Mediational Role of Cognition in Behaviour Formation - Essay Example

The Writer’s Name] [The Professor’s Name] [The Course Title] [Date] Mediational Role of Cognition in Behaviour Formation Literature Review Social Psychologists have agreed upon the fact that cognition mediates behaviour in one way or the other. It has certain mediational role and status in counselling and formation of our attitude. The results may be different in different scenario, yet its significance cannot be denied. Various experimental studies have been conducted on the topic by various social psychologists. This literature review will evaluate the relevant empirical observations and studies conducted so far in this filed of study. Social choices are choices; attributions of human agency are causal inferences; perceptions of other persons are perceptions. When the processes underlying these social phenomena are identified, particularly those of the second and third parts, they turn out to be the very same information processes we encounter in non-social cognition. Information is extracted from a complex stimulus situation; it is subjected to the kinds of information processes we call "thinking," "judging," "problem solving," or "inferring"; during the course of that processing, there is brought to bear on it a wide range and variety of information already stored in memory. Now particular social situations define particular task environments. Conversing with a new acquaintance is different from solving an algebra problem. That is to say, the substances of the situations are different, as are the scripts, in Abelson's terms that are relevant to them. This does not imply that they are handled by different processors. The point is illustrated by GPS, the General Problem Solver ( Newell & Simon, 56-69) computer program devised to simulate human problem solving. GPS is "general" in that its processes make no reference to any specific problem domain. It is a perfectly general scheme for taking a starting situation and trying to transform it into a goal situation. GPS is, in principle, as willing to judge a new acquaintance as it is to tackle an algebra problem--providing that the problems are specified for it in a form it understands. The same experimental manipulation induces stereotyping behaviour in social situations. Hamilton goes on to show, by reference to his own experiments and those by Chapman, how identical manipulations can produce illusory perceptions of correlation between uncorrelated variables in social and nonsocial task situations. Man's "bounded rationality" --the limits of his information-processing capabilities in the face of complex situations--can be adduced to explain a variety of phenomena in social as well as individual behaviour. In particular, he proposes that the limits of man's ability to reach decisions in the face of a multiplicity of incommensurable criteria are a principal reason for the generally observed superiority of simple linear decision rules over the judgments of experienced counsellors. Human behaviour can be regarded as genuinely nonsocial only to the extent that it is determined by some combination of the physiological characteristics of the central nervous system and sensory organs with the structure of the task environment. If we notice differences among human subjects placed in the same task environment, and if those differences are not explainable in physiological terms, then we must find something in their previous lives, produced presumably by the culture in which they have lived and the other persons with whom they have interacted, to account for the differences in task performance. For behaviour to be social, therefore, it is not necessary for persons other than the behaving subject to be present; persons with whom he has interacted in the past make it equally social. Research on cognition has also indicated that the human information-processing system is highly flexible and adaptive ( Simon, 99-118). In most situations, task characteristics strongly shape the possible ways people can structure their internal representation of the task and hence their information-processing behaviour in that task. Within the context of the parole process, two task characteristics have already received attention. If we ask what the operating assumptions of a cognitive social psychology are, we can identify a general theoretical emphasis and some methodological advances. Theoretically, cognitive social psychologists have shifted toward process models, which focus on how the individual gathers, interprets, and uses information. Whereas an interest in cognitive processes is not new to social psychology, the development of a methodology appropriate to this interest is. In practice, we have begun testing cognitive principles in situations and borrowing measures that attempt to zero in on what is actually going on in the subject's head. On another level, cognitive social psychology is a shift in theoretical scope. It is an effort to move away from atomistic theories about temporally isolated and fairly specific social events to schematic models that are rich in detail and that attempt to provide a sufficient explanation for individuals' responses over time to a wider range of social events. Here again, the gap between theory and method is substantial, although this theoretical reorientation has resulted in initial efforts to develop computer models of social behaviour. (Simon, 270-77) The clearest indication of mediational role of cognition, as regards to human behaviour, is directly attributable to the influence of social Psychology. It may further inflict changes not only in what temporal portions of interactions are studied but also in the nature of the measures that are employed. For example, social psychologists have begun using dependent measures that have somewhat limited usefulness for studying the outcomes of social events but considerable usefulness for studying the dynamics of individual inference. Such measures include reaction time, recall, organization of recall, requests for additional information, eye movements and scanning, and verbal protocols, all of which are efforts to lend construct validity to process models. Abelson calls for a large-scale approach to the mediational status of cognition. First, he rejects the usefulness of two views of psychology: piecemeal, bottom-up approaches to assembling knowledge, which are often adopted in practice if not in theory; and a structuralist approach, which maintains that matching specific experiences to formal structures relatively free of specific world-wise content can provide a basis for understanding social cognition. Abelson's answer to these views is that we should be studying behavioural chunks, not particulars, and that these chunks must take into account a knowledge of how the world works. He has proposed script theory as an alternative way of thinking about behaviour, a script being a coherent set of expected events. He proposes that attitudes and behaviour depend substantially on what scripts an individual has or can construct regarding social events. (Abelson, 19-32) This idea forms the basis of an extensive theoretical shift in psychology. In rejecting piecemeal and structuralist approaches to social cognition, script theory also renders unsurprising certain phenomena that are surprising from other theoretical vantage points. For example, several symposium participants have discussed the disturbing fact that concrete information with a high level of immediacy has a greater impact on behaviour and some attitudes than does abstract and often objectively better information. Abelson's answer to this is that it is not a problem per se but a very clear illustration of how people impute meaning to social experience. He is asking us to take an information-processing approach several steps further than we already have in considering acts as embedded in a network of prior experience, experience that is concrete, specific, often imageable, and to some extent idiosyncratic. (Abelson, 274-356) One implication of the theory can be directed to artificial intelligence. A mechanical inference system requires a knowledge of how the world works in order to make sense of behaviour. (Stellar, 504-507) An implication for researchers not in artificial intelligence might be a close examination of individual verbal protocols, for summary statistics are unlikely to reveal a scriptal type of reasoning process. Hopefully, once we find out what to do with it, the full impact of script theory can be felt. Dawes speaks to the concern of cognitive social psychology role in behaviour formation, namely attention to the limitations of cognitive processes. First, Dawes points out myths about cognition that both social and cognitive psychologists have accepted until quite recently. He exposes the naive assumption that information processing gives us complete and correct answers and that biased, erroneous, or incomplete answers can be traced to motivational factors. Second, he reminds us not only that our cognitive capacities for processing information are extremely limited, but also that one manifestation of this fact is our continued belief that they are not. (Dawes, 443-59) Through his examples, Dawes has shown that both our theories and our applications of psychology to social problems are badly flawed. We are at our best, he contends, when we stick to figuring out what the relevant variables in a situation are, rather than how they should be combined, and he recommends in situations involving predictive applications, that we specify the input variables and let the rest of the work fall to linear composite solutions. (Dawes, 443-59) Our theories are no less flawed, and within social psychology particularly, an about face on many problems is clearly warranted. Investigations assumed that stereotyping represents a short circuiting of the normal reasoning process. As a result, the search for what goes wrong persisted for many years and concentrated on individual motives and the social nature of the information. Only recently have investigators returned to the possibility that it is cognitive processes themselves, for example, the use of categorization to simplify incoming information that may be at fault. We might consider what the view of man as a limited information processor has to say about our own scientific efforts to understand social cognition. (Meck, 171-201) That is, it is easy to see stupidity in retrospect, but our acknowledgements of faulty reasoning about applications to social problems and our recognition of previous arbitrary theoretical distinctions does not render us immune to such errors in the present. Theoretical, methodological, and statistical conventions that are adopted for their popularity rather than their appropriateness or validity may constitute other such blind spots, ones that can be removed only by making the assumptions of our models explicit and developing tools appropriate to examining these assumptions. Hunt, Schlosberg, Solomon, & Stellar, (291-304 ) start out with the following: ‘In his original paper, Hunt noted that the evidence for the stress currently placed upon infantile experience as a determinant of adult behaviour derives from approaches which observe first the effect in the adult and then look backward for the causes. In the psychoanalysis, the method consists of noting the characteristics of an adult and then looking backward for the cause through his free associations into a childhood already past. In comparative study of cultures, the method consists of noting certain common behavioural characteristics of the adults in a society, and then examining their method of rearing children for the causes. Hunt sought to provide a predictive, experimental test of the hypothesis that infantile experience can endure and can effect (sic) adult behaviour. Using rats as subjects, because of their relatively brief span of life, he found that animals submitted to feeding frustration in infancy hoarded more than two and one-half times as much as their freely fed litter-mate controls. (p. 291) And they concluded this very interesting paper with: "These observations and those deriving from psychoanalysis and the comparative study of cultures, coupled with our own on rats, argue that we may be dealing with a phenomenon which can appear generally in mammals." There is, an absolutely unmistakable style here: Psychoanalysis, culture, and "generally in mammals" lead, in later years, to love, hate, fear, guilt, passion, imprinting, drug addiction, thrill seeking. Solomon (228-39 ) in his paper, wrestles at great length with the history and purposes of control group designs and with whether control procedures might interact with the very things we're trying to control for. These same issues were addressed anew in a developmental context (Lessac & Solomon , 14-25 ; Solomon & Lessac, 145-50), and it is no accident that clear thinking about the yoked control procedure and the proper control procedures for Pavlovian conditioning ( Pavlove, 78-81: Rescorla, 71-80 ) should have originated in the minds of students. Solomon, Turner, and Lessac (1968), in a paper on delay of punishment and resistance to temptation in dogs present what they call "a complicated theory of conscience." They write: “The dogs, even with long delays of punishment, quickly 'know' which food results in punishment administered by the experimenter. This is a type of cognitive learning that can span long temporal delays. The dogs know what they are not supposed to eat! However, when the experimenter is missing, and the dogs are faced with an uncertainty or a change in the controlling stimulus situation, cognition is not enough. The hungry dogs cannot be certain any longer that eating the taboo horsemeat will result in punishment, because the experimenter is gone. It is under these conditions of changed social stimulation that the authors believe the conditioned emotional reactions of the dogs "take over". If emotional conditioned responses take mediational control of behaviour under conditions of cognitive uncertainty, the temporal characteristics of Pavlovian emotional conditioning will manifest themselves. This is why delay of punishment is a powerful determiner of subsequent resistance to temptation and the emotional concomitants of taboo violations. (p. 237) The study of avoidance behaviour would tell us something about the conditions under which it might be necessary to impute cognitive processes. How can the absence of shock be a reinforcer unless there is an expectation of shock? Several of us, having learned from Dick how to tease confounded variables apart, tackled such problems as the roles of conditioned stimulus (CS-termination) and unconditioned stimulus (US-omission) as reinforcers ( Solomon, 291-302 ). We wondered--and that was exciting to us--would we be able to account for behaviour that seems to demand analysis in terms of purpose, foresight, cognition, planning, and so forth, in a simpler and more mechanistic way? The failure to stop responding was not due to a lack of knowledge of the relevant contingencies. Prior to executing the jump, the dog often made vocalizations that indicated that it "knew" the punishment was about to occur, but it did not inhibit the response. This was one piece of "evidence" that he used to conclude that one cannot predict behaviour of an animal on the basis of what the animal "knows." To understand behaviour, it is essential to have a theory of learning and motivation as well as a theory of cognition. (Overmier, 1-55) For the purpose of understanding the nervous system, behaviour is considered to be an assay, much like a chemical assay. Behavioural observations are used to infer biological events, but they are not unique in this respect. Many biological events are not directly observed but inferred from non behavioural assays. (Thompson, 32-38) Although it is an indirect measure, behaviour can have advantages over more direct measures. Since the behavioural measure is less invasive, it may be less likely to disrupt the phenomenon under study, and it may be made repeatedly. An ideal assay would permit a precise specification of the stimulus and it would provide a quantitative behavioural index that is closely correlated with a physiological event. (Lemann, 7-90) To minimize the cost per measurement, relatively untrained personnel should be able to make such an assay quickly. Because of the complexity of the intact mammalian nervous system, some researchers believe that more fundamental progress will be made from the analysis of simpler systems such as the headless roach or Aplysia ( Cooper, Bloom, & Roth, 110-14; Thompson, Patterson, & Teyler, 73-104 ). These methods may not be applicable to reseach on the relationship between the brain and behaviour of individuals. From the biological point of view, the only satisfying explanation is a description of a chain of events from stimulus input through various neural events to muscle contractions. (Rescorla, 406-12) The explanatory goal is to develop a biological process model, as described in a section that follows. Such an explanation would supersede any other explanation. Some investigators are interested in how the mind works. The focus of their study is on such mental processes as attention, memory, and learning. Unlike biological concepts, psychological concepts cannot be directly observed. They must be inferred from behaviour. Thus, it is necessary for these investigators to relate specific behavioural observations to specific psychological processes. Then it is possible to study how drugs affect particular mental processes. Those interested in understanding the mind emphasize pharmacological manipulations and behavioural measures that are assumed to be related to mental events. From this perspective, pharmacological manipulations are just one of many methods to affect specific, separable, mental processes. (Maier, 231-37) For example, the latency of a tail flick to heat stimulation has been used as a measure of the magnitude of analgesia, especially in the testing of substances (like morphine) that are known to affect subjective reports of pain by human subjects. As another example, resistance to extinction of an avoidance response has been used as a measure of the strength of original avoidance-learning or memory for the learned avoidance. Thus, the fact that vasopressin increases resistance to extinction leads to the conclusion that vasopressin improves learning and memory ( deWied & Bohus, 1484-86). For the purpose of understanding psychological concepts, the behavioural measure must reflect some specific psychological process. Many of the behavioural measures commonly used may either be a complex measure that can be affected by multiple psychological processes (e.g., memory and decision) or a simple measure (e.g., a reflex) that does not reflect any psychological process under study. The term animal cognition has been used to refer to several different concepts. It has been used to refer to reactions to stimuli that are no longer physically present, such as symbolic processing; to behaviour that is complex and would be considered to be intelligent if done by a person; to behaviour that provides a measure of consciousness; and to behaviour that is similar to human behaviour ( Premack, 345-57 ). The study of human cognition has made extensive use of psychological process models; this may also be the most successful approach for the study of animal cognition. From the psychological point of view, the only satisfying explanation is a description of a chain of events from stimulus input through various mental processes (iconic storage, working memory, reference memory, etc.) to a response. The explanatory goal is to develop a psychological process model, as described in a section that follows. Such an explanation would supersede any other explanation. Since any particular psychological process model might be implemented with different biological mechanisms by different species, a biological explanation would only be a particular hardware implementation of the psychological process models. Many psychologists are primarily interested in behaviour and its explanation. Their main method is to observe and record behaviour under controlled conditions. The focus on behaviour comes from two traditions: ethology and behaviourism. One of the major contributions of ethology is the detailed specification of motor response patterns under well-specified stimulus conditions ( Mackintosh, Chance, & Silverman, 3-35 ); one of the major contributions of behaviourism is the detailed specification of the time of occurrence of a repetitive response sequence under well-specified stimulus conditions ( Dews, 9-43 ). Both types of behaviour are sensitive to pharmacological manipulation. From the behavioural point of view, explanations can consist of input-output rules, general principles, or formal models that describe the transformations on the stimulus input necessary to achieve the response output. Biological or psychological concepts would be employed only to the extent that they contributed to the prediction of the response output on the basis of the input from the current stimulus and previous experience. References Abelson R. P. "Are attitudes necessary?" In B. T. King & E. McGinnies (Eds.), Attitudes, conflict, and social change. New York: Academic Press, 1972. Pp. 19-32. Abelson R. P. "Simulation of social behaviour". In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology, Vol. 2. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1968. Pp. 274-356. Cooper, J. R., Bloom, F. E., & Roth, R. H. ( 1978). The Biochemical basis of neuropharmacology ( 3rd Ed., pp. 307-322). New York: Oxford. 110-14 Dawes R. M. "Cognitive distortion". Psychological Reports, 1964, 14, 443-459. de D. Wied, & Bohus, B. ( 1966). "Long and short term effects on retention of a conditioned avoidance response in rats by treatment with long acting pitressin and a-MSH". Nature, 212, 1484-1486. Dews, P. B. ( 1971). "Drug-behaviour interactions". In J. A. Harvey (Ed.), Behavioural analysis of drug action (pp. 9-43). Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman. Hunt, J. McV., Schlosberg, H., Solomon, R. L., & Stellar, E. ( 1947). "Studies of the effect of infantile experience on adult behaviour in rats. I. Effects of infantile feeding frustration on adult hoarding". Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 40, 291-304. Lemann, T. B., & Solomon, R. L. ( 1952). "Group characteristics as revealed in sociometric patterns and personality ratings". Sociometry, 15, 7-90. Lessac, M. S., & Solomon, R. L. ( 1969). "Effects of early isolation on the later adaptive behaviour of beagles: A methodological demonstration". Developmental Psychology, 1, 14-25. Mackintosh, J. H., Chance, M. R. A., & Silverman, A. P. ( 1977). "The contribution of ethological techniques to the study of drug effects". In L. L. Iversen, S. D. Snyder (Eds.), Handbook of pharmacology: Principles of behavioural pharmacology (Vol. 7, pp. 3-35). New York: Plenum. Maier, S., Seligman, M. E. P., & Solomon, R. L. ( 1969). "Pavlovian fear conditioning and learned helplessness: Effects on escape and avoidance behaviour of (a) the CS-US contingency and (b) the independence of the US and voluntary responding". 231-37. In B. A. Campbell & R. M. Church (Eds.), Punishment and Aversive Behaviour. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts. Meck, W. H. ( 1983). "Selective adjustment of the speed of internal clock and memory processes". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Behaviour Processes, 9, 171-201. Newell A., & Simon, H. A. Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. 56-69 Overmier, J. B., & Lawry, J. A. ( 1979). "Pavlovian conditioning and the mediation of behaviour". The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (ed. G. Bower), 13, 1-55. Pavlov, I. P. ( 1972). Conditioned reflexes (Tv., G. V. Anrep). London: Oxford University Press (Reprinted, New York: Dover, 1960). 78-81 Premack, D. ( 1983). "Animal cognition". In M. R. Rosenzweig & L. W. Porter (Eds.), Annual Review of Psychology. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. 345-57 Rescorla, R. A. ( 1967). "Pavlovian conditioning and its proper control procedures". Psychological Review, 74, 71-80. Rescorla, R. A., & LoLordo, V. M. ( 1965). "Inhibition of avoidance behaviour". Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 59, 406-412. Simon H. A. "A behavioural model of rational choice". Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1969, 69, 99-118. Simon H. A., & Hayes J. R. "Understanding complex task instructions". In D. Klahr (Ed.), Cognition and instruction. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1976. 270-77 Solomon, R. L. ( 1967). "Aversive control in relation to the development of behaviour disorders". In Comparative psychopathology, (pp. 228-239) New York: Grune & Stratton. Solomon, R. L., & Lessac, M. S. ( 1968). "A control group design for experimental studies of developmental processes". Psychological Bulletin, 70, 145-150. Solomon, R. L., Kamin, L. J., & Wynne, L. C. ( 1953). "Traumatic avoidance learning: The outcomes of several extinction procedures with dogs". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 48, 291-302. Stellar, E., Hunt, J. McV., Schlosberg, H., & Solomon, R. L. ( 1952). "The effect of illumination on hoarding behaviour". Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 45, 504-507. Thompson, R. F., Patterson, M. M., & Teyler, T. I. ( 1972). "The neurophysiology of learning". In P. H. Mussen & M. R. Rosenzweig (Eds.), Annual Review of Psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 73-104). Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. Thompson, T., Schuster, C. R. ( 1968). Behavioural pharmacology. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice Hall. 32-38 Read More