 One of the most interesting questions in developmental psychology today is to define the mechanism that guides development. Piaget discussed how growth is structured progressively by the principles of assimilation and accommodation, which involved successive modifications of the internal cognitive structure of the child (Flavell, 1963). In contrast, the cognitive approach views much of this change as an expansion of processes already studied in expert performance and adult cognition (Miller, 1983). These two differing views complement each other because Piaget's work deals with the richness of change that a children go through on their way to adulthood, while the cognitive theory posits an explanation that is attractive because of its parsimonious relationship to all other human information processing. |
| Quite a few authors have dealt with the issue of mechanisms and the range of solutions is quite wide. They range from changes in the size of working memory (Sternberg, 1984; Pascal-Leone, 1970), or changes in the dominant level of the mind (Alexander et al, 1988) to executive control structures (Case, 1984). Skills theories seem to be another common mechanism (Keil, 1984; Fischer, Kenny & Pipp, 1988; McGuiness, Pribram, & Pirnazar, 1988). Skills theories depend upon changes in the knowledge structure, and some authors feel that it is merely a growth of domain specific knowledge that makes the difference between a child's information processing and that of an adult (see Bjorklund, 1987). Other authors feel that it is actually a combination of several of these processes (Chi, 1978). Aside from these general all encompassing theories, there are several theories that have focused upon development in a small area, such as the development of pretend play (Fein, 1979) or the development of language processes (Brown, 1973). Biologists have focused upon the development of perceptual processes (Edelman, 1988) and upon the biological basis for memory theories and the integration of several sensory processes (Grossberg, 1982). |
| Flavell (1984) mentioned that explaining the mechanism for development is one of the hardest problems that faces developmental psychologists, and he wishes that proposed mechanisms link cognitive growth with underlying biological processes. Because most of the theories of development postulate that some part of the internal system changes, developmental psychology needs to explain how all the parts of internal subjectivity, such as memory, thinking and feeling, relate to the internal mental structure. |
| In order to do that, however, it is necessary to understand the nature of the internal cognitive structure. Norman (1980) mentioned that there are large parts of the internal cognitive machinery that are as yet poorly understood. This implies that one of the first things developmental psychology should do is to show how the different parts of the internal subjectivity are interrelated. One theory that has interrelated all of the aspects of cognition is a theory of the levels of the mind proposed by Maharishi's Vedic psychology (Alexander, et al, 1988). |
| When we speak of the workings of the mind, we use many terms: thoughts, feeling, intellectual decisions, desires. What Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1967, Orme-Johnson, 1988) has done is to develop an integrated structure known as the levels of the mind to show the inner relationship of these processes within the mind. |
| The basic structure can be shown in the chart in figure 1, where the levels are the senses, mind, intellect, feeling and ego. Each of these levels has its own character and style of functioning. The level of desires and representations is the level of "internal" sensory perception. Abilities such as visual imagery are connected with the senses, but seem to be a subtler representation of these processes. It is at the level of the screen of the mind that all of the different sensory input is organized because this is the screen on which thoughts are projected. |
| The intellect is the decision maker, that transfers awareness from one thought to another, while feeling is the full range of affective states that an individual can experience. The ego is the sense of self and is the coordinator of feeling and the intellect (Alexander et al, 1989). These inner levels act as coordinators of the outer levels. It is these deeper levels of the mind and their coordination with conscious awareness that Vedic Psychology feels is responsible for turning the dislocated experiential fragments from the sensory perceptions into this unitary conscious experience. |
| Even deeper than these is the field of pure consciousness, which is experienced as a state of pure awareness. Normally this state is open to the awareness only in brief glimpses, but the Transcendental Meditation technique (Alexander, et al, 1988) makes this state available on a regular basis and allows for scientific investigation of its effects and subjective qualities. The state of pure consciousness is a state devoid of thought where the excitations of the mind have settled down into a quiet unbroken field of pure awareness. |
| Consciousness in this theory is the light of awareness by which we perceive all of the world (Maharishi, 1977). Consciousness can be both abstract and field like, or directed outwards toward objects. When consciousness is in a field like state it identified with the unified field which physics has located at the source of physical creation (Hagelin, 1987). When consciousness takes on a directed quality, it becomes attention or awareness ( Alexander et al, 1989). This contrasts to the definition of consciousness that is used in modern cognitive psychology, where consciousness is a subsection of attentional processes, but it closely parallels early psychologists such as James (1890/1950). |
| I will begin my discussion about the relationship between thought, memory, and perception at the sensory-motor level, because this is the level where the greatest amount of hard data exists, and here many of the same processes which may occur in higher processes have tangible equivalents. |
| One of the most famous diagrams in biology is the drawing of the sensory homunculous that "inhabits" the human sensory cortex. The diagram in figure 2 shows which nerves in the sensory cortex respond to tactile cells in different parts of the body. A similar diagram can be drawn for the motor cortex, the visual cortex, the thalamus, and the other primary sensory areas. |
| In each of these areas, sensory input is mapped in a very logical and orderly fashion onto the corresponding area of the cortex. These mappings then serve as channels for the information from one part of the cortex to flow to another part of the brain in an orderly way. These maps serve to connect information from the outer sensory organs to the various parts of the brain. This model proposes an inflow of perception through the levels of the mind, where perception is sequentially modified at each level until it reaches long-term memory, and then a sequential outflow through these levels, conscious attention, and finally out to the motor system for action. |
| When information comes into the senses, it is relayed through the thalamus back to the visual cortex. Different areas of the cortex perform different operations on the information in a sequential series. According to Edelman (1988) the brain is set up in a series of mapping structures that process information and then pass it onto the next stage. Separately, these stages each form "little maps" that have a logical relationship between their internal structure and the information that is passing through them. While few of them have the eye catching appeal of the sensory homunculous, each of these maps relates very closely to its incoming sensory input. For example, the visual cortex has a relationship with the rods and cones in the retina of the eye, and the auditory cortex relates to the hairs of the cochlea. |
| The next stage of information processing in the visual system takes the visual cortex as its input, and transforms the information presented there into three types of data: rough outline or primal sketch, color, and motion (Livingston, 1988; Marr, 1982). These three systems act as the next step of processing. As the information is passed onto higher levels, it is processed by several more sequential steps, many of which are not fully understood. Each of these stages are both highly organized in themselves, and do their own internal processing of the data. They also act as the input for the next step. Hence, information processing in the brain can be considered to be a cascaded relay system, where each of these highly organized stations acts as a separately relay that both does its own processing and is the input for the next stage. |
| Such a relay system (Edelman & Finkel, 1984) allows for the interconnection of a wide range of highly diverse activities into a coordinated system. One observation about the human nervous system is that it has two opposite qualities - it is highly modular, with different areas performing different activities and secondly the entire system forms a highly integrated whole. The modularity explains why damage in one area is contained in that section. The highly integrated nature of the system explains why psychologists have had so much trouble with stage models of information processing. Such cascaded relay systems have the basic capacities needed to explain both of these characteristics. They also have the potentiality to link highly different system, such as the different sense modalities and higher mental functionality such as intellect or feeling. Figure 3 shows how a series of "maps" coordinate to form the incoming perceptual process in the Levels of the Mind model. |
| The importance of this discussion for developmental psychologists, is that these mapping structures are not present at birth. A great deal of recent research has shown that while the potentiality for these maps is innate, the details of the maps themselves are created by experience (Edelman, 1988). Hubel and Weisel's (1979) famous experiment with kittens raised in deprived sensory conditions, showed, that if these areas of the brain are not used for the original functions for which they were intended, other functionalities will take over those areas, and that functionality will be lost. The fundamental maps between such systems as the eye and the primary visual cortex are being created in the first days and weeks of life. Such maps are highly individualistic, varying from individual to individual. They can also be modified by changes in the environment. For example, if a monkey looses a finger, these maps are modified to reflect that fact ( Edelman & Finkel, 1984). |
| Developmental psychologists have generally assumed that sensory motor processing was structured in the biology and fully present at birth. These famous neurophysiological experiments show that this is not the case. The very simplest visual processing abilities, such as the ability to see a straight line, is not present at birth. The brain has an innate ability to create these abilities, but they need experience to be structured. If the biologists are right the first weeks of a child's life are dedicated to structuring these simple components of the perceptual motor programs. |
| One of the things that developmental psychologists have always thought about the earliest part of infancy is that children seem to be gaining control of their sensory-motor system. If the first few weeks lay down the simple mapping structures, then later periods would logically focus on the interconnection between the different sensory motor areas. |
| The difficulties involved in motor behavior are not readily obvious to psychologists, because adult humans solve these problems with incredible ease. However, consider what an infant must do in order to learn to correctly touch their finger to their nose by looking into a mirror. Firstly, they must know where their eyes are in relationship to their head and they must then use this knowledge to correct the visually generated positions in space created by the neurons in the eye ( Grossberg, 1982). Once this is done they have to then translate this knowledge into a form that can be used by the muscles. The muscles system can only code information in terms of which muscles to move and how much each muscle should move, so quite a bit of translation is needed to produce the desired results. Thus, the simplest human motions involve at least three major translational steps. First the eye mappings must be in place. Second the muscle maps must be developed, and third the coordination maps must be created. If neural network theory is correct, then the eye mappings and the muscle mappings must be completed before the the third coordination mappings can begin to arise. |
| An important question is how these connections arise. Observations of neonates indicate that early in life there is no coordination between the visual and tactile senses (Bushnell, 1981). At about two months infants begin to accurately "swipe" at visual objects with their hands and feet. Children of that age also intensively study their own hand motion. It is in the third to sixth months of life that the integration between tactile and visual senses occurs. |
| In reviewing this kind of data, Warren (1973) concluded that there were three critical periods for the development of visual-motor coordination. The first is the period from 3 to 6 months, the second occurs during crawling and walking when vision is being use to coordinate movement, and the third occurs when an individual learns to connect visually perceived objects with language. Von Senden (1960) reviewed many cases of individuals born blind who later had surgery, and he noted that such individuals were not able to recognize long familiar objects by sight. They needed extensive experience to learn to utilize their visual skills. Such observations seem to strongly suggest that these connections arise through experience, which is what Piaget suggested in his idea of assimilation and accommodation. |
| The understanding of the cascaded relay system could help to explain the idea of assimilation and accommodation which is one of the most interesting and poorly defined concepts in Piaget's theory of development. The basis of Piaget's idea was that the internal cognitive structure of an individual is built up, and modified by incoming sensory information. This is exactly what the neurophysiologists say is happening in an infants brain. |
| Piaget (1953/1954) felt that at birth, vision and hearing occurred in self contained and unrelated spaces. The coordination of these areas was achieved by "reciprocal assimilation" between the sensory modalities. This is the point where the cascaded relay structures discussed previously come in to play. The memory structures of the sensory homunculous are a perfect example of a cognitive structure created by experience. The creation of these systems gives insight into how a simple set of mappings occur in the first days and weeks of life. |
| The great speed with which these connections are created has lead many authors to conclude that they must be innate, however, while some research shows that there is a primitive connection (Bushnell, 1981) between different sensory-motor areas, biological experiments show that all the senses pass through the thalamus on their way to the primary sensory cortex, and the thalamus itself is not fully organized at birth (Edelman & Finkel, 1984). The thalamus is one possible place where these connections are occurring, because this part of the brain receives information from all parts of the brain, and in addition to sending it to the primary sensory cortexes, also sends it too all the other parts of the cortex. Experience seems to enliven or trigger the development of these internal connections as Piaget suggested. The mappings in the thalamus that organize the flow of sensory information are created in the same manner as the mappings in the other areas of the sensory cortex such as the sensory homunculus. |
| Recent research on neural circuits has indicated that these mapping systems are created by an associative resonance between top-down and bottom-up processes. Neural circuits have the unique property that they can create a pattern that is a combination of higher and lower mental processes, and store that pattern to influence all future incoming experience ( Grossberg & Kuperstein, 1986). |
| One of the big debates in cognitive psychology has focused around the perceptual process. The question is whether perception is data driven or schema driven. One of the best examples of this problem occurs in something known as the cocktail party effect (see Norman, 1976). When someone whispers our name across a crowded room, suddenly our attention turns to that person, In order to notice our name, we had to be analyzing the discussion. But research on diachotic listening seems to indicate that we do not analyze such "rejected" messages fully enough to make such an analysis (Triesman, 1964). |
| The crux of the problem is that conscious decisions seem to be affecting perception, long before that perception reaches the conscious level. The fact that conscious attention affects perception is the basis for the schema driven theories, and the primary effect of experience on perception is the basis for the data driven theories. The current research on this area has supported both data driven and schema driven theories equally well, and implies that perception is a combination of the two (see Norman, 1976). |
| Recent research in neural circuits (Grossberg, 1987) has shown that information processing arises from a resonance between incoming data and outflowing schemata carried by the attentional process. The attentional processes is especially important in creating this associative resonance, because it is the flow of attention that brings the higher level processes to bear on the sensory areas. Such systems also allow extremely great levels of flexibility to modify the system. This is essential in human systems because no computer algorithm could maintain its efficiency when all of the information and even the physical structure of the nervous system changes as a child grows. |
| One of the concepts of Vedic psychology is that attention acts to modify the brain physiology. When attention flows through a particular channel, it will modify that channel. Once a linking has occurred between different areas of the physiology, then the flow of attention is no longer needed, and the system can operate in a parallel fashion. Maharishi has mentioned that without this flow of attention, the brain physiology will not change. |
| Cognitive psychologists think of the attentional process as a limited capacity channel, and peripheral functioning as massively parallel ( Norman, 1976). The question is why conscious attention forms such a bottle neck. If conscious attention is modifying the brain physiology, then the purpose of its singular nature becomes clear. |
| To use an example, we can look at the functioning of a factory. The workers in the shop might turn out 100 cars an hour, while the engineer designs a new car every six months or so, and whenever the engineers appear on the shop floor to fix something, production stops. In one sense the engineers are extremely inefficient. Yet without them, nothing would ever be built. Attention is like the engineer of the cognitive system. It built the system in the first place, attention fixes or modifies it, and it does so by flowing in a limited capacity channel. |
| Research on neural networks, the theory which the biological experiments outlined previously fall into, need incoming experience and attention to build and modify the data structures in the brain. Conscious attention must flow through cognitive, perceptual and motor structures to modify them. These modifications, once learned are retained. Just as the workers in the factory will continue to build the cars exactly as the engineers specified until they receive a new order, so to the perceptual systems will continue working in a highly systematic way, exactly as it was instructed to do so by attention. |
| The importance of this discussion is that when an individuals first learns a task, there is a great deal of conscious involvement. For example, when they learn to ice skate, they need to pay attention to their physical movements for a time. When higher levels of expertise are reached, then it is no longer necessary to think so much about a task. The ability of the nervous system to set up standing neural circuit patterns explains how something that was once a highly conscious process, complete with higher level decision making, became automatic. In the literature on expert performance, individuals who are expert in a task have a set of domain specific schemas, which are created by a shift in schemas during learning. Once the new schemas are in place, an individual can use those in an effortless way (Larkin et al, 1980). |
| This theory proposes that it is this movement onto automatic that forms one of the main pillars of development. Such an idea is found often in cognitive literature (i.e. Larkin et al, 1980). The reason that the cognitive theory is not more widely accepted is that it has never been able to explain the stages of development noticed by Piaget. What this theory will add is Maharishi's levels of the mind, and show how the nature of these levels relates to the individual stage transitions. |
| Attentional feedback is necessary to create and modify the structure either of the brain or of the schemata, but what is the source of this feedback? In the infant we can pass it off to primitive goals and emotions, but this isn't possible in the adult. In adults, there is a rich complicated internal life, which contains thoughts and feelings, memory, and consciousness. Somehow, it is necessary to connect the level of sensory functioning and motor movement to all the rest of this internal subjectivity. |
| One way to do this is to look at the simplest possible self learning system. Such a system needs three basic components. There must be a physical component to run the programs, a memory to store the details of the program so that the same program can be invoked more than once, and thirdly, there must be some decision maker that modifies these stored programs to work properly. In order to tell if a program is working, it is necessary for the decision maker to compare expected output with actual output. |
| The importance of this decision maker can be seen by looking at an example. Suppose we want to draw Chinese characters on the computer screen. As all computer programmers know, first versions don't always work. So imagine that when the program is run, the computer beeps loudly three times, and the screen goes blank. The computer would continue to run such a program in idiot like fashion completely unaware that it is not drawing acceptable Chinese characters. It's only the human programmer, who compares expected output- Chinese characters- with actual output- beeping- that is concerned. |
| In humans, this decision maker is the higher functions of the intellect and feeling. The intellect decides whether the output matches expectations, and the feelings and the ego decide whether the differences matter. This analysis implies however, that higher level functions are involved very critically in all physical activity (Kelso, 1982), learning, and indeed in all thought, which is exactly what large quantities of psychological literature and the Vedic Psychology's model suggests. In order to understand these processes it is necessary to look at how Vedic Psychology views the process of thought formation. |
| "Experience results when the senses come into contact with their objects and an impression is left on the mind. The impulse of this new impression resonates with an impression of a similar past experience already present in the mind and associates itself with that impression. The coming together of the two gives rise to an impulse at the deepest level of consciousness, where the impressions of all experience is stored. This impulse develops and rising to the conscious level of the mind, becomes appreciated as a thought. This thought, gaining the sympathy of the senses, creates a desire and stimulates the senses to action" (Maharishi, 1967, pg. 207). |
| This description shows how Vedic Psychology views the flow of information from one area of the mind to another. Firstly, perception comes in and traverses all the levels of the mind until it reaches the storehouse of impressions that lies at the deepest levels of mental functioning. The perceptions then interact and create little bubbles of thought that begin rising. As thoughts arise they are modified by the different levels of the mind. For example any affective components are added as the thought passed through the level of feeling, and its intellectual direction are gained at the level of the intellect. Sensory computation would occur as the thought passed to the final outward level of the senses. Here any physical movements of the eyes or the body would occur. |
| The importance of this understanding is that it connects perception, memory and thinking. Hamilton (1983) mentioned that the relationship between memory and perception is one that is seldom explored in cognitive theories, even though experiments on perception (Ericcson et al, 1980) have demonstrated that changes in memory modify sensory processing. It was the fact that higher level information processing abilities and memory could affect the iconic memory, which is the "snapshot" that the eye takes of a visual scene, that destroyed the multistage memory models, and which has been one of the hardest problems for any current memory theory to solve. This is one of the reasons that at present there are no currently widely accepted theories of memory (Gardner, 1986). |
| Perception is the process that proceeds memory, and yet memory is involved in perception. While this may seem contradictory, this is exactly what the research seems to be indicating, and this is the process described in this model. It's the nature of the cascaded relay system, and neural circuits that is able to give this type of a system. |
| In this model, the mind is setting up a sensory-motor memory along the incoming perceptual pathway to guide incoming perception. The fact that perceptual processes pass through and are modified by all the levels of the mind agrees with the observation of many experiments. For example, Bower and Cohen(1982) discussed how perception seems to have an affective filter, while Wolford and Morrison (1980) and Chase and Simons (1973) reviewed how a knowledge filter affects incoming processing. Also current mental processing affect incoming perception (Triesman, 1964). |
| In their discussion of knowledge representation, Rumelhart and Norman (1985) discussed two types of representational systems. One of these they described as procedural, and they defined procedural knowledge as all those processes that occur without conscious knowledge about how they happen. For example, we know how to speak, yet we are unable to explain the specific movements that our body makes when it pronounces a specific word. The memory system that the mind structures in this cascaded relay system to connect the higher levels of the mind to the senses is almost completely procedural. Procedural systems are seldom discussed in psychology because they don't seem to involve cognitive components. |
| In this case, however, the procedural system of the cascaded relay is created by cognitive processes. One point that Vedic Psychology can add to the knowledge of cognitive psychology is the knowledge that it is the higher levels of the mind that create this procedural order in the lower levels through the flow of attention. The first areas in the hierarchical levels of the mind developed are the most outward, because they act as the link to the external world, and also because they are act as the final stage in each outflow of thought. |
| One way in which the physiology could create a working cascaded relay system would be to build up the system in a stepwise fashion, where it first creates a new skill, or level of functionality, and then integrates it with other skills. This development could then pass through the stages of the mind as the cascaded stacks pulled in larger and larger functional areas. Each skill that we have is actually composed of a series of components. For example, reading involves the intercoordination of eye movements with memory of syntax and language. |
| As such a system is developed, it builds its way sequentially through all the higher levels of the mind to structure the entire incoming perceptual pathway. Alexander (1988b) has recently showed how the developmental stages of Piaget neatly parallel such a sequential unfoldment of the levels of the mind. If this is the case, then these cascaded relays should be related to the different functionalities associated with these levels. Previous discussion about the sensory-motor level makes it appear likely that it is the refinement of this level that is occurring in the first year of life, the period which Piaget called the sensory-motor stage. If Alexander is correct then the next stage of development should relate closely with development of internal sensory perception and the integration of these processes with internal goals or desires. In order to see of this suggestion of the hierarchical unfolding is viable, it is necessary to examine the next of Piaget's stages of life to see if such an understanding is consistent with observation. |
| By the time an infant leaves the sensory motor stage of life two things have happened. The first is that they have created most of the underlying sensory motor coordination systems that will serve them for the remainder of their lives. The second is that they appear to have gained the ability to maintain the concept of a permanent object (Flavell, 1963). This was one of Piaget's most surprise ideas, and one of the most widely researched ( Daehler & Bukatko, 1985). In order to maintain the idea of a permanent object it is necessary to have the internal ability to hold mental images ( Ginsburg & Opper, 1988) and also to have sufficient experience to allow memory to conceptualize the object. |
| One way to view this would be to say that it was necessary for a child to be able to activate memory structures simultaneously with perceptual structures, so that they knew that something that they had previously seen was no longer present. Thus the problem might be that the mind must be able to simultaneously coordinate perceptual experiences and memory. For example, when an investigator hides an object under a cushion in full view of a child (Gratch, 1975), and the child looks at the last point where he has found it, there is a failure of coordination between perception, action and memory. Researchers in this area have noted that young children are easily confused about where to search for an object that they have just seen hidden. |
| For example, Whitall (1991) looked at how dynamical systems interacts with concurrent verbal cognition and locomotor skills. Interactions between cognitive and locomotive skills have been studies extensively to determine information processing capacity. Even a motor process as simple as tapping demands attentional resources. Performing motor tasks require the involvement of an enormous number of degres of freedom, and dynamical system theorists solve this problem by proposing a coalition of functional neuromuscular units. Rather than using a rule governed central processor, these units are elicited by simple central commands, and physical constraints. A theoritical distinction has developed between coordination and order variable, and controlling functions. For example, a change in walking speed can occur without changing the relative timing of the muscle activation patterns. |
| Whitall (1991) found that the attentional demands of these two types of factors differed whan they were combined with other tasks. They found that it was the control variables that were affected by concurrent tasks. This suggests that coordination and control operate at functionally different levels of the nervous system. Once the central controller has distinguished between different patterns of motor activity, such as walking or running, the particular phasing pattern organizes without further attentional mediation. |
| Like the coordination between hand and eye, the ability to perform this operation would logically seem to be innate, however, the working structures in the mind needed to perform this task need not be lively at birth, any more than coordination between the senses. What exactly is it that changes as a child learns the permanent object concept? The ability to coordinate perception with higher levels of the mind and memory in any major way involves a mental phenomenon which this theory will call inner loops. |
| One of the major concepts of Vedic psychology involves self referral (Orme-Johnson, 1988). In such a state, consciousness has turned back on itself, and is experiencing its own internal dynamics. Such a highly refined state is rather rare, but many mental experiences involve a partial inward turning. For example, if we think of a friend, then the eyes don't see, and the ears don't hear, all of our attention has withdrawn into the inner mental world. As Maharishi has noted, it is not only possible to send attention outward through the senses, attention can flow inward as well. Such an inner turning of attention occurs in many mental processes, such as planning, daydreams, fantasies, active recall from memory, or intense mental focus. Even our daily pondering about future events is a modifications of this general process of inner looping. |
| Inner loops is a new concept to most cognitive psychologists. The earliest theories of mental processes were just elaborations of the behaviorists stimulus-response models. While cognitive psychologists made the inner mechanics of the mind more complicated, they did not throw away the stimulus-response basis of the models. Vedic psychology breaks free from a stimulus-response model. While it is true that stimuli are one of the sources of thoughts, they are not the only source in Maharishi's model. Mental rotation is an example of an object called into the mind from memory, and then acted on by structures in the mind. |
| In the phenonemon of inner loops, inner mental experiences are themselves directly feeding into the perceptual channels, and thereby becoming the source of new thoughts as they contact the storehouse of impressions. Adults flip quickly and easily between these modes of functioning. The intellect has the ability to guide the thought flow in many directions and it is largely responsible for the form that the final product of a thought takes. In addition, at least in adults, there can be a blocking of the incoming perceptual channels by the intellect. |
| This theory proposes that inner loops cannot occur until a sufficiently high level of inner coordination between mind and body is achieved. If infants cannot even coordinate hand and eye motion, it is unlikely that the internal structures needed to allow the coordination between the outgoing thought-motor sequences and the incoming perceptual sequence have been created. Such a situation would be changed as a child linked into the cascaded relay system the necessary internal cognitive machinery to integrate the power of these internal loops into their internal mental activity. |
| This concept appears to be supported by research on category formation by Hayne et al (1987). In their paper, when they reviewed pervious experiments, they noted "It is significant that the discrimination tests in these experiments (on category formation in infants) have without exception, followed the original familiarization series by only a few seconds or minutes at the most. (e.g. Quinn et al, 1983). There is no evidence that infants less than 24 months of age can perform these discriminations after longer delays ( Greco & Daehler, 1985) or that they can use class membership for adaptive responding. In fact, Strauss found no evidence of category detection in 10 month-olds after a retention interval of only 15 minutes (see also Sherman, 1985)" ( Hayne et al, 1987, pg. 750-751). |
| However, infants can detect the shared features that define categories at about 6 months of age if such information is presented in rapid sequence ( Fagen, Morrongiello, Reeve-Collier & Gekoshi, 1984). If infants forget this fast, then how are they learning categories in the first place? This is an interesting question that appears to support the concepts that described above. There are two major ways that individuals can contact the memory system in this model. One involves the stimulus-response thought flow, and the other is through inner loops. This could explain why young children can form categories in short-term but not in long-term memory. All mental processes (such as mind, intellect and feeling) are available in a poorely structured way as the thought moves thorugh its incoming-outflowing process. However, the structures that allow a systematic probing of memory or the full fowering of the category structure in the mind are absent. This is why category formation is occurring in short-term but not in long-term memory. Most of the habituation tests for retention of categories clues in young children have fallen within the characteristic span of short-term memory ( Hayne et al, 1987). |
| Once a sufficient period has elapsed, however, the only way to trigger a category would be for incoming perceptions to be similar enough to trigger past memories directly. Hayne et al (1987) used a habituation test in which infants were taught to kick their feet at the sight of a mobile. Some infants were trained with a series of mobiles in rapid succession, and others saw only one type of mobile. Twenty four hours later, the researchers returned and retested the infants. Those who had been trained with several mobiles were able to generalize the training to a novel mobile, and those who had only seen one type, were not able to generalize. |
| This shows that babies are able to respond to previously seen objects within the perception-thought system, but their ability to connect previously learned experiences with new experiences is limited, because the incoming perception doesn't always trigger the previous memory. This experiment seems to indicate that infants have the ability to form categories in short-term, but not in long-term memory. |
| Adults don't have such a limitation, and neither do childrenafter a certain age. There seems to be something that allows adults to easily access previous memories to link them to previous ones in category formation. What I propose is that this inner looping is what allows that transition. This would also be the thinking or semiotic transition that Piaget talks about because it would allow an infant to hold the image of an object in their minds. The transitions that allow this change are graphically represented in figure 4. What inner loops do is to allow an individual to coordinate internal representations over time. They also allow the mind to have a much greater flexibility of expression, by allowing different parts of the internal mental system to coordinate with each other, and to influence each other. |
| This transition from sensory motor to representational thought is one of the largest changes that occurs, because it is here that inner loops begin to appear and demonstrate their power, a power that is an intimate part of all higher level human functionality. An example of these higher level connections and interconnections that occur in human information processing is the ability to speak. The unfoldment of speech occurs in a stepwise fashion. First children master one-word utterances. Then they go on to master two-word utternaces, and graduate to full sentances. The next sections will show how a sequential development of internal mapping structures relate to speech formation. |
| One of the tasks that confronts a child at an early age is the mastering of speech. Children begin with one word utterances. What cognitive structures are necessary to perform such a feat? If a child's mother walks in the door and she pipes `mama', then clearly there has been contact between the visual sense and the memory system sufficient to recognize `Mother'. Also, a high level of control has to have been developed over the larynx muscles, so the child can reproduce desired sounds, such as `ma' rather than `ta'. The child has had to have heard the word `mama' at some point and connected that auditory input with the visual object `mother', as well. So three mapping structures- vision, hearing, and the muscle system of the larnyx have to be fully developed before one word utterances can occur. Then these structures have to be coordinated. |
| The assumption that long-term memory for audition and visual perception are the same arises from experiences with adults. Biologists, however, following the paths of the incoming sensory channels, have not as yet located the points of connection, and there's a debate about whether these systems really are the same (Hamilton, 1983, Abravanel, 1981). The essence of the debate lies in the fact that in order for memory to be unitary, all of the incoming impressions need to be translated into a "common coin" which may be either visual or auditory, and then need to be translated back to give either "verbal" thoughts, or mental images. At the current time, there is no convincing explanation of how this transformation occurs. On the other hand, adults seem to have a unitary memory where the name "bird" can conjure up the mental image of a bird. |
| There seem to be two possible solutions that will explain the data: either the incoming perceptual channels perform much more complicated processing on the signal than is currently discussed to create this "common coin", or there's a more powerful interlinking going on in the memory system. The data at present seems to be suggesting that both of these statements may be true. Marks (1978) discussed the common psychophysiological characteristics of the different sensory modalities, and recent authors who have discussed semantic memory ( Schank, 1976; Rumelhart & Norman, 1985) have shown that the complexity of even the verbal portions of memory are quite great. |
| Just to deal with one word utterances, we need to go beyond the cognitive theorists who have discussed verbal memory and discuss motor memory and visual memory. These three must be interwoven to create the simplest human expression, a one word utterance. All of these skills necessary to perform a one word utterance rest on underlying abilities. For example, the intercoordination of larynx muscle control and the auditory system could easily be occurring in the babbling period. Interconnection of perceptual systems and the memory systems are also necessary. While some intermodality functioning between the sense of sight and the sense of hearing exists at birth ( Butterworth, 1981), there's no reason to suspect that infants immediately connect verbal sounds with physical objects. In fact, such connections are not automatic. In blind individuals who gain sight in later life, there was no visual recognition of familiar objects ( von Senden, 1960) and such individuals had to go through long learning processes to connect previous skills with visual input. |
| Such connections between the different sensory modalities must lie at the basis of the semantic representations of verbal knowledge because they are occurring long before the more complicated interweaving that brings full adult thoughts and sentences. |
| Children proceed through this period by successively expanding their single word capacity. A child may begin with 'mama', and this will soon expand to other one word utterances, such as 'papa' and 'cat' . The first of these utterances relate to things that the child is familiar with, and later there is an expansion outward to other items. At this stage a child's language comprehension is more developed than their language production ( Clark, 1973), and they slowly build their vocabulary. |
| Gopnik and Meltzoff ( 1986) have shown that there is a close relationship between cognitive capacities and the appearance of certain words. For example words such as "gone" relate to the full stabilization of object permanence, and "there", and "uh-oh" relate to the solution of means-end analysis. They also noted that the "children seem motivated to acquire words that are relevant to the particular cognitive problems that they are working on at the moment" (pg. 1052). |
| If they are correct, then this seems to imply that the sequential creation of thought has been organized so that previous thoughts feed into current thoughts. Such a change is explicitly developed by the ability to utilize internal looping capabilities. It seems as if the internal looping structures are taking components of memory that have been previously triggered back with them through the internal loops to create larger category systems in memoryp. This inner looping would allow memory to create larger and larger wholes as more parts are connected. |
| By the time the one word stage is completed, a child has taken the process of linking vision, auditory input, and motor movement far enough that all of these can be put on automatic. They have also created the basis of a category system of objects and have achieved basic rules for differentiating between different perceived objects. One word utterances are usually nouns- 'mama' or verbs- 'more' ( Brown, 1973). Once one word utterances have been mastered, a child can go onto mastering the next stage, two word utterances. |
| Brown (1973) felt that there were a small set of systematic relationships expressed in two word utterances, and these indicated more complex cognitive abilities, such as knowledge of possession- i.e., 'my ball'. Such an understanding would imply that a fairly sophisticated internal mental machinery is already intact. What would such a mental machinery really entail? Some of these relationships seem to imply clear knowledge of categories. For example, statements such as "big car," which Brown considered to belong to a general class called entity-attribute, seem to be relating a currently perceived car to one of its characteristics. Such relationships look like simple extensions of one word utterances; they simply include more details. However, there are several other classes of semantic relationships that seem to involve something else, namely the beginning of the schematic processing that dominates adult cognition.
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| Schemata is a word that has many uses in psychology, but one of its main meanings arises from Bartlett's work in the early part of this century. He talked about how memory was an active reconstruction process rather than passive recall. One of the famous experiments (Bradsford & Franks, 1971) that deals with this concept shows how individuals recall sentences. When someone sees these two sentences: |
| The dog is barking. |
| The cat is scared. |
| they will also say that they also remember seeing the sentence:
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| The cat is scared of the barking dog. |
| as well as the previous two on a recall test. However, this sentence:
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| The dog is jumping. |
| would be judged as 'not seen' even though its resemblance to one of the previous sentences is greater than that of the reconstructed one. The critical element seems to be the relationship between the different parts. Bradsford and Franks concluded that individuals use general principles in reconstructing memory, rather than a detailed memory of exactly what they saw. |
| A careful inspection of these sentences reveals that they contain elements in combination. The first sentence contains two elements, dog (agent) and bark (action), with the several relational words that English includes to modify these basic elements. This is one of the basic semantic relationships that Brown observed. Several of Brown's semantic relationships seem to deal with the simplest relationship between two ideas or things, for example, location- "cup table", or action somewhere- "sit chair", or action of someone on an object "mommy doll." These also seem to be the relationships that are retained when memory is schematically reconstructed. |
| In cognitive psychology the ideas of the semantic networks and schemas are often seen as conflicting theories of memory processing. However, when we closely examine a child's speech, one word utterances seem to be clear examples of semantic memory models. Firstly all of the necessary features are combined and these have enlivened some category or network. However, whether we use Quillian's ( 1968) bird decked in its wings and resplendent plumage, or Rosch's ( 1978) protypical robin, or Brook's ( 1978) instance of a bluejay, we still need more to fully two word utterances. Adult memory not only has all of these categories fully lively, it also has them linked. It is as if the semantic memory system passes its raw data onto another section of the mind to perform this schematic linking process. |
| In later variations of the semantic network theory Norman and Rumelhart (1975) tried to include the relationships between agents, actions and objects. They uses examples such as "Albert(subject) threw(action) the book(object)" to describe how various activities and objects interrelate. Schank ( 1975) also discussed this idea of interrelationships when he developed conceptual dependency theory. He discussed how we know much more from a sentence than is explicitly stated and that there is some sort of canonical form for this representation. Schank took a set of eleven primitive actions and tried to build all the other verbs from them. |
| A much simpler breakdown of verbs and nouns into basic meaning units occurs in the Sanskrit language (Briggs, 1985). In Sanskrit, every verb has two components, an "action" element, and a "fruit" element. The relationship between the verbs, nouns, and adjectives is conveyed by the eight case endings: agent, object, instrument, recipient, point of departure, locality, generative, and vocative. In this system, the relationships that we use in a sentences are one time combinations of these basic underlying elements. Briggs mentions that the Sanskrit language, as analyzed by the ancient grammarians, closely resembles several of the formulations of modern semantic network theorists. Sanskrit begins with these basic compounds and then groups them into larger systems by means of the grammatical rules. |
| The combination of these basic elements into larger groups has been called frames, schemas, or scripts by various authors. These ideas all use feelings, episodic events, and current plans in various degrees. There is no necessary reason that all of the processes that occur as a perception passes through memory occur in one step. If the process is a several step procedure, then a semantic type memory can feed into a higher schematic system that links and coordinates these elements into coherent wholes. Such processes could occur as thoughts arise from the storehouse of impressions and pass through the different hierarchical levels of the mind on the outward flow of thoughts. Such a system is shown in figure 5.
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| In this theory, the incoming perceptions trigger specific categories of information and make them lively. This semantic information begins to bubble up, and interacts with the episodic memories stored in the ego. At this point many of the specific elements are combined by their proximate relationships in previous events. For example a rose may remind an individual of their mother, because she always had a house full of beautiful flowers.
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| As the bubbles of thought continue to rise, they would pass through the affective level, and all the beautiful feelings towards mother would be enlivened. At the level of the intellect, the thoughts would begin to take shape and directions. By the time the thought reached the level of conscious awareness, it would be formed into a concrete entity. |
| The transformations that take place during the rising of a thought can explain many of the ideas about scripts discussed by Schank (1975). When Rumelhart and Norman (1985) discussed the central concepts of schemas, they noted that the central feature of a schema was that "they were packets of information that contained variables. Roughly, a schema for any concept contains a fixed part, those characteristics which are always (or nearly always) true of exemplars of the concept and a variable part." (pg. 36) The fixed part of schemas seems to be a type of category, such as a restaurant script, that is stored in the storehouse of impressions, and the variable parts are any novel features that are picked up from either current incoming impressions, or from connections with other currently lively categories. |
| Rumelhart and Norman also noted that "a second important characteristic of schemas is that they can embed one within the other...and a third characteristic of schemas is that they represent knowledge at all levels of abstraction." ( 1985, pg. 37). If the mind actively constructs memory by using the semantic categories as inputs for higher levels of the mind to link into meaningful thoughts, then the fact that schemas are imbedded one within the other makes more sense. General, all purpose scripts could exist along with the categories, and act as frameworks for linking these categories. |
| By the time a child begins two word utterances this system is functioning in a manner that clearly resembles its adult functionality. These levels of mind have probably been linking the different bubbles of thought arising from the storehouse of impressions ever since the child was born. This is how infants created categories in their short term memory during infancy. However, before a certain age, this linking process was making up for the impoverished cognitive structure of the infant. As the infant grew, and gained in experience, the knowledge base and cascaded relay system became large enough that it began to pass much more lively information to the schema system, and hence allowed it to function in a fuller and richer way. |
| The process of thinking is the main focus of cognitive psychology, and cognitive theories of development have been one of the major theories of development. They propose that it is changes in internal cognitive components or in the knowledge structure of a child that drive the developmental process. Anyone who has followed the previous discussion will appreciate how intricate those internal processes are. It's one thing to say that the internal knowledge structure is reorganized, and quite another to explain how. The purpose of the sections on one and two word utterances was to convey the kind of processes that need to be included in a cognitive model toexplain development. |
| The active reconstruction process is one of the major steps that occurs in the thought process, as a perception comes in and flows through the system. The final step is the projection of this fully developed thought onto the screen of the mind. Piaget extensively discussed the emergence of the semiotic function within children. From the earliest infancy, children have the ability to recognize objects, but it is not until the ability to symbolically represent objects in the mind occurs that children have the internal cognitive structures needed to actively recall events. The recognition in earliest infancy occurs through the perceptual-thought process, but it is not until the emergence of inner looping occurs that true representation occurs. |
| Alexander said that at this stage "Actions and sensations are now internally organized in terms of perceptual impressions, desires, and simple mentation (process of knowing), which can be outwardly expressed and communicated in the form of speech" (1988, pg. 25). Alexander mentions that a child of this age is as unquestioning about the nature of their inner mental life as an infant was of their perceptual experience. The entire thinking process is something that occurs throughout the life of an individual, and it forms the basis for the entire developmental process. |
| The stage of Pre-Operational is a time where children learn to integrate progressively more complex motor actions, such as walking and speech production, with previous activity and with thought. As Flavell notes "during the pre-operational subperiod the child is transformed from an organism whose most intelligent functions are sensory-motor, overt acts to one whose upper-limit cognitions are inner, symbolic manipulations of reality" ( 1963, pg. 151). The internal loops are one way in which this transformation is accomplished. In early infancy, a child's attention is completely focused outward, and the mechanisms of thought operate to produce the changes. |
| Piaget discussed how the stage of pre-operations is a time where the internal thinking processes are being developed. The thought process in this model is much more complex than previous cognitive models. Cognitive psychology needs to supply some kind of model like this that shows how the internal cognitive structures change over time, and how they integrate new knowledge into the cognitive structure of an individual. The current cognitive models are in general too static to allow the massive transformations in knowledge content, functional capabilities, and memory organization that must occur as a child grows to adulthood. |
| In development there are two major processes that occur, both of which were discussed by Piaget. The first is the change that occurs every time an incoming perception enters the mind. Piaget referred to assimilation and accommodation as the changes that occur as a child modifies and is modified by incoming perception. The previous discussion about biological thories of neural networks and the sequential development of internal mapping structures relates very closely to the concepts of assimilation and accomidation in Piaget's theory. Piaget's second idea is related to stage transitions. These stage transitions have been one of the most complicated and least understood parts of his theory (Miller, 1983). The stage theories imply that there is not only a quantitative change in thinking over time, but there is a discontinuous qualitative change as well. The difference between assimilation and accommodation and the disequilibriums that produce stage changes are not as clear as many theorists would like, and that is part of the problem. |
| In cognitive skills theories many of these changes appear to occur in one domain, where an individual has extensive experience, and not in others ( Fischer, Kenny, Pipp, 1988). Skills theorists explain such changes by having the mind sequentially combine simple skills into more complex skills. This paper has included a very extensive review of how part of that process occurs- even though there has been no discussion of the storehouse of impressions, where large portions of this cognitive knowledge transition is occurring. A large portion of this transition in skills is occurring during the sequential build up of the cascaded relay system. |
| When the whole process of development is viewed from a close up perspective of day to day living, it looks as if the skills theory is correct. However, when researchers stand back and look at the type of progression that occurs over the entire developmental process, a stage theory emerges, because children develop certain skills at certain times. |
| Alexander (1988) has developed a theory that proposes that the developmental stages of Piaget arise from a shift in the dominant level of conscious awareness through the levels of the mind. In the earliest stage of life- the sensory-motor stage, children are clearly operating through the senses. Their entire thinking processes seem to be totally bound up by sensory perception to the extent that all thinking is totally tied to a stimulus-response loop. In the next stage of development, a child has created the connections that allow the sensory processes to "go on automatic" and their mind can begin the powerful inner looping process that allows the creation of semiotic thought. |
| As time progresses, this active construction process carried on by the ego, affect, and intellectual levels of the mind comes to play even larger roles in information processing capabilities of a child, and it is this transformation in semiotic thought that acts to transform cognitive structures so that concrete operations can arise. |
| The next level developed by a child is that of the screen of the mind. According to Vedic psychology, "The active thinking mind is responsible for apprehending, remembering, comparing and conceptually organizing the multiplicity of sensations and perceptions in order to plan speech and action to fulfill desires." ( Alexander et al, 1989). |
| The classic test for concrete operations is a conservation task such as pouring water between two differently shaped glasses. Children say that the glass with the higher water level has more, even though the water is the same. In discussing such an experiment, Flavell, Flavell and Green (1983) said that one problem children seem to have a great deal of trouble with in the period of pre-operations is the pretend/reality distinction. In their research they asked children first to clearly convince themselves that a painted piece of stone that looked like an egg was in fact a stone. When the object was transformed visually by looking at it under a microscope or blue filter, the children could easily become confused, and error by paying too much attention to sensory input and saying the object itself had changed, or by intellectual realism, where the knowledge of the nature of the object dominated perception. |
| Flavell (1985) explains this by saying "Another possible reason is that the young child is not yet very good at mentally sorting out and examining different sources or "channels" of information. He is less able than an older child to think that, although "stone" is known (one channel) to be present over there, all that is actually visible (another channel) is "egg"" (pg. 56 & 57). |
| If we accept the idea that the problem really is the integration of different channels of knowledge and perception, then what are the channels that are being integrated? Or to put the question in a different form, what mental abilities are needed to perform specific conservation tasks? If the previous description of the activities of the mind refers to specific functions that it performs on perception in the incoming cascaded relay system, then it would seem to imply that there are specific mental structures that develop which function to organize the incoming sensory data. More specifically they could organize incoming perception so that it triggers memory in a more optimal way. |
| For example, let's look at the two word utterances that Brown ( 1973) discussed. In this system there are combinations of two specific items, for example, an agent (cat) and an action (jump). In Quillian's ( 1968) original semantic network theory all of the qualities of a bird such as the fact that it had feathers, that it was a type of animal and therefore a living being, and that it could fly, were gathered together under one big hierarchical structure. The complexity of such a model is a problem, because we know so much about birds. However, the real problems with such a model arise from a consideration of the mechanics of logic. To take an example, we are able to make logical jumps from the fact that a kangaroo is an animal to the knowledge that it must therefore eat, because all animals eat. This seems to imply that the intellect can take pieces of that semantic memory and operate on them. |
| In one of his famous experiments, Piaget asked children in Switzerland to locate the cities of their homeland and name them, and then he asked them if the people in those cities were Swiss. They said no (Piaget, 1926). They seem to have no ability to mentally operate on both parts and wholes, and to compare them as different entities. Ginsburg and Opper say that it is "an inability to think simultaneously about several aspects of a situation" ( 1988, pg. 108). The same principles of logic that seem to operate to allow us to conclude that kangaroos eat also operate in this whole-part problem. |
| In an extensive discussion of the whole-part relationship Winston et al ( 1987) pointed out that there are six specific types of whole-part relationships, and that these are mixed randomly with other attributes in Quillian's semantic network model. These specific whole part relationships are "1. component-integral object (pedal-bike), 2. member-collection (ship-fleet), 3. portion-mass (slice-pie), 4. stuff-object (steel-car), 5. feature-activity (paying-shopping), and 6. place- area (Everflades-Florida)" (pg. 420). Each of these different part-whole relationships have a different logical relationship. For example, we can separate a portion of the pie from the whole easily, but we can't take a portion of the steel from the car without damaging or modifying the structure. |
| In Rosch's ( 1976) theory of categories, she mentioned that there were three levels- "basic"- for example a chair, "superordinate"- this would be a large class like furniture, and "subordinate"- for example, the rocking chairs in the living room. Before about seven years of age, children use functional groupings rather than the hierarchical groupings of items that adults use ( Daehler & Bukatko, 1985). In order to solve Piaget's Swiss problem, it is necessary to have class membership relationships sorted out. These class operations relate quite closely to the groupings that adults use, and a hierarchical structure is necessary to solve problems such as "wholes are always larger than their parts". |
| What causes this change from childhood functional to adult hierarchical grouping? Incoming perception would tend to create categories that are episodically grouped, or ones that are grouped by common appearances. It would not tend to create groups that are combined by abstract principles such as whole-part, or living-nonliving. The mind however, has the power to link categories in this manner, and to organize incoming perception by more abstract principles. As the cascaded relay built through this level, then a child would gain the ability to integrate different parts of the incoming perception into a larger whole. |
| What seems to be happening at this stage is that the screen of the mind switches from a passive reflector to an active coordinator. One thing that is a hallmark of the transition to concrete operations is the ability of a child to take another individuals point of view. For example, in Piaget's mountain problem, he asked children to tell him what the view of the three mountains would be from the far side of the table. Children, before a certain age, are only able to see the mountains from their current viewpoint. |
| In order for the child to pick any other viewpoint, they not only need the knowledge that their point of view is not the only possible one, which is something that they have trouble with, but they also need a well developed category 'mountain' that allows them to mentally call up the internal image of the far side of the of the hill. They must then be able to rotate that categorical picture mentally to find the correct location. Shepard and Cooper ( 1982) have studied mental imagery in adults, and it would appear that in order to see a scene from a different vantage point, the ability to perform mental rotation needs to be lively. |
| But such an ability also seems to imply the ability to call up a category from memory, and modify that category, in this case, through mental rotation. Mental rotation is very much a process of the active mental level. It involves the ability to put current perception on "hold", to call up knowledge from memory, and then to rotate the retrieved picture. It's not a simple task, but rather one that necessitates the coordination of many different areas of the mind. |
| Its the ability to integrate different sensory perceptions simultaneously that is the hallmark of the famous water level conservation test. Children see two different dimensions of water in a beaker, and focus on one dimension to the exclusion of the others. As children pass through the conservation shift, they learn to integrate more and more of the different sensory perceptions that fall on the screen of the mind, and to take into account larger portions of the incoming stimulus array. |
| By the time a child reaches adolescence, they have mastered much of the internal cognitive machinery of the mind, they have well formed categories which can be manipulated in memory at will, and the entire schematic reconstruction from memory has taken an adult form. The cascaded relay system has integrated many areas in the mind, and they can be used at will. Then they are ready to pass onto the next level of development, having automated the mechanisms associated with the mind. This next level in the hierarchical levels of the mind is the intellect. |
| At the current time, Piaget's idea of formal operations is under attack because it doesn't seem to fully capture the transition between childhood and adulthood. For example, a scientist will score high on tests for formal operations, but an artist may score poorly ( Sorflatten, personal communication, March, 1988). The highly mathematical and logical nature of his test for formal operations doesn't seem to differentiate well between adulthood and adolescence. This isn't because the difference isn't there. Many of the stage theorists who have studied change over the life-span have placed a major transition at this point, among them are Loevinger, Kohlberg, Freud, and Erikson ( Miller, 1983; Alexander et al, 1988). This transition occurs roughly at the time of the great physical transformations of puberty as well. |
| However, Piaget's attempt to classify formal operations in terms of intellectual reasoning does capture something about the transition. About this time an individual begins to understand abstract concepts, and to reason about the world and her place in it. Erikson discusses how the stage of identity verses identity diffusion is what characterizes this transitional period, while Loevinger places her stage 3/4 here, which represents the self-awareness stage, where an individual can step back and look at themselves in a third person perspective. Kohlberg discusses this period in terms of an entry into conventional moral reasoning where the need to consider others appears. This is a change from the egotistic view of morality held by children. |
| What Alexander has suggested is that this transformation occurs when the conscious mind de-embeds from its association with the mental thinking level of the mind which focuses primarily on apprehending, comparing and organizing the different sensory inputs, and remembering, and steps back to begin to associate itself more closely with intellectual thinking. "The function of the intellect, according to Vedic psychology, is to discriminate, evaluate, and decide, bringing direction and order (and hence understanding) to the diverse and more outwardly orientated activity of the thinking mind." ( Alexander et al, 1989, pg. 28). Figure 6 shows Alexander's theory, and it indicates how the development of a child mirrors the sequential unfoldment of the levels of the mind.
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| If we follow the sequential building process that used so far in this paper, then the transition that is occurring here is one of completion and automation of the internal cognitive system. The memory system is fully linked into the perceptual process, and categories are well formed. Schematic processes are active and functioning. In other words, the construction of the facilities of the cognitive structure is completed. There will be more expansion of different levels as an individual becomes expert in a given field, but the basic machinery of the mind is intact, and is put on automatic. Once this occurs, an individual can step back and begin to focus on who and what they are, which is what theorists who speak of self awareness and identity formation are discussing. It would also be a period where an individual could begin to "think about thinking," ( Piaget, 1950) . |
| Without the automation of mental processes, and the highly structured cascaded relay system that connected mental decisions to motor muscle responses, such a transformation would not be possible, conscious attention would constantly be drawn into specific details of these lower functions. It is when the mind becomes free, at least on the attentional level, from the specific mechanics of trying to coordinate memory and perception, or different sensory perceptions that it is free to focus on utilizing its cognitive structure for mastery of the world, whether that includes building a multi-million dollar company, or hanging out on the docks of San Francisco as a street artist. This period of puberty is usually considered to be a coming of age, and an entry into adulthood. |
| With the purpose of the intellect being to decide, it would function to control the flow of thoughts through the system. At puberty, children begin to try and consciously control their lives, and this reflects the underlying change that is occurring as the intellect tries to learn to control the internal thinking process. This brings with it a much greater power of thinking and precision, as well as a qualitative change in activity. At this period the intellect would be gaining control of the cascaded relay system. One thing that the intellect seems to have the ability to do is to turn on and off outer perceptual channels. It also seems to have the ability to switch between the different channels, or to enliven a specific channel. |
| One thing that tends to occur at the transition point between childhood and adulthood is that individuals extensively think about their place in the world (Miller, 1983). Such a transition seems to imply that the intellect is beginning to probe into mental functioning. The intense internal questing seems to imply that the intellect is also gaining control of the memory structure, and can probe it for specific details. Alexander mentions that at this point the intellect gains the capacity to "consciously reflect upon the contents of the mind" ( pg. 28). |
| However, like all of these transformations, this change isn't spontaneous or total. The intellect will gain mastery over some areas of the mind sooner than over others, and it will take time for all the different areas of the mind to fully gain this stage. However, by age 18 or 20, all of these areas have been developed, and the intellect has gained mastery. |
| Adult cognition, beyond this point, then seems to entails expansions of domain specific knowledge. This is however, not the full story, because there are two other levels of the mind that have not yet been fully integrated, because they lie beneath the intellect and mind. These are the levels of affect and ego. |
| Feelings are perceived throughout life. However, even though feelings can guide the intellect, as Allport and Posner (1948) noted in their famous experiment, feelings often lie as much underground as on the surface. Social psychology is full of experiments that show that feelings guide and direct the intellect with or without conscious awareness of that fact. |
| As long as feelings are harmonious they work in harmony with the intellect. When they become disturbed, they create havoc in an individuals life. Freud's theories are a study in disturbed emotions and their effects on life. However, there is no reason that this area should be like that, and Vedic psychology views this area fundamentally as a field of bliss, that links the individual with the larger universe. It's through the emotions that individuals are linked together in marriage, and linked to the rest of society. Moral behavior arises, when individuals consider how their actions will affect others in their environment ( Gilliagan & Murphey, 1988). |
| If the sequential unfoldment of mental functioning up to this point has been to integrate more and more functionality into the cognitive structure, and to put the whole process onto automatic, why is it that this process doesn't continue? To a certain extent, it does. Erikson's later stages of life, which talk about generativity, appear to be just such a transition. However, not everyone gets these and the reason has to do with the nature of the emotions. To damage the body, it is necessary to create some physical injury, but the emotions can be injured by a word. If one of the senses is injured, for example if a child is born blind, then all of the cognitive abilities that critically depend upon sight, such as internal visual imagery, will also be lost. In a similar way, damage to the emotions will cut out certain abilities, and without them the mind won't be able to settle to this deeper level or be fully coordinated with the intellect. |
| At the final stage of development of the active mental process, the intellect is integrated with feeling, and both of these levels are put on automatic. The active thinking mind, then retires to the level of the ego ( Alexander et al, 1989). At this stage, feeling and intellectual activity are as automatic as the functioning of the mind became when an individual entered adulthood. However, at this stage, a full appreciation of the ego, or self is not witnessed. It is the entry into the higher states of consciousness, cosmic consciousness, that allow the individual self to become as fully automatic as all the other processes were at earlier stages. |
| One of the hallmarks of this state is that the self is not involved with the world. Everything, whether it is thinking, feeling or perception, runs automatically, just as motor muscle motion currently is automatic, and apparently unconnected to attentional processing. The entire brain literally runs in parallel, and attention ceases to be a bottleneck in any cognitive processes. Maharishi has discussed this extensively, and has indicated that this is the natural state of adult life. |
| This paper has presented a theory that shows how the Vedic Psychology's theory of the thinking process relates to child development and explains many of the processes that occur there. While this theory isn't simple, I doubt that few cognitive psychologists today expect all of mental functioning to be captured in a theory that has two boxes and four interconnecting loops. In one sense its very simple. Thoughts come in, are processed by all the levels of the mind, reach the storehouse of impressions, and then return through the levels of the mind to be displayed on the screen of the mind before they become outer actions. |
| It's basically just a stimulus-response loop, with an entire mental universe in between the stimulus and response. The power of this theory lies in the fact that it begins with known biological principles and expands them in a logical way to build up the entire cognitive structure by progressively passing attention through a cognitive structure and then automating it. Figure 7 shows the full internal mental process. |
| The process of automation of mental processes is a fascinating process, and much of the substance of this paper has been based upon the assumption that mental processes slide into automatic in a progressive manner as a child grows. First children create sensory-motor skills, and by the time an individual leaves infancy, most of those are automatic. Next they integrate the subtler aspects of the sensory process and link memory processes with the different sense modalities. The whole growth process that I have presented relies on the ability to integrate a new set of skills with the previous sets, and then to put the whole thing on automatic. |
| However, this process of creating automatic processes doesn't end in adolescence, it continues on throughout the life span, and forms one of the fundamental pillars on which mental functioning is built. Higher level functions continue to create and modify these structures as needed to serve current purposes. Such an understanding fits in neatly with previous work on expert performance. It is interesting to note that expert performance is one of the main theories of development in cognitive psychology. |
| This is a general development program that encompasses several of the ideas of cognitive growth put forward by various authors. For example, Case felt that "children's intellectual functioning at different stages of development is most usefully depicted as a sequence of increasingly sophisticated mental structures," ( 1984, pg. 20), and he discussed these in terms of executive control structures, goals, or problem solving strategies. What we call goals and plans in adulthood seem to relate closely with higher order mental processes such as the functioning of the intellect and affective levels. In order for this suggestion to be viable, such higher order levels must feed into an individuals actions from a very early stage. In short, it is necessary to have an executive to have executive control functions. |
| Keil ( 1984) mentioned the necessity of taking into account the nature of the internal knowledge structures themselves and he mentions that the underlying biology exerts a powerful influence on what problems our all purpose learning machine solves most easily. This theory takes Keil's general concept and makes it more explicit. There are certain innate capacities that a human has, and these need to be enlivened and interconnected to create an adult cognitive system. In this theory children are all trying to solve the same general problem with the same basic tools, which is why their solutions look so similar. The first problem that an infant faces is to gain control over their body. Later children intercoordinate the senses with memory and the intellect, and rich interconnections between all the different areas are created. |
| The sequential development and integration of functionality is essentially a skills theory that can appear to be a stage theory on the surface because several of the transformations that occur involve substantial changes in the basic functioning. The physiology will integrate different subsets of its full potential in a sequential way. For example speech cannot occur before an individual has gained voluntary muscle control over the larynx. Each skill must also be individually created before it can be integrated with others. This is similar to other skills theories, but it tends to focus more thoroughly on the inner mechanics of the thought process. |
| In a theory of skill development that proposed a mechanism for development, Fischer, Kenny, and Pipp ( 1988) discussed ten levels of skill structure. The three earliest stages represent the creation of the sensory-motor system, and in stage four, these systems are combined to create a single representational set. The remaining system presents a series of progressively more abstract combinations that eventually combine to guide the developmental process. |
| They discuss four rules for skill development: substitution, focusing, compounding, and differentiation, for development within levels, as well as a fifth one: intercoordination, that guides development between levels. |
| The example that they gave was one that related to a child's play, however, the same principles could relate to the model just proposed. For example, compounding and differentiation would relate to the type of coordination occurring within a map, while intercoordination would be the connection of different maps into a cascaded relay system. Focusing would be the attentional energy that arises from the thought process as it flows through these relays, and substitution would occur as the thought process shifted from one thought to another. The difference between the two theories is that the one that I am proposing places a much greater emphasis on the internal mechanics of the thinking process, and the organizing structures that underlie thought. |
| Other theorists such as Chi ( 1978) have felt that it was an interplay between three factors, highly organized knowledge, development of representational strategies, and increase in the capacity of working memory that brought the changes. The capacity of working memory is a factor which this theory doesn't address. However, parts of the highly organized knowledge that an individual possesses lies in the storehouse of impression, and part of it lies in these highly organized rules for integrating different parts of the physiology. The same is true of the representational strategies. |
| From the point of view of this theory any of these integration stages, where the mind is linking in a new set of abilities could be considered as a separate stage in a stage theory or it could be considered to be a non-stage skills theory. In reality, it is somewhere in between these two views. The points where Piaget labeled his stage transitions are where strong counter intuitive transitions occurred. For example, the idea that young children don't have a permanent object concept is surprising. Similarly, the conservation shift is noteworthy. His last stage, formal operations is now even being questioned because there is no dramatic shift of this kind that distinguishes it from other stages ( Flavell, 1985 ). |
| In this theory, the mind creates the different stages by successively picking up and linking the next most accessible cognitive ability and links it in a progressive manner with whatever it has previously developed. The full mental machinery in this theory is much more complex, and the deep structures of the mind play a part that determines much of development. However, learning and skill also play an important role because it is the flow of attention through the different areas of the physiology that structure the cognitive machinery. In this model the sequential unfolding of stages arises from the internal characteristics of the human mind and from the nature of the biological machine which we inhabit. |
