I'm reading an article today by John Bransford and Kathleen Nitsch -- cognitive scientists -- which details the ways in which subjects in linguistic experiments understand sentences they are asked to process, and how this differs from the ways in which we understand sentences in everyday life.

The article relates strongly to the subject of transfer of knowledge, which I find fascinating. In reading this article I have been able to transfer it to various subjects, which I find satisfying in a metacognitivey kind of way. I feel my brain is pretty limber, probably because of all the creative writing I've done (metaphors are strongly implicated in successful transfer), and pride myself on the fact that I have transferred the implications of this article to two very disparate subjects.

First of all, this article will provide excellent fodder for an ongoing argument I've been having with a colleague about whether there is such thing as universally "good" structure in media (the medium in question generally being video games, though I expect that if I pushed her she'd make the same claim about writing). She seems to be arguing that one can judge how good a game is independent of the subject matter of the game and one's own preferences and social references. I would argue that whether a game (or story, or poem, or TV show, or song) is good or not can only be judged based on the game(etc)'s own terms, and in light of one's own references.

A central thesis of the Bransford and Nitsch article is that the minimal unit for understanding comprehension is not an input (sentence, word, what have you), but rather an input and its context (they call it a "situation.") There are very simple examples to demonstrate this. My advisor, Chuck, demonstrated this point to us last semester by pointing out that you don't know how to pronounce the word "content," or what it means, without context.

Similarly, you can't judge a game to be "good" without understanding its context. You can't judge how "good" a game is if you don't know whether it's aimed at entertaining an eighteen-year-old guy, keeping an elderly woman occupied, or educating a six-year-old girl. Certainly, we could probably begin to say things like "a side-scroller with sloppy controls is worse than a side-scroller with good accuracy," "an RPG with a lot of treadmilling is bad," or "an educational game for toddlers with a menu interface is going to be ineffective." But in these cases we're still considering game play within a context: that of genre. An educational game, for example, might have reasons for treadmilling, while an RPG generally requires the use of menus.

The other way in which I expect to use this article has to do with one of my major preoccupations, namely driving more nails into the coffin of media effects research. The evidence that Bransford and Nitsch call on to demonstrate the ways in which understanding in and out of the experimental context differ is striking.

Witness an example they bring up late in the game. Along with McCarrell, the researchers performed an experiment in which a friend (E) walked into the office of one of their colleagues (C) and said, "Bill has a red car":

He [the colleague] looked very surprised, paused for about three seconds, and finally exclaimed "What the hell are you talking about?" After a hasty debriefing session C laughed and told E what had gone on in his head. First, C thought that E was talking about a person named Bill that C knew. Then C realized E could not in all probability know that person; and besides, Bill would never buy a red car. Then C thought that E may have mixed up the name and really meant to say J (a mutual friend of C and E). The [sic] C knew that J had ordered a new car, but he was surprised that it was red and that it had arrived so soon. The [sic?!] C also entertained a few additional hypotheses -- all within about three seconds of time. After that he gave up, thereupon uttering "What the hell are you talking about?"

The authors go on to note that "subjects in [an] experimental situation seemed perfectly comfortable with their shallow understanding of the Bill sentence. The information they received was sufficient given their cognitive-perceptual situation at the time."

What can this tell us about a research tradition whose roots lie in experiments where children watch violent television in a lab, and are then put in situations which suggest the violence they just saw? I am thinking particularly of Bandura's classic Bobo doll experiment, here. Are children more likely to view violence superficially in a lab setting? How does that change how they react? What does the lab setting itself tell them about how they should interpret violent content? How much more nuanced a picture might we get by speaking with television viewers outside of the experimental context before we bring them into the lab, perhaps building subsequent experimental designs on what we learned? Posted by Gus at January 29, 2005 02:54 PM | TrackBack