Adaptive Behavior and Environmental Influence
Published:
The central debate between Davachi s and Zack’s stimulus types is not merely about one being more naturalistic than the other. Consider, for instance, the inherent oddity in signing up for a psychological experiment—our study primarily involves participants labeled as ‘WIRED,’ consisting of undergraduate students. Conversely, sequences of pictures with varying colored backgrounds might deviate from our everyday experiences, yet one might argue that, from a process perspective, both types of stimuli are processed by similar biological computations and could generalize to more naturalistic stimuli.
Therefore, the real difference between Davachi and Zack’s paradigms lies in the distinction between content-oriented and process-oriented theories. Historically, psychology has abstracted from content, toggling between content and processes: in attempting to describe universal processes used by humans (for example, in learning), psychology often neglected many aspects of its domain.
A robust information processing theory should describe the time course of behavior, characterizing each new act as a function of the organism’s immediate prior state and its environment. A second strategy involves using differential laws to express the system’s state at each point as a function of its initial state, represented symbolically. A good theory prioritizes discovering and describing systems of mechanisms adequate for performing cognitive tasks. By creating a system capable of performing these tasks, we approximate—considering inherent human limitations like processing rates and immediate memory capacity. If such a system can perform the task, efforts should then focus on refining it to better align with specific human processing data.
Concerns about sufficiency arise not just within the present theory but also throughout its developmental context. Thus, a pressing question in psycholinguistics is whether the mechanisms of classical S-R learning theory are sufficient to account for a child’s learning of language—an idea often deemed inadequate.
The behaviors commonly elicited when people or animals are placed in problem-solving spaces—broadly defined to include activities like reading comprehension, which could be seen as sessions to figure out current events—are termed adaptive or relational. In other words, these behaviors are determined by the situation. This is distinct from the behaviorist argument that all behaviors are elicited by the environment; rather, the behaviors we observe speak not only to the innate abilities of the organism performing these actions but also to the environmental context as well. If there is a behavior demanded by the situation, and if an individual exhibits this behavior, then their response tells us more about the task environment than about the individual themselves. The only inference we can draw is that they are indeed capable of discerning and executing the behavior required by the situation. Placed in a different context, their behavior would likely change.
Using this strategy, economics can sidestep concerns with the psychology of decision-making and instead focus on analyzing the environment of choice—markets, cost functions, and the like. Consider a standard paradigm for an experiment in concept attainment: a sequence of stimuli is presented to a subject, who is asked to classify each as an instance, or non-instance, of a concept (unknown to them). They are informed whether each trial is correct or incorrect. The conditions of the experiment are carefully arranged so that the subject is motivated to perform well.
From these observations, two principles can be derived:
- To the extent that the behavior precisely matches the demands of the situation, it provides insights into the task environment. Observing the behavior of a grandmaster over a chessboard, for example, we learn about the structure of the problem space associated with the game of chess.
- To the extent that the behavior deviates from perfect rationality, we gain information about the psychology of the subject, including the nature of the internal mechanisms limiting their performance.