Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Cognitive Writing Research to Cognitive Psychology

Virginia Wise Berninger

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848729636
• eBook ISBN: 9781136647215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

This volume tells the story of research on the cognitive processes of writing—from the perspectives of the early pioneers, the contemporary contributors, and visions of the future for the field.

Writing processes yield important insights into human cognition, and is increasingly becoming a mainstream topic of investigation in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Technological advances have made it possible to study cognitive writing processes as writing unfolds in real time. This book provides an introduction to these technologies.

The first part of the volume provides the historical context for the significance of writing research for contemporary cognitive psychology and honors the pioneers in cognitive and social-cognitive research in this field. The book then explores the rapidly expanding work on the social foundations of cognitive processes in writing and considers not only gender differences but also gender similarities in writing. The third part presents a lifespan view of writing in early and middle childhood, adolescence, higher education, and the world of work. There follows an examination of the relationships of language processes –at the word, sentence, and text levels—to the cognitive processes in writing. Part V covers representative research on the cognitive processes of writing—translation and reviewing and revision—and the working memory mechanisms that support those processes. A review of the current technologies used to study these cognitive processes on-line as they happen in real time is provided. Part VII provides an introduction to the emerging new field of the cognitive neuroscience of writing made possible by the rapidly evolving brain imaging technologies, which are interpretable in reference to paradigms in cognitive psychology of writing. The final section of the book offers visions of the future of writing research from the perspective of contemporary leaders in writing research.

Part I

The Cognitive Tradition in Writing Research

1

My Past and Present as Writing Researcher and Thoughts About the Future of Writing Research

JOHN R. HAYES

The invitation to write this chapter came with a request to write the story of a research career and the researcher who was the main character in that career story. Thus, in this chapter, I describe my research career as it unfolded in real time: my past—how I became a cognitive psychologist and brought my cognitive perspective to writing research; my present—what I am doing now; and, finally, my thoughts about future directions for the psychological study of writing. To tell the story, the chapter will contain bits of history, snippets of current events, and fragmentary personal opinions, all loosely tied together by experiences I have lived through during a long career. In short, don’t expect conventional organization.

THE PAST: HOW I BECAME A COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGIST

As is true of many of my cognitively oriented colleagues, I came to psychology by way of the physical sciences. In high school, I was fascinated by physics. I was first hooked on the subject when I happened to read a brief history of atomic physics. The important thing, I think, was that the topic was presented not as a body of facts, but as a narrative about real people asking hard questions about nature and then struggling, sometimes against adversity, to answer them. Intrigued, I read biographies of Madame Curie, Galileo, Copernicus, and other scientists and began serious study of college physics texts. I had no doubt that my future lay in physics because I was having such a wonderful time building spectroscopes and vacuum pumps in my cellar laboratory.

Everything about physics was magical to me. I expected to love physics even more in college, but a peculiar thing happened. It soon became clear to me that the professors at Harvard whom I so admired and whom I wanted to model myself after had no interest in involving undergraduates in research or even in talking to them very much. They were too involved in earning their Nobel prizes. I didn’t understand until years later why my interest in physics faded and why I instead became fascinated with psychology. I’m sure that it had nothing to do with the subject matter. Rather, I’m convinced it was because I found psychology professors who were willing to let me get involved in doing psychology. I knew I had found a home when my professors let me have my own rat lab. Later reflection on these events that changed me from a physicist into a psychologist made me acutely aware of the important impact teachers can have on their students’ lives simply by paying attention to them.

Harvard psychology at the time was dominated by Skinner and his radical behaviorism. I bought into it enthusiastically. I was happy to work with pigeons and rats because I accepted the behaviorist dictum that psychology is best pursued “bottom up.” Behaviorists believed that you have to understand the simple things first: conditioning in rats and pigeons before language and learning in humans. Basic research questions were strongly favored over applied ones. They believed that to be “scientific” you could deal only in observables. Observables included stimuli—the palpable environment of the animal, and their responses—what the animal could be seen to do. Observables did not include thoughts, images, memories, or any other experiences that could not be confirmed by an outside observer. And they definitely did not include models of what was going on inside. The behaviorists were certainly an interesting group and they had a very definite set of attitudes. I accepted all of these attitudes as truth and criticized Skinner’s enemies, or as I saw it, “our enemies,” for their fuzzy-headedness, for their mentalism, for their failure to define their concepts operationally; in short, for their failure to be doctrinaire behaviorists. This “we know the one real truth” attitude that I reveled in at the time may be great for promoting in-group solidarity and enthusiasm, but, as I discovered later, it not only narrows the perspective of individual researchers “within the faith,” but may also act to disadvantage others peacefully pursuing other approaches.

I carried my behaviorist enthusiasm with me when I went to graduate school at MIT, where I studied with George Miller and was able to take courses with Jerome Bruner and anthropologist John Whiting. And I carried that enthusiasm through to my thesis, a study of the motivation (read persistence) of preschool children when playing games. I started my thesis believing that I could account for children’s motivation for play in terms of Skinner’s schedules of reinforcement. I designed games in which young children would be rewarded by viewing pictures, intended to reinforce them, according to various Skinnerian schedules.

In one way, my results were consistent with the Skinnerian point of view. The children’s interest in my games was related to the schedules of reinforcement, roughly as I had predicted. In another way, though, my results were radically at odds with the Skinnerian point of view. The children were not treating the reinforcements, the pictures, in the way I expected. They weren’t attending to them in the way that rats or pigeons in a Skinner box would snap up morsels of food. Actually, they hardly gave my pictures a glance. But they did show a lot of interest in discovering the rules of the game. What I found was that the children weren’t being conditioned; they were enjoying the cognitive activity of solving problems.

My experience with the nursery school children made it clear to me that there were some very interesting phenomena that fell outside of the behaviorist worldview. I began to look for a new, more inclusive psychology. This was 1955. 1 didn’t have long to wait. The events that led to the birth of cognitive psychology were already under way.

One of these events was the publication of Chomsky’s (1959) devastating critique of verbal behavior, Skinner’s (1957) book about language. Skinner had attempted to extend his conditioning studies of rats and pigeons to human language and had failed disastrously. I realized that perhaps the behaviorists’ bottom-up approach wasn’t such a good idea after all. Another event was the publication of George Miller’s (1956) “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” This precedent-setting article offered the first important cognitive model. The model was cognitive in that it explained memory in terms of unobserved mental structures and processes (a sort of mentalism the Skinnerians completely rejected). The model was important because the limitations of short-term memory that Miller described constitute a bottleneck through which many human thought processes must pass.

The event with the most far-reaching effect, though, was Newell and Simon’s powerful computer metaphor for thought. The metaphor was made concrete in their programs that carried out activities usually believed to require human intelligence, such as proving mathematical theorems (Newell & Simon, 1956) and solving problems (Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1959). Oddly, the computer metaphor had the effect of encouraging psychologists to study human thought. The behaviorists believed that it was unscientific to talk about internal thought processes because they were not directly observable. Seeing that computer scientists discussed the internal information processes of their machines in respectable scientific ways, however, gave psychologists courage to disregard behaviorist strictures and consider the same kinds of process models for the descriptions for human thought.

THE EFFECT OF THE PARADIGM SHIFT

With the paradigm shift from behaviorism to cognitive psychology, important things changed for researchers. First, new areas for research were opened up. Researchers could now explore topics such as memory, planning, problem solving, imagery, and creativity—explorations that the behaviorists would certainly have discouraged. Second, two powerful new research tools became available: cognitive process models and protocol analysis. Cognitive process models allowed researchers to theorize about the internal mechanisms that the behaviorists refused to consider and to think through the implications of these mechanisms for what people did. Such models have been widely used by psychologists for understanding the nature of memory, problem solving, decision making, and other complex human activities. Protocol analysis is a technique in which a person is asked to think aloud, that is, say what is on the “top of their mind” while performing a task. What the person says is used as one set of cues to identify the processes underlying his or her task performance. Protocol analysis has been used in studying how people perform a wide variety of complex tasks such as playing chess, theorem proving, and writing.

The paradigm shift to cognition clearly shaped my later career as a writing researcher. It allowed the use of protocol analysis with which my colleagues and I identified the major cognitive processes people use to write. It allowed us to postulate internal processes such as planning, translation, and evaluation and to represent the relations among these processes in cognitive process models. But, while essential, these features of cognitive psychology were by no means the only tools that I gained from my training in psychology. The paradigm shift changed a lot about psychology, but it didn’t change everything. Over a century and a quarter, psychology has developed a rhetorical tradition—an accumulation of methods and standards for making convincing arguments based on data. I call it rhetorical because it is centrally concerned with persuasion and the construction of arguments. It is the set of strategies that guides psychologists when they try to convince an audience of peers that their claims are plausible.

The rhetorical tradition is a work in progress. Each paradigm has made contributions to the tradition, and these additions were passed on to the next. To become professionals in the field, students must become fluent in this tradition. They must learn to design studies, to use control groups, randomization, and counterbalancing, and to be concerned with the reliability of measurement. They must learn how and when to use a variety of statistical methods—the rhetorical tools par excellence in empirical research. And they must develop a heightened awareness of “lurking variables” (of which there are many) that may fool one into making inappropriate inferences from data. Teachers sometimes use puzzles, such as the following, to illustrate the importance of lurking variables:

Teacher: Did you know that there is a strong correlation between writing ability and foot size?

Student: Really, how could that be?

Teacher: Well, very small children tend to have small feet and they also don’t write very well.

Students are expected to be able to look at a result reported in an article, consider the myriad lurking variables that might have caused that result, and judge whether or not the author provided appropriate controls for these variables. Of course they are expected to exercise the same critical standards when they design their own studies. Researchers who do not meet the standard—by failing to recognize lurking variables, by omitting needed control groups, or by using inappropriate statistical methods—are criticized or, more to the point, their arguments are rejected as unconvincing. This tradition, in addition to the cognitive paradigm shift, has been invaluable to researchers in designing and carrying out persuasive studies, whether on writing or on other topics.

HOW I BECAME A WRITING RESEARCHER

Since I already had a satisfying career studying decision making and problem solving, you may be wondering what led me to change my research direction and take up the study of writing. In retrospect, it seems to me that writing was and is an excellent topic for cognitive researchers. First, it is a generative language activity. For this reason, it offers more interesting challenges and possibilities than does reading, which is a receptive language activity. Reading is certainly an important topic and it is easier to study than writing, but, in the long run, I believe that the study of writing will yield more important insight into the human psyche. Second, writing is a social activity that has the goal of influencing other humans. Thus, it is a kind of crossover study that could and should be jointly explored by cognitive and social psychologists as well as cultural researchers. Finally, it is a socially important developmental activity. We expend major resources to teach students to write from first grade to graduate school. Understanding how to do that well is important. To me, these are compelling reasons why writing should be a very attractive topic for psychologists. But so far, it has attracted relatively little attention within mainstream psychology. For myself, I must admit, these reasons were not the ones that led me to take up writing research. Rather, my reasons for taking up writing research were more or less accidental. There were two major reasons.

The first was my work with Herbert Simon. Newell and Simon had created General Problem Solver (GPS), a computer program that could solve a variety of problems such as Tower of Hanoi and Hobbits and Orcs. When people solve problems, they typically have two tasks. The first is figuring out the real nature of the problem—what really needs to be done, what are the means for doing it, and what information is or is not relevant. Then, when they have answered these questions, that is, when they have represented the problem clearly to themselves, they can try to solve it. GPS could take a well-represented problem and solve it but, unlike humans, it could not form that representation. Simon recognized that this was an important link that was missing in our understanding of human problem solving and initiated a project to fill in the gap.

I was lucky enough to work with Simon on this project. The work produced two running programs that are, in effect, very concrete theories about how humans form representations. Both programs took descriptions of problems written in English as their inputs. One of the programs (Hayes, Waterman, & Robinson, 1977) separated information in a written problem that was relevant for solving the problem from information that was not. The other (Hayes & Simon, 1975; Simon & Hayes, 1976) used the relevant information in the problem to form a problem representation that could be used by GPS to solve the problem. The importance of this work for my career in writing was that it was the occasion for me to use the tools of cognitive psychology, cognitive modeling, and protocol analysis for understanding human language use.

It was at this point that I met Linda Flower. Linda had been teaching writing strategies to students, so studying cognitive processes made sense to her. We decided that it would be interesting to apply cognitive methods—protocol analysis and cognitive modeling—to the analysis of writing. This decision led directly to the development of our first writing model (Hayes & Flower, 1980). Very supportive administrators and faculty members fostered a positive environment for writing research at Carnegie Mellon University. Lee Gregg and Irwin Steinberg (1980) organized the first symposium on cognitive processes in writing. The English Department, chaired by Richard Young, established a PhD program in rhetoric and document design and over the next 20 years produced 50 PhDs whose theses focused on empirical studies of writing.

Many of the students coming to English graduate programs did not have a background in empirical research. They tended to like language but not numbers. As a result, students were often unfamiliar with statistical methods and the rhetoric of empirical research that I mentioned earlier. To help fill this gap for Carnegie Mellon students, Richard Young and I developed a course tailored to the needs of aspiring writing researchers. Generally, the course worked well. However, we ran into an interesting pedagogi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Editor
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Cognitive Tradition in Writing Research
• Part II The Sociocultural Plus Cognitive Traditions in Writing Research
• Part III The Changing Nature of Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing Across the Life Span: K–12, Adolescence, Higher Education, and the Work World
• Part IV Levels of Language Processes in Writing: Word, Sentence, and Text
• Part V Cognitive Processes in Writing
• Part VI Applications of Technology to Studying and Teaching Writing
• Part VII Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience of Writing
• Visions of the Future of Writing Research: Perspectives from the New Generation of Writing Researchers and Contemporary Leaders
• Author Index
• Subject Index