call it a bottleneck — to conscious working memory and attentional capacities, so it is reasonable to suppose that unconscious capacities have remained functional in order to process automatically material to which we can give only limited attention (Hasher & Zacks, 1994), thereby becoming favored traits. However, it is not only the acquisition of information — extending from spatial, temporal and frequency information to acculturation (Lewicki, 2002) — that takes place outside of awareness. Nor is it enough to know that the unconscious contains templates or dispositions that ease and shape our acquisition of language, innumeracy and any number of other modular abilities. 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