When we run, our arms and legs swing in an alternating rhythm. Your left arm swings back as your left leg swings forward, same with the right. This contralateral rhythm is important for balance; the arms and legs counterbalance each other and help reduce rotation of the torso created by swinging the limbs.
It turns out, however, that people don't really know this and they draw running incorrectly surprisingly often. Specifically, they often depict people running in a homolateral gait (with arms and legs on the same side swinging in the same direction at the same time; see the Olympics poster). I commented on a piece by Rose Eveleth at the Atlantic about a paper (Meltzoff, 2014) that identifies this surprising confusion in art throughout history and all over the world, and that then reports some simple studies showing that people really don't know what running is supposed to look like.
Rose covered the topic well; I wanted here to critique the paper a little because it's a nice example of some flawed cognitive psychology style thinking. That said, I want to say that I did like this paper. It's that rare thing - a paper by a single author who just happened to notice something and think about it a little then report what he found in case anyone else thought it was cool too. This is a bit old school and I approve entirely.
I have my doubts about psychology.
Anyone who's read this blog before knows that Andrew and I are fairly opinionated about what we think is right and wrong with psychology research. This isn't about small effect sizes or falsified data, which are currently popular (and valid) concerns. It's about the the types of questions psychologists usually ask and whether they are useful and likely to move the discipline forward. These questions are dominated by constructs - self esteem, prejudice, working memory capacity, intelligence, motivation - to the point where an alien reading a psychology journal would be forgiven for assuming that the point of psychology was to understand constructs, not people.
Psychologists ask questions about constructs because the dominant theoretical paradigm (cognitive psychology) says that mental states play a causal role in behaviour and that, to understand how people work, you have to understand the content of these states and the nature of the cognitive processes that operate on them. This doesn't sound crazy. Even though I think cognitive psychology is a fatally flawed paradigm (see here, here, and here), I am enculterated enough in mainstream psychology that this doesn't automatically sound like a bad way of doing things. And anyway, I'm done doing active battle against cognitive psychology, so this post isn't to re-hash what I've written about elsewhere. Instead, I want to lay out what I think psychology should be doing. The idea is simple, but it's radically different from the mainstream.
Here's the claim: Information is the primary external cause of behaviour. If psychology is going to make any real progress, it must be grounded in a thorough analysis of the types of information available and the mechanisms by which information is used to control or precipitate behaviour.
Here's the argument:
Hi. I’m a cognitive psychologist, but I’m not that kind of cognitive psychologist. Specifically, I don’t believe in representations, and I reject the computational model of cognition. Yes, this makes me very unpopular. I this post I want to quickly review the dominant cognitive approach and then briefly raise several potential problems with this framework. I will go through these issues in detail in later posts, but I want to go ahead and present the big picture here.
Cognitive scientists tend to view cognition as computation. In this model, representations are data structures and cognitive processes are algorithms acting on these data structures. Input => transformation of input via manipulation of discrete symbols (representations) => output. The clear analogy is to information processing in a computer. Another way to think about representations is as internal mediating states (cf. Dietrich & Markman, 2003). For instance, when I see a cup, the stuff happening in the visual system will probably be a better match to my “cup” representation than to my “glass” representation. So, I correctly identify the object as a cup. In other words, my ability to identify an object depends on consulting a discrete, internal representation of that object.
There are a number of unresolved issues with this representational stance: First, there is no theory of what representations actually are or of what information they contain. Second, many cognitive phenomena seem to defy a computational explanation. For instance, attempts to use a computational framework to model cognitive behaviours have often failed to produce anything as flexible or interesting as what we humans get up to. Third, alternative stances (e.g., that there are no discrete representations or that they are not processed algorithmically) have not been thoroughly explored. Cognitive psychologists usually take representations for granted; their existence is assumed, rarely defined or tested. This just isn’t good science. I’m just raising these points here; in future posts I’ll lay out the evidence.
My goal is to spend some time discussing these issues and to think about alternatives to representation. As a cognitive psychologist, I could get away with not understanding or caring about perception. Honestly, it just doesn’t come up much. When it does come up (e.g., Barsalou) it’s in terms of the “sensation based theory of perception” (see previous post), which we know is outdated. In the long run, I want to discuss how it might be possible to ground the study of cognition in Gibsonian perception/action. This is risky since, at the moment, I have no idea what such a framework would look like. But, cognitive psychology needs to evolve, and this is currently my best bet on how that might happen.
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