Experimental Psychology

 

Psychology is the science of thought and behaviour. Experiments are set up so that the clearest and most significant generalizations are possible from the results. The work aims to be replicable, so that other researchers with different expectations and cultural backgrounds get the same results. Validity is equally important: the work must ensure that it is indeed measuring what it claims to measure. Control is therefore vital for experiments — either in a single-blind manner (subjects do not know the object of the work and so cannot selectively cooperate) or double-blind manner (object is not known to the actual experimenter, so that unconscious clues cannot be passed on). Very elaborate precautions are commonly taken to ensure that the setting is as naturalistic as possible, and that other factors do not unduly influence the result (differences of age, cultural background and family history).

Psychology has very diverse aims, and is commonly divided into overlapping but fairly distinct fields. These include the areas of genetic inheritance, child development, maturation, socialization, intelligence, language development, perception, learning, emotion, concepts of self, psychology in the home and workplace, sexual differentiation, life changes, ageing and bereavement. The list is endless, but our concern here is with language and cognition (perceiving, knowing and conceiving) as they are relevant to literature and literary theory.

Psychoanalysis is not a science — it is worth digressing to note — and not a branch of psychology, though often regarded so in the popular mind. Though now fragmented into many competing schools, psychoanalysis was founded on the attempt by Sigmund Freud to treat behaviours that were thought to arise from illnesses or malfunctionings of the unconscious. Freud developed a talking cure that supposedly allowed him to enter into that part of the patient's mind that is normally hidden, and effect a cure. Lacan applied psychoanalytical approaches to language, with even less satisfactory results.

Experimental psychology, however, shows that syllables (and to some extent phonemes, which tend to overlap and become blurred in rapid speech) are the basic elements of comprehension. Nonetheless, word recognition (bottom up processes) and context (top down processes) are both necessary, and there are indeed two theories to model this. The cohort model argues that the initial sounds or syllables throw up various word possibilities, which are then whittled down to the correct candidate as the context is grasped and more of the word is read or heard. The process is quite complicated, with various knowledge sources — lexical, syntactic and semantic — being accessed by the brain. The TRACE model assumes that processing units at different levels — manner of production, phonemes and words — operate in proportion to their activation and strength of interconnections. Both give reasonable matches to experimental evidence, though refinements are necessary. Words read are recognized partly by sound and partly by appearance.

Though good speakers are usually good writers, the difficulties experienced by brain-damaged patients show that very different processes are involved. Grice's cooperative principle appears to be broadly true, and has been extended by the spreading activation theory of Dell and others. Though writers often say their sentences to themselves before writing them down, perfectly adequate sentences are written by patients who lack this facility. Expert writers differ from non-expert markedly in two respects: they spot more errors and know how to put them right, and they organize their scripts much more effectively.

Psychology is beginning to understand the mechanisms of human thought and behaviour. The more literary language — that which employs metaphor, mental imagery, synaesthesia, etc. — seems not to be simply more picturesque, but to reflect actual modes of brain behaviour.

A greatly extended account, with proper references, can be found on TextEtc.

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Experimental Psychology

 

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