Structural Cognition

60 skills to increase the structural cognition





Some Ambiguities in the Role of Structure in Cognitive High Performance
Is it the structure itself that propels cognitive performance higher or is it the process of erecting the structure or is it some subtle as yet unseen side-effect of building the structure. For
example, in comprehending prose, long term recall is boosted by prose passages that require deep processing of macro-structure topic levels (Kintsch, ; Kintsch and van Dijk, ). Prose
written so clearly that such deep processing is not required is recalled less well and long than passages expressed somewhat muddily, requiring reader decoding work and mental effort to
“read”(Kintsch, ). Good structure may not be easy structure but structure erected with difficulty, side-effects of that difficulty propelling cognitive performance higher. Since you get no
mental or action structure without mental process building it, you do not get one without the other. It is experimentally challenging to disentangle these two, given the plural size scales
at which they affect each other in and outside the mind. If, in the review later in this paper, we find structure appearing in high performer transcripts as a core part of how they achieve
higher than average cognitive performance, we have to consider both that structure and the process that erects and uses it as a trio till later research teases them apart. Another ambiguity
in the role of structure in cognitive high performance comes from the habit of researching how things are rather than how things might be--the bias in research towards passive studying
of how things now are, even when things now are not to great. There is abundant evidence that human cognition--reading, writing, communicating, and like functions--as done by “the
average person” and even as done by “the average ‘above-average’ person”, is performed at low levels of both performance and quality compared to peak performances achieved and sustained
by the top 1% of individuals in any field of human endeavor. For eons such exceptionally high performing people were written off as geniuses and monstrosities, of little to teach
Page 2; Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered
ordinary people trying to improve themselves. However, expert systems researchers at the end of the 20th century, found ways to obtain inside-the-mind protocols of such top 1% performers
and ways to use those protocols to train ordinary people to match or surpass the high perfomer performances. The role of structure in high performance can split into two meanings--
its role in high performances as presently done by people naturally and its role in new higher performances done by people artificially enhanced, trained, stimulated, entooled, or
habituated in some ways. An example is the elimination of all sorts of text comprehnsion research in the 1990s when PDP (parallel distributed processing) models of neural net based
minds showed all the symbol-processing models then competing to be “the most right” (constituting most of cognitive science, which was based on seeing minds as like computers) could
simultaneously be done by neural nets of the Rumelhart/McClelland sort. That is, causal logic, theory-hypothesis, co-variation, and other cognitive models all were right (and wrong)
because all simultaneously got executed in typical neural net models, with none of them having priority over the others. It may be that the role of structure in cognitive high performance
in natural people depending only on their born-with parallel distributed neural net brain system differs from the role of structure in cognitive higher performances of un-natural people
entooled or trained beyond that born-with basis of functioning. This article explores both of these to some extent, but ends up more interested in the latter than the former. Where builtin
brain structure supports poor cognitive performance and quality, and consciously invented and learned other structures result in better performance and quality, the “role of structure”
in cognitive high performance becomes the role of specially, consciously, invented structures that go beyond structures natural to brains as born.
The four roles of structure in cognitive high performance (found in the 60 cognitive domains that this paper later reviews) are as follows. People read structure in situations or they miss/
ignore it. People regularize structure in their minds or else they omit or forget to apply parts of it. People fuse and extend idea structures, performing mental operations on entire structures
rather than on single ideas only. People choose how to deliver a new idea structure they have imagined and produced, often adding mystery, drama, or false starts to optimize attention
and later recall of audiences they mentally perform before. One ambiguity is whether all or only some of these employed suffice to move any particular cognitive function to high
performance levels. It becomes difficult to allocate credit among the four roles, and very difficult to devise experiments with proper controls to disambiguate contributions from the various
roles. This paper begs this question, frankly, leaving resolution of this ambiguity to later work.
Philosophers of the mind argue, have done so for centuries, that either structure is out there in the world (of texts, words of others, speech) or there is no structure out there at all, all structure
being projected from limitations or machineries inside our minds (Fodor, ). This is a philosophical ambiguity and since philosophers of mind have failed over centuries to resolve it,
and I am not a philosopher of mind, I refuse in this paper to attempt to resolve it. However, there is genuine ambiguity about the extent to which structures among ideas are “out there”
versus “mere projections from within”.
The very idea of idea structure is ambiguous, when one looks carefully at it. If any relationship between two ideas however slight constitutes “idea structure” the idea is perhaps so broad
that it becomes meaningless. Yet any attempt to reign in scope of the term “idea structure” runs severe risks, given how utterly variegated human types of thought are (). Someone is
surely going to quickly bring up precisely a type of thought violating that reigning in of scope yet clearly suggesting “idea structure”. Is one idea recalling one or more others structure?
Is one idea suggesting one or more others structure? Is a set of ideas organized into a hierarchy of categories structure? We readily think the latter is structure while some of us doubt one
or the other or both of the former two are. In the 60 domains of cognitive functioning dealt with in this paper, we find lists, mappings between lists, topic hierarchies, causal paths, that
is, rather unambiguous structures.
For another ambiguity think of tennis players at Wimbledon thinking how they should address the next ball that comes their way. Research has found that mere thinking of what to do
can reduce sports performance (). Techniques to ward off such thought are now taught to world class sports competitors of all sorts. Opponents of a player try to deliberately break concentration
and rhythm, pulling the player out of unthinking automatic responding, so as to reduce performance. Players are taught techniques for doing this to opponents. Skilled cognitive
performance is perhaps just as disturbed by overt conscious thinking one might suppose. On the other hand, one might suppose just as well that many kinds of skilled cognitive
performance occur only because overt conscious thinking is employed during them. A manager making a decision who consults a list of 50 alternatives he made for similar prior decisions
is more likely to spot patterns, risks, opportunities than a manager relying on a smaller list his mind automatically produces without use of such mind extensions as personal notes,
files, friends to consult and the like. Is covert, unconsciously tapped structure just as enabling of high cognitive performance as overt, consciously tapped structure? For the 60 domains
of cognitive functioning examined in this paper, conscious structuring, via rehearsal, gets automated into unconscious automatic use.
Finally there is the ambiguity of what structuring of ideas works well and what structuring works badly for particular cognitive functions a person wants to perform, in addition does a
structuring that works well for Ms. A not work well for Ms. B. This is the topology of thought question--what structurings (and tools that support such) propel particular cognitive functions
in particular persons to high performance levels compared to others (). This question has not been explored professionally and this paper, therefore, can only start by suggesting
(suggestion taken from a review of 177 transcripts of 77 high performers in 42 domains) some structures for some cognitive functions that work and by providing arguments for why lots
of other thinkable structurings of ideas are likely to later be found not to help as much as one might think.