Measuring continuous cognition

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of online measurement, as described here, is the use of continuous rather than discrete responses. Continuous responses are assumed to better reflect holistic processing, which is not obviously segmented—either temporally or

semantically—in the way that symbolic processing is (due to the dependence of symbolic processing on localist, compositional representation). It might be objected, however, that the notion of continuous measurement is a contradiction in terms, given that

measurement inherently requires the discretization of observed behavior by placing it on

a metric.15 For just this reason, James (1890) saw little hope for the empirical study of

continuous, holistic cognition:

The object of every thought … is neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter…. It is needless to say that memory can seldom accurately

reproduce such an object, when once it has passed from before the mind. It either makes too little or too much of it. Its best plan is to repeat the verbal sentence, if there was one, in which the object was expressed. But for inarticulate thoughts there is not even this resource, and introspection must confess that the task exceeds her powers. The mass of our thinking vanishes for ever, beyond hope of recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few of the crumbs that fall from the feast. (p. 276)

While it is true that measurement requires discretization, James perhaps did not place enough stock in the development of alternatives to direct/offline measurement

procedures, which would make possible the observation of behavior at a much more fine- grained resolution. The outcomes of such procedures, being necessarily discretized at some level, are inevitably approximations of holistic processing, but these procedures nevertheless represent the best option for countering James’ pessimism about the limits of empirical psychology.

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Indeed, this point suggests a powerful analogy between conceptions of science and reality on the one hand and symbolic and holistic cognition on the other: Each relation essentially involves measurement. Thus, the process of quantification, through which holistic representations are translated into symbolic representations, can be understood as a kind of introspective (metacognitive) measurement procedure. Taking the analogy a step further, symbolic representations might be viewed as abstract reconstructions of, or theories about, holistic representations.

In fact, measurement procedures have already been developed that possess many of the features of online measurement described above. For example, using a mouse-tracking procedure that continuously records the motion of a participant’s hand during the generation of response behaviors, Freeman and Ambady (2009) found that early responses to stimuli are more holistic, being sensitive to features of the individual stimulus, before resolving to more discrete, categorical assessments. Spivey and Dale (2006) have reached similar conclusions using eye-tracking procedures. Wojnowicz, Ferguson, Dale, and Spivey (2009) also employed a mouse-tracking procedure to shed light on the cognitive processing underlying self-reported evaluations of social targets; their results suggested that early representations are sensitive to multiple sources of information before “self-organizing” into the categorical representations required by self- report procedures. In addition, a small but growing number of researchers have begun to apply the dynamical systems approach to psychology (e.g., Bechtel, 2008; Vallacher, Read, & Nowak, 2002; Wiese, Vallacher, & Strawinska, 2010). This approach, inspired by the cybernetics movement that originated in the mid-twentieth century, assumes that much cognitive processing is continuous and non-linear. A common feature of these various approaches to measurement is the emphasis on the time course of cognitive processing, which is a crucial aspect of the relation between holistic and symbolic

cognition. In contrast, direct and indirect measurement procedures have typically ignored the temporal aspect of cognitive processing, providing only static cross-sections of presumably dynamic processes.

James’ worries about holistic cognition touch upon a second problem for empirical psychology, however: Holistic cognition is not only temporally continuous, but semantically continuous as well. This is a consequence of the fundamental context- dependence of holistic representation, and it poses a serious threat to the practice of empirical psychology (Fodor, 1987). In short, if holistic cognition is tightly bound to the situational context in which it operates, then it becomes extremely difficult to produce valid generalizations about these psychological processes. The solution in mainstream psychology has been to ignore this possibility and assume that all cognition can be described in general, aggregate-level terms, essentially as if all cognition were symbolic (i.e., discrete, linguistic, etc.). In practice, this requires heavy dependence upon the use of

ceteris paribus clauses in psychological explanation to subsume all of the unidentified variation that can influence the link between an “operationally defined” stimulus and a behavioral response (Fodor, 1989). This solution, however, seriously undermines the value of general psychological explanations. The difficulty is that psychologists seeking

to provide precise descriptions of psychological mechanisms cannot ignore the possibility

that some of those mechanisms may be context-dependent, and in these cases, sweeping the “random error” due to context-sensitivity into a ceteris paribus clause precludes the possibility of precisely describing the cognitive mechanism underlying behavior (Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van Heerden, 2003; Cronbach, 1975; Molenaar, 2004;

Runkel, 1990).16

The covariation theses offer the framework for a more adequate solution to this problem by helping researchers empirically distinguish between conditions under which cognitive processing will be more or less context-dependent. The quantification hypothesis thus suggests that under online (compared to offline) conditions, descriptions of cognitive processes will need to be more context-dependent. The practical problem with this suggestion is that mainstream empirical psychology depends heavily upon aggregation in the analysis of behavioral data (Epstein, 1979, 1980), and aggregation is inherently decontextualizing. One potential solution to this problem is the use of multi-level analyses, which allow for the modeling of data at both the aggregate and the individual level. Although the practice is not yet mainstream, the tools for measuring and analyzing multi-level data are already available (e.g., Hamaker, Dolan, & Molenaar, 2005;

Molenaar, 2007; Nesselroade & Ram, 2004). Collectively, then, psychometric advances offer reason to doubt James’ pessimistic conclusion: The measurement and analysis of online, holistic cognition is not only possible but empirically practical.

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In considering the threat holistic processing poses to the generality of psychological explanation, Conrey and Smith (2007) claim that “Fortunately, the aspects of context that are most important to social

psychology are relatively few” (p. 254). To the extent this is true, the problem of distinguishing between behaviors that require context-dependent vs. context-independent explanations would be relatively

innocuous, and traditional (aggregative) empirical methods could be applied unconditionally. In light of the wide variety of contextual cues to which social behavior is sensitive (see §1.2.1.2), however, the