Jonathan Shih Commentary on Week 7 - Perspectives from Cognitive Science Reading about cognitive architectures and information processing theories left me with skeptical thoughts. Although these theories do have a lot of merit in their efforts to understand the infrastructures behind intelligent human behavior, they seem to wrongly assume that all interactions in the world exist in a social, cultural, and environmental vacuum. They seem to offer an incomplete explanation of human behavior because the architectures revolve around only a person’s mind and don’t fully consider external influences on the person’s behavior and interactions. It comes as no surprise that this is something that also happens to be a common criticism of the cognitive and information-processing model of psychology in general. Cognitive architectures list concrete specifications as to how much time it takes to execute some action or behavior (like memory retrieval, item recognition, different kinds of problem solving, etc.) but they neglect to acknowledge that these interactions are performed in complex systems that include much more than just a person’s general knowledge, preferences, perceptions, skills, and actions. These systems also happen to include non-person-centric elements such as external events or social and cultural norms that indirectly or directly influence a person’s motivation to complete the task at hand. To throw some examples out there, in the context of a particular human being performing a specific task: Did s/he just receive a raise? Did a long-time crush just reject him/her? Did s/he just get engaged? Did a family member just pass away? Is it sunny or rainy outside? If s/he just ran out of the shower, is it culturally acceptable to perform the task naked? I believe that cognitive architectures cannot fully describe these interactions because of the fact that they focus solely on the infrastructures within a person’s mind. They neglect to consider the entire social, cultural, and environmental system that surrounds and influences that person’s mind – which, in turn, has to affect his/her interactions and behavior as well. In the end, I also believe that cognitive architectures cannot explain human behavior enough to describe the intentionality of different people’s experiences. After all, how can an information processing theory or cognitive architecture model fully and completely describe and predict the differences between my process of solving a particular problem (i.e. going through a game of FreeCell) and your process of solving the same problem? |