Cognitive Structure: A Component of Cognitive Context

Cognitive Structure: A Component of Cognitive ContextAuthor(s): Katherine NelsonSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1991), pp. 199-201Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449266 .

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COMMENTARIES 199

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Cognitive Structure: A Component of Cognitive Context

Katherine Nelson Graduate Center

City University of New York

Sedikides and Skowronski have reviewed an impressive amount of research under the umbrella of "cognitive structure activation." But have they achieved their aim of unveil- ing a general psychological law applicable across the frac- tionated field of psychology? Does this "law" "significantly enhance our understanding of thought and behavior" as claimed? In this commentary, I address two issues: (a) What is to be gained and what is lost by generalizing across so wide and diverse a territory? and (b) Is there a fundamental truth embedded in these claims? If so, what is it?

First, it is appropriate to ask whether this proposal adds anything to our understanding of cognition and communication in the social world. Does this daring generalization across a vast range of research reveal anything new? Does this proposal differ in any significant way from what is now recognized as general schema theory (e.g., Mandler, 1983, 1984; Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977)? Most important, what is a cognitive structure?

The authors state that "a cognitive structure is the mental representation of an object or idea." The term object seems clear enough at first, but idea is not a well-defined term in psychology; one suspects that it is invoked here because there is no other term that applies to all the things that Sedikides and Skowronski want to include in their construct. More- over, with one exception, none of the examples given is an object in any usually accepted sense of the term: The examples include semantic categories, scripts, procedures, memories, specific people-and, yes, specific objects. As the arti- cle unfolds, it turns out that the construct includes even more: narrative versus paradigmatic thinking, rational versus irra- tional problem solving, moods, creativity, motivations, and "hostility-relevant constructs." In common psychological parlance, procedures are not considered equivalent to structures, nor would implicit motivational needs (such as achievement or affiliation) be considered within the same framework as explicit semantic categories. What is gained by



200 COMMENTARIES

grouping these diverse constructs all together that could override the cost of losing important distinctions such as structure-function-process, form-content, or motive- goal?

In short, at the outset it seems that the cognitive-structure- activation proposal is misnamed. It soon becomes clear that cognitive structure involves not only structures but any influence on an individual's approach to a situation. Consider, for example, the narrative-paradigmatic thinking contrast (Bruner, 1986) discussed by the authors in relation to the effect of base rates on problem solving. A narrative frame for thinking about a situation is different from a categorical (paradigmatic) one, in that the thinker makes up a possible story that may explain what is happening, in contrast to simply sorting the people and their actions into appropriate categories (e.g., angry, fighting). At the same time, narrative frameworks (such as scripts) may embed categorical ones (Nelson, 1986), and categories may also be formed to organize narratives, such as event categories (Rifkin, 1985), or story genres (e.g., folk tales, mystery stories).

These contrasting frameworks represent different ways of organizing cognitive content; each may be applied to the same objective information, and they may result in different effects on thinking processes. Developmental work at the City University of New York has shown individual dif- ferences among people in the way they typically organize their representations of experience. Some mothers, for example, present experiences to their children within a narrative framework, and when talking with their young children about a remembered experience talk about it in a narrative style (emphasizing the who, where, when, and why of the experience). Other mothers frame experiences in categorical terms, and their memory talk emphasizes categorical knowledge derived from the experience (what kind, what properties; e.g., "What kind of trucks did we see on the walk?"). Children in turn reflect their mothers' style of framing experience, and the style (or mode) affects what is remembered (Engel, 1985; Tessler, 1986, 1991). Thus, this research is consistent with the narrative-paradigmatic dif- ferences that Sedikides and Skowronski report based on Zukier and Pepitone (1984). Clearly there are observable effects of different ways of framing a problem. But are narrative and paradigmatic frameworks "cognitive structures" in the sense of mentally represented objects and ideas?

The problem is that the authors use the term cognitive structure to refer to several different, distinct properties of cognition (arid motivation). This problem is familiar from developmental theory, as seen in the different ways that structure is used in Piagetian theory and in information- processing accounts. For Piagetians, structures (e.g., schemata, operations) contrast with functions (assimilation, accommodation, organization) and also with figurative representations (e.g., perception, imagery, symbols). In most information-processing accounts, operations (functions) operate on representations (structures). In the latter framework, structure is more or less equivalent to organization; categories, schemas, and scripts are all viewed as structures (albeit "software" rather than "hardware"). It appears that this view is what the authors have in mind in their basic definition. But procedures ("making an inference, solving a problem, executing a well-practiced behavior") would not be counted as structures in either account, nor would specific memories of specific people and objects.

The point is that representations that may be objects of thought are not the same as the operations that construct the representations but that are not themselves objects of thought. Herein lies the essential difference between the content of a represented experience and the narrative or paradigmatic organization of the content. The narrative does not exist outside of the content; it cannot be an object of thought in and of itself. Of course, the type of organization may- and usually does-influence what content is organized, but that does not make the organizing framework itself into content. As noted previously, one may set up categories of narratives and represent them as mental objects of thought, but this is a different step, involving attributing kinds of content to narrative structures.

Despite these problems, there is certainly at least a germ of truth in the proposals put forth, and the essence of it can be found in the following key statements: "How one under- stands one's world is, in part, a function of the constructs one uses to encode stimulus input." (Why "in part"?) "How people interpret a situation will affect how they respond in that situation." That these are seriously put forward as new insights reflects poorly on the field of psychology as a whole and its history. The question that responsible psychologists ought to be asking is why so much research effort by so many psychologists over so many years has gone into demonstrat- ing these very common-sensical observations. Is there any- one inside or outside of psychology who has given the matter any thought at all who does not believe these claims?

Basically then, the cognitive-structure-activation claim comes down to the idea that context matters. But, as the authors have realized, the context that matters is not always or only the external "objective" context but what my col- leagues and I (French & Nelson, 1985; Nelson, 1986) have termed cognitive context and what Sperber and Wilson (1986) term cognitive environment. Cognitive or subjective context is the context within which a situation is experienced by the individual. In our work, we have considered the in- stantiation of well-organized schemata for familiar situations that determine how the present situation is interpreted as constituting a major part of cognitive context. If the situation or event does not fit an already constructed schema (or script), the cognitive context may be chaotic or disorganized, and efforts to construct an appropriate context may be under- taken. Under this interpretation, the question becomes how to understand what enters into cognitive context (beyond familiar scripts) and how to find predictors of what will enter into cognitive context for a given individual in a given situation.

Our developmental research has focused on the individual's history of experiences of events that lead to the representation of scripts for familiar events and situational schemata. We have shown in a variety of research paradigms that children's scripts influence their memory for new experiences, their interpretation and use of language within and about events, their play, their understanding of stories, and their construction of category knowledge. Older children's scripts differ from those of younger children and thus influence these processes in different ways. Furthermore, older children have more structures available for interpretation of a given experience and are more flexible in activating appropriate interpretive structures in different situations. For example, younger children tend to call on event-based script knowledge restricted to a single event regardless of task



COMMENTARIES 201

requirements, whereas older children may activate either a single-event script, multiple-event scripts, or more abstract categorical knowledge depending on task demands (Kyratzis, Lucariello, & Nelson 1991).

A conception similar to our notion of cognitive context has been put forward by Sperber and Wilson (1986) in their discussion of relevance in communication and cognition. They noted that we are all engaged in "constructing the best possible mental representation" of our common environment. But because people "have mastered different con- cepts . . . they can construct different representations and make different inferences. They have different memories, too, different theories that they bring to bear. . . . Hence, even if they all shared the same narrow physical environment . . . their cognitive environments would still differ" (p. 38). Sperber and Wilson employed this notion to explica- te their idea that communication between individuals involves making assumptions about shared cognitive environments and, on that basis, communicating information relevant to that environment. Interpretation of a message, verbal or nonverbal, depends on what assumptions the inter- reter mentally represents on that occasion, based on the specific conditions of the particular communicative situation.

These observations emphasize an important psychological reality that is given little consideration in Sedikides and Skowronski's discussion: Cognitive context (or cognitive environment) differs in essentially unknowable ways from individual to individual and from situation to situation. General principles of recency and frequency of activation, such as the authors propose, may provide some predictive value but are inevitably limited by the particulars of an individual's history. This is especially apparent in developmental research in which a child's interpretation of an experimental environment is at issue. What assumptions a particular child brings to the situation will depend on her developmental history, and, because that history is short and relatively restricted, the set of possible assumptions about the context may be some- what idiosyncratic and may not intersect with those of the experimenter at all. Such different theories of the experiment can lead to considerable noise in the data, as well as errors in interpreting the results.

As Sperber and Wilson's discussion makes clear, the set of assumptions that people bring to a situation include not only organized structural knowledge, but attitudes, motivations, goals, and intentions. Cognitive contexts (or environments) are made up of more than cognitive structures as that term is usually interpreted; they may, in fact, include all that Sed- ikides and Skowronski wish to invoke in their use of the term.

In summary, I believe that what these authors have glimpsed in their review of a vast range of research is the

important influence of what I have termed cognitive context and what Sperber and Wilson termed cognitive environment. In trying to come to grips with these influences, they have conflated structures, procedures, operations, organizing principles, schemata, categories, motivations, and moods, among other things. In so doing, they have ridden roughshod over important distinctions that theorists have worked hard in recent years to draw clearly. While recognizing the impor- tance of the central insight that context matters, and that it is cognitive or subjective context that matters, we need to be careful to keep teased apart the different kinds of psychological variables that enter into the formation of any cognitive environment.

Note

Katherine Nelson, Developmental Psychology, Box 300, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 33 West 42nd Street, New Yiork, NY 10036-8099.

References

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French, L., & Nelson, K. (1985). Young children's knowledge of rela- tional terms: Some ifs, ors and buts. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Kyratzis, A., Lucariello, J., & Nelson, K. (1991). Continuity and context- sensitivity in the knowledge organization of young children. Manu- script submitted for publication.

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Tessler, M. (1986). Mother-child talk in a museum: The socialization of a memory. Unpublished manuscript, City University of New York.

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Zukier, H., & Pepitone, A. (1984). Social roles and strategies in predic- tion: Some determinants of the use of base rate information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 349-360.



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Cognitive Structure: A Component of Cognitive Context