Classic introspection techniques took the approach that what people say about their minds is the best and most reliable source of information. Individuals were asked to give their responses to certain words, or to describe the workings of their minds, and their reports were catalogued. This approach had many gaps and flaws -- without any independently verifiable experimental methods, the results were eventually discarded as too subjective and lacking in evidence. The behaviorist attack was largely effective in sweeping away cobwebby thinking and pushing the psychological sciences to work harder to validate their approaches. Joseph Hart developed a series of experiments that allowed these introspective phenomena to be measured independently -- by demonstrating that in some cases, people could accurately report on the workings of their own minds, in ways that were then provable. The example described in the text is his RJR model -- which utilizes the much-studied 'Tip of the Tongue' phenomenon to demonstrate that even when people do not know the answer to a question, they can judge with reasonable accuracy whether they would recognize the answer if they saw it. These reports are verifiable by how accurate their answers are, when coupled with how well they predict their own recognition. Hart found that people tend to whether they will be able recognize the correct answer to a question; they know if they "know" it, even if they can't recall it. This suggests that there is more than memory or response to patterns/stimuli going on in the brain.
Imageless thoughts
The classic introspectionism experiment is image-association, in which participants were asked to say what image they saw before a word came into their heads. Experimentalists found that a significant portion of these words did not generate any images in their various study participants -- which suggested that there were portions of the mind's workings that could not be reported verbally.
In the Ericsson and Simon model of introspectionism and memory, the verbal reports from a subject are most accurate when the person has been asked to monitor their thinking in a particular way and are immediately asked for the results of this monitoring. Lower-accuracy data can be obtained by asking people about their thinking at a later point. If the individual did not pay attention to a particular element of their thinking, they may not be able to do much more than guess. In the situation described where items are preferentially selected based only on their position, people may simply not know why they made a particular choice, and potentially fabricate a reason. The choice might be made based on some instinctual or subconscious level, such as proximity to the hand, or location in the area of greatest focal clarity for the human eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment