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From: jaspert@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jasper Taylor)
Subject: Re: On Going Beyond The Information Given & 'Cognition'
In-Reply-To: David Longley's message of Thu, 17 Aug 95 13:18:30 GMT
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Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 10:43:48 GMT
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In article <808665510snz@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <David@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:

> Whatever my failings are, they pale into into insignificance next to
> yours.  Anyone with an undergraduate degree in psychology after 1970
> would know how much work there is which shows that perception, let
> alone cognition, is influenced by expectations.  

Then how much more so behaviour! 

> As a consequence,
> our observations naturally go beyond the information given.

> Arguing with me won't change this empirical fact.

My understanding of this post is that the following two quotations are
supposed to illustrate how prone to bias scientists are when making
perceptual judgements of any kind....

>     'Where the control of perceptual activity is concerned, two
> solutions are currently popular among cognitive psychologists.  The
> first, [...]  distinguishes sharply between perception and
> attention. Perception proper is thought to be determined by
> impinging stimuli, while a mechanism of selective attention remains
> under the control of the individual himself. We have already seen
> that this proposal will not do; selectivity is inherent in the very
> process of information pickup and cannot be relegated to any
> separate device. The second, which must be considered here, is due
> to J.  S.  Bruner.  He assigns control to the perceiver who is said
> to go increasingly far "beyond the information given" as he acquires
> more sophisticated perceptual skills. In this view, the main thrust
> of cognitive development is to make the adult freer than the child:
> he is said to be less "stimulus-bound" and more "inner-directed."'

>     U Neisser (1976) Cognition and Reality

>     'Considers that intuitive predictions follow a judgmental
> heuristic-representativeness.  By this heuristic, people predict the
> outcome that appears most representative of the evidence.
> Consequently, intuitive predictions are insensitive to the
> reliability of the evidence or to the prior probability of the
> outcome, in violation of the logic of statistical prediction. The
> hypothesis that people predict by representativeness was supported
> in a series of studies with both naive and sophisticated university
> students (N = 871).  The ranking of outcomes by likelihood coincided
> with the ranking by representativeness, and Ss erroneously predicted
> rare events and extreme values if these happened to be
> representative.  The experience of unjustified confidence in
> predictions and the prevalence of fallacious intuitions concerning
> statistical regression are traced to the representativeness
> heuristic.  - - - rules determining intuitive predictions &
> judgments of confidence; contrast to normative principles of
> statistical prediction.

>     On the psychology of prediction.  Kahneman, Daniel;
> Tversky,-Amos Hebrew U., Jerusalem, Israel Psychological Review;
> 1973 Jul Vol. 80(4) 237-251
        
...but if you consider the subjects in these experiments are just
that, _subjects_ rather than _experimentors_, then this argument
shoots itself in the foot. There is no way one can even conceive of
such experiments as these without contemplating the _attitudes_ of the
subjects. They are what is under examination here. And they are not
simply a randomizing factor to be ignored; their effects follow a
pattern, and are thus worthy of investigation _in themselves_. If
there is a phenomenon out there, it's the duty of science to
investigate it even if it proves to be tricky, rather than ignore it
and hope it'll go away.
--
Jasper Taylor                        | /www.cogs  /   |  A politically-correct
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