The Analysis of and Distinction Between Conscious and Unconscious Aspect of Minds
(意識與無意識心智的區辨與分析)
鄭昭明
Vygotsky Seminar 2010-2011
Contents
1. Some Phenomena
2. Cognitive Development: Jean Piaget and Lev Semionovich Vygotsky
3. Consciousness and Unconsciousness: Historical Review
4. Current Conceptions of Consciousness and Unconsciousness
5. Conscious Cognition
6. Unconscious Cognition
7. Unconscious Control of Normal People
8. Conscious Animals?
9. When Does Human Become Conscious? Evidence From Children’s Memory
Classical Approaches to Learning and Cognition in Psychology
過去有一種研究取向認為，個人的認知與智慧的能力受限於個人所繼承的演化、遺傳與腦神經組織。此看法是「先天驅動歷程」[nature-driven (NAD) processes] 的看法。
另一種取向是認為，後天的環境因素如教育、文化與社會環境與人工設計才是決定個人認知與智慧的主要力量，此種看法是「後天驅動歷程」 [nurture-driven (NUD)]的看法。
心理學在過去的發展中不斷的在這兩種看法之下擺盪。
2. Cognitive Development: Jean Piaget and
Lev Semionovich Vygotsky
Piaget and Vygotsky:
Constructivists that claim that cognition is the result of "mental construction". In other words, students learn by fitting new information together with what they already know.
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory:
Social interaction leads to continuous step-by-step changes in children's thought and behavior that can vary greatly from culture to culture (Woolfolk, 1998).
Development depends on interaction with people and the tools that the culture provides to help form their own view of the world.
There are three ways a cultural tool can be passed from one individual to another:
Imitative learning
Instructed learning
Collaborative learning
Four Basic Principles Underlying the Vygotsky Framework
Children construct their own knowledge.
Development cannot be separated from its social context.
Learning can lead development.
Language plays a central role in mental development.
The First Aspect of the Sociocultural Theory: Social Speech, Private Speech, and Inner Speech
The earliest speech of child is ... essentially social. At first it is global and multifunctional; later its functions become differentiated. At a certain age the social speech of the child is quite sharply divided into egocentric speech and communicative speech.....Egocentric speech, splintered off from general social speech, in time leads to inner speech, which serves both autistic and logical thinking.
The Second Aspect of the Sociocultural Theory: The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).
Vygotsky believed that any pedagogy creates learning processes that lead to development and this sequence results in zones of proximal development. It's the concept that a child accomplishes a task that he/she cannot do alone, with the help from a more skilled person.
Vygotsky also described the ZPD as the difference between the actual development level as determined by individual problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or collaboration with more knowledgeable peers. The result of this process is children become more socialized in the dominant culture and it induces cognitive development (Moll, 1994).
In order for the ZPD to be such a success, it must contain two features.
The first is called subjectivity. This term describes the process of two individuals begin a task with different understanding and eventually arrive at a shared understanding.
The second feature is scaffolding, which refers to a change in the social support over the course of a teaching session. If scaffolding is successful, a child's mastery level of performance can change, which means that it can increase a child's performance on a particular task.
3. Consciousness and Unconsciousness:
Historical Review
Consciousness in Early Days
Consciousness: Mind or Cognition
第一、人如何能知外在世界的事物？知識與經驗的分 析。
第二、我們自己個人的觀念、思想、心像、見識、記 憶、創造以 及其他的心智能力，其本質究竟為何？
對人類心智內容與結構的分析。
〈荀子‧正名〉
「心有徵知。徵知，則緣耳而知聲可也，緣目而知形可也，然而徵知必將待天官之當簿其類然後可也。」
In General Introduction to Psychology
Consciousness: our ongoing awareness of our thoughts, sensations, feelings.
Unconsciousness: coma, sleeping
Altered state of consciousness: dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, or states induced by drugs.
In Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory
Consciousness: awakenment with self-awareness of desires, experiences, and standards.
Unconsciousness: awakenment without self-awareness desires, experiences, and standards (unacceptable sex and aggressive desires, early trauma, internalized social standards).
In Current Cognitive Psychology
Consciousness: awakenment with self-awareness of cognition (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns)
Unconsciousness: awakenment without self- awareness of cognition (unknown knowns).
4. Current Conceptions of Consciousness and Unconsciousness
| A Schematic Diagram of the Relations Between Memory Systems and Varieties of Consciousness (Tulving, 2002) | |
| Memory System | Consciousness |
| Episodic | Autonoetic conscious （自我智性的意識） |
| Semantic | Noetic conscious （智性的意識） |
| Procedural | Anoetic conscious （無智性的意識） |
| --(e.g., coma, sleep) | Unconscious （無意識） |
Comte’s Critiques (孔德的批判):
Introspection: unreliable
Comte’s paradox (孔德的矛盾)
ü Liar paradox
ü Hegel’s paradox
ü Authority paradox
ü Truth-value paradox
“Thiss sentence contains threee errors.”
Tarski’s theory of truth (真值理論) (1956)
Hypothesized Characteristics of Unconscious Control (Reber, 1993)
Evolutionarily old structures and processes
Robustness of unconscious perception, learning, and memory
Age and development-level independence
Low variability across individuals
IQ independence
Commonality of process across species
5. Conscious control: Controlled
by Self-Awareness:
Sensation
Perception
Intentional learning
Conscious memory (e.g., recall, recognition)
6. Unconscious Cognition
Patients
盲視 (blindsight) (Weiskrantz et al., 1974; Weiskrantz, 1986, 1990). e. g. Patient D. B.
視覺失認症(visual agnosia) (Humphreys & Riddoch, 1987; 1993;
臉形失認症(prosopagnosia) (Bauer, 1984).
Ø e. g. Patient L. F.
失憶症 (anterograde or retrograde amnesia) (Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1970).
7. Unconscious Control of
Healthy Persons
Reflexive behavior
Instinctive behavior
Visceral control
Subliminal perception
Incidental learning
Latent learning
Automatic processing of motor or cognition
e.g., 7. Implicit Expertise in Universities, Hospitals, Trade Schools, Workshops:
Knowledge representation of experts is different from novices and is also inaccessible to verbalization. There is a difference between what experts say they do and what they actually do; they are often unaware of the nature of their secrets (expertise). They actually do not know how they do what they do.
Evidence:
Expert systems such as MYCIN, NEOMYCIN did not work.
Implicit Processes in Medical Diagnosis and Diagnosis in Motor Mechanics, System Analyst, Football Coaches
e.g., the acute abdominal pain is common to a range of disease and disorder [perforated (穿孔性) ulcer, appendicitis, bowel obstruction, dyspepsia (消化不良), diverticular (憩室的) disease, cholecystitis (膽囊炎), nonspecific abdominal pain, pancreatitis (胰臟炎), or renal (腎臟的) colic (絞痛)].
When facing a difficult diagnosis problem, students were more likely to refer to basic science findings than were expert doctors
e.g., 8. Implicit Learning and Knowledge (Broadbent, 1987)
• Independent variable :
– Number of workers employed (W).
• Dependent variable:
– The amount of sugar produced (P)
Pt = 2Wt - Pt – 1 + rt
where t is the number of trial, rt is the random component at t.
• Task:
– Participants were required to choose the W in such a way that the production reached and maintain a prescribed target value.
• Conscious Knowledge (學分的知識)
• Unconscious Knowledge (學徒的知識)
• 8. Conscious Animals?
• 1). Premack & Woodruff (1978)
• Subject: Sarah, a chimpanzee
• Task: She was shown a series of short videos of a person struggling with a problem (e.g., trying to get out of a locked cage, or trying to make a radio work). After each video, she was asked to choose between two still photographs: one photograph illustrated a “solution” to the video problem (a key, for example, or a plug and socket); the other illustrated to solution to another problem.
• Results: correct solution.
• 2).
• Subjects: Chimps, monkeys, gibbons, orang-uttans, gorillas
• Task: body mark test
• Results: Some chimps and orang-uttans passed the test, but others who were young and old did not. Monkeys, gibbons, and gorillas failed to pass the test.
• Possibility 1: A chimp sees the mark on, say, his eyebrow, and, now knowing that the mark is on his body, moves his arm and fingers so as to touch the area.
• Possibility 2: The chimp saw the mark--a novel stimulus--and simply used the mirror to guide his arm movements so that his finger contacts the novel stimulus.
3). Deception: the Machiavelian Hypothesis
e.g., 1: Whiten & Byrne (1988)
A male Olive baboon who had killed an antelope and was approached by a female who enjoyed meat. The female began by grooming the male; when the male lolled back under these attentions, she grabbed the meat and ran off with it.
e.g., 2. (by Hans Kummer, an ethologist at the
A female baboon who spent some 20 minutes gradually shifting herself, while maintaining a seated posture, a distance of some two meters. This brought her behind a rock, where she began to groom a young male baboon. This grooming would not have been tolerated by the male leader of the troop.
Infantile Amnesia
幼兒不能記憶所發生的事情或經驗。
幼兒能記憶所發生的事情或經驗，但不久之後就忘了。
幼兒能記憶所發生的事情或經驗，但不能覺知自己的記憶，因此不能報告自己的記憶。
2. Auditory and Visual Recognition
DeCasper & Spence (1986): Auditory memory
Pregnant mothers read aloud a short (three-minute) children’s story daily--the same one every day—for the last six weeks of their pregnancy.
Within two days of birth, their babies fitted with earphones, through which they would hear either the same story or another story (read by their mothers), were tested for recognition of the story. Their spontaneous rate of sucking a nipple was recorded.
Results:
Eight babies: increased in rate for familiar story and decreased in rate for a new story.
Eight babies: decreased for familiar story and increased for the new story.
Babies altered their sucking rates so as to listen to the familiar story in preference to the new story.
Fagan (1973): Visual memory
Pascalis & Deschonen (1994): Recognition
Rovee-Collier & Shyi (1992): Learning to Do Things
4. The Transition to Talking: Toddlers’ Recall
Question: We have seen evidence that babies can retain memories for a variety of types of experience over relatively long periods.
Why, then, do we not recall those experiences in adulthood?
Possibility: The development of language somehow makes these memories inaccessible.
5. Conscious Recall?
Myers,
Howe, Courage, & Peterson (1994)
Subjects: patients at the emergency room of a hospital.
Task: They were asked six months later what they remembered of their incident.
e.g., KB, 18 mnths and not yet talking, caught a fish bone in her throat, showed maximum stress. The bone was removed at the hospital. Six mnths later, KB was talking, but could not recall in words anything abut the incident. However, she did pick out a photograph of the emergency-room doctor who removed the bone, and refused to eat fish since the incident.
7. Language and Recall
It seems that infants who have not learned to talk do not consciously recall the events of their lives, whereas children, who can talk, recall. If this account is valid, then infantile amnesia is not caused by a block of repression of infant memories, but by the failure to form conscious memories preverbally.
Evidence: The earliest memories of female adults tend to be of events earlier in their lives than those of males, probably because girls tend to start talking at a younger age than boys.
