* David E. Melnikoff and John A. Bargh, ‘The Mythical Number Two’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22 (2018), 280-93.

Around this time of the year, I usually think ‘I need to have fewer things on my things-to-do list!’, and pause the blog for a while. I then restart when I have read enough interesting articles that the inspiration starts to overflow. A month or so? Maybe two?
      Next week I will be attending the ‘Cognitive Futures in the Humanities’ conference in Kent. I’ll be on ‘we’ business (still rolling on this track). The programme can be found hereabouts. I am sure this will mean I pick up lots of good ideas and reading suggestions. And of course I’ll be catching up on several months of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

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Before signing off, I will say a brief something about the Melnikoff and Bargh essay cited above. There’s a link here with the topic of my previous, brief post. There the worry from the psychologists was that their terminology overlapped too much with everyday usage. Here the worry is also about simplification and popularisation, in the form of ‘two types of psychological processes: one that is intentional, controllable, conscious, and inefficient, and another that is unintentional, uncontrollable, unconscious, and efficient’.
      The argument is that the ‘two systems’ approach lacks empirical support; it’s a ‘convenient and seductive’ approach’, they say. One target, for example, is a dual-system theory of memory. They cite by Shanks and Berry that doubts the distinction between implicit and explicit memory that was at the heart of about half of my book Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (2016). (Don’t worry: I am sure I hedged my bets about the absolute final rectitude of the science I was citing there; I usually do. It’s a gift and a curse.) Another target is the ‘fast and slow thinking’ described by Daniel Kahneman. The big worry is that two-systems approaches are taken as definitive by organisations outside psychology (‘like the World Bank and Institute of Medicine’) and turned into practical policies.
Here’s their key analogy, which I found both helpful and not helpful:

We say that there are two types of cars, convertibles and hard-tops. No debate there. But now we say: there are two types of cars, automatic and manual transmission. Yes, those are certainly two different types of cars. And still further: there are two types of cars, gasoline and electric motors. Or: foreign and domestic. The point is that all of these are different types of cars. But we all know that there are not just two types of cars overall: convertibles that all have manual transmission, gasoline engines, and are manufactured overseas; and hardtops that all have automatic transmission, electric engines, and are made in our own country. All around us we see counterexamples, automobiles that are some other combination of these basic features.

I suppose, yes, that this gets across that when this two-systems model draws in different qualities of cognition to divide whole minds into two types, there are risks involved. However, in cars at least, the localised binaries can tell us things. There are hybrid cars of course, and being electric or not doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a car is environmentally excellent. But still there are times and ways that discerning this kind from that kind can enable some insights. That’s probably true of minds too; but as on previous occasions I’m thinking in quite a literary-critical way here, welcoming dynamic, provisional tensions that offer a new way of seeing the world — but not things that necessarily aim to converge on a true big picture.

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I’ll leave you with a song. Not really day-appropriate at the time of posting. But very good, I think. I actually couldn’t see how this collaboration (two of my favourite artists working with a special song) would work well, and didn’t listen to it for a while. But then I did, and it’s an understated treat.

Olivia Goldhill, ‘Psychology will fail if it keeps using ancient words like “attention” and “memory”‘, https://qz.com/1246898/psychology-will-fail-if-it-keeps-using-ancient-words-like-attention-and-memory/
Russ Poldrack, ‘How folksy is psychology? The linguistic history of cognitive ontologies’, http://www.russpoldrack.org/2016/04/how-folksy-is-psychology-linguistic.html

A very quick post, this one, owing to (stop complaining Raphael!) a very busy time at work. I’ve been sitting on these two blog-type salvoes for a while, wondering what I think about them. They’re saying… psychology is using words like memory and attention which are (i) old, and (ii) folky. So the discipline is using the same language it used in its infancy, and it’s using words that are polluted by a set of loose and general associations.
      Well, this is interesting. On the one hand, yes, technical refinement probably should go along with a language that is technical and refined. On the other hand, psychology is often talking about things that regular people recognise in their everyday experience, whereas quantum physics isn’t, and that should perhaps be reflected in its terminology. And I would prefer to read things that are trying to speak to me, as an interested person, than ones that are not. But then again, I have myself in these very virtual pages complained at times about loose use of familiar words (mostly when they are being used in ways that are unnaturally narrow), and worried about the way that some popular psychology books attract the attention of general readers by (perhaps) overstating the real-life relevance of experimental findings.
      I find myself undecided, of course. But also I’m thinking that this debate helps a words-person like me see that psychology is pushed and pulled in interesting disciplinary and interdisciplinary directions.

* Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory, edited by Terence Cave and Deirdre Wilson (Oxford, 2018).
* Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav, and Christopher Y. Olivola, ‘The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22 (2018), 337-49: doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.007

The first of these is a landmark collection made up of essays putting an important theory of communication into conversation with literary criticism. I’m in it so of course I am biased, but I think it includes some outstanding work by people who aren’t me, and I want to make a bit of noise about it. The theory of communication in question is ‘relevance theory’ as formulated by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, the latter being one of the editors. (The other editor is Terence Cave, whose book Thinking With Literature featured in this post by Emily Troscianko.)
      This theory explains communication as a process of inference, based on a recipient establishing the meaning of an utterance with reference to the contexts that make it relevant. It sets itself against ‘code models’ of communication (hinted at in the title of the book) that conceive of the process as a speaker encoding something and a listener decoding it: the importance of contexts, and the resourcefulness of recipients in deducing which of these give an utterance a function, is crucial.
      It seems to be that a lot of literary criticism gets by without an explicit theory of communication, and/or indeed by not thinking of reading (or writing) as a kind of communication. At the very least, it seems profitable to me to bring these things back together, and the essays in the book validate that effort. My contribution is about Robert Herrick’s poem ‘Corinna’s Going A-Maying’, and in it I think about how poems communicate across history, the different timescales they inhabit and invoke, and some of the opportunities and problems of a historicist approach.

Relevance theory is referred to as a ‘cognitive pragmatics’. One reason for this is that it shares an effort-reward structure with many models of cognition. The recipient will search for a context that gives relevance, and once a sufficient threshold is reached, then the meaning of the communication will be inferred. The effort will be no more than is required to release enough relevance — in some scenarios not much relevance will be necessary or hoped for, so the effort will be abandoned sooner. Sometimes we are listening carefully and avidly and will be ready to offer more effort for more reward.
      The effort-reward dynamic comes into focus in the Inzlicht et al. essay cited above. Their argument is that in various ways the usual assumption, that effort will be avoided if possible, does not always apply. Humans sometimes select activities because they require effort, as if the effort involved adds value. More research is needed, they argue, to understand what attracts people to mountain climbing, ultra-marathons, sudoku, DIY, and ‘the surprising popularity (and fundraising success) of charity events that require those raising money to expend substantial effort to reach their goal’.
      They don’t cite the novels of James Joyce or the poetry of J.H. Prynne, but they could have — there are analogous aspects to people’s choices of reading. (The same applies in relation to relevance theory: the number and complexity of the contexts that could release meanings from literary utterances may be formidable, but many find them correspondingly rewarding.) At present there are questions rather than answers, but the attractiveness of difficulty, which may train us to do things, or may make us better people (morally? or just with fitter psychologies?), is a rich topic. More please!

This is the second of two posts gathering a few thoughts about my experience of trying to put together Proper Psychology Experiments in collaboration with brilliant scientist colleagues. The first of these is here. As I explained there, I am merging more than one attempt in this description, and I am keeping things anonymous and probably quite unclear. This is for a reason which is, in fact, the point of this post.
      You see, for a while I thought that the process of the experimental design led to interesting discoveries about the text, and a set of intriguing interdisciplinary thoughts, which could be an end in themselves. However, things looked quite different to my collaborators, people building careers from good and successful experiments. They didn’t fall in love with the intractable problems of turning literature, especially drama, into science, as I did. Instead, they saw unsolved difficulties in defining proper experimental protocols, and little prospect of a reliable and demonstrable experimental result (whatever it showed). It took a while, but I saw the point in the end.
      Designing a theatrical experiment was intoxicating fun. Working with actors to achieve a particular combination of text and gesture, for example, finding out what these skilled professionals were able to do, and not able to do, to fit a necessarily fixed idea about what had to be included in one version, and not included in another. The guinea-pig audiences were very helpful, but gathering them was rather hard. Students always have somewhere to be after classes. The process made me think again about what is important in a text: I got interested in the difficulty of adapting a passage, the things which affect the rehearsal process, the moments where it felt like an experimental effect could be hoped for.
      I gave a talk where I showed some bits of film, explained what was being worked towards, and the talk was a success (I think). I told a story about how one day, in a workshop, we made a stage ghost disappear just by not looking at it. A literary audience bought into the dream of experimental rigour, and recognised the critical questions I was addressing. When I spoke to friends about what we were trying to do, they saw the point, and wanted to hear more. I began to think that, even when a properly rigorous set-up did not transpire, and we didn’t get super-promising results in our first, sketchy efforts at trying things out on an audience, I could still write up an interesting article describing the insights gathered from the process.

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This optimism was squashed by two specific things. One was a grant application where I described a series of of workshops with actors wherein I proposed to test out, in rehearsal, some ideas about how Shakespeare manoeuvres the social cognition of theatre audiences. The funders, as far as I could tell, were nonplussed by an interest in dramatic process which wasn’t heading towards a dramatic outcome. The second was a discussion with one psychologist colleague who was also nonplussed, this time at the thought that I would parade our failures (OK, nobody said that), or rather that I would put my name to something that had never taken a full and final form. This wasn’t hard to understand.
      So in that previous post I described one lesson I learned: that isolating features of a literary text as experimental variables is an interesting thing to do but stores up objections for the future that are hard to argue against. And in this one, the second lesson is that even if an interesting interdisciplinary process might be absorbing and revealing at the time, and even if the kind of failure experienced is a noble and delicious one, you need secure and defensible results if you’re going to go public in a serious way. The journey, I said, the journey! Maybe only in a memoir; it wasn’t really memoir material; I don’t want to write a memoir.