Raymond Shaw, Merrimack College
Associate Professor
North Andover, Massachusetts
shawr@merrimack.edu
Office:
(978) 837-3507
Expert In
Bio/Research
My scholarly interests are really about one thing: What is the impact of context in cognitive processing? Having written that, I’m reminded of an approach one of my many mentors took in writing about a complicated topic: I need to explain three terms in that question: Cognitive Processing, Contex...
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Bio/Research
My scholarly interests are really about one thing: What is the impact of context in cognitive processing? Having written that, I’m reminded of an approach one of my many mentors took in writing about a complicated topic: I need to explain three terms in that question: Cognitive Processing, Context, and Impact.
Cognitive processing… My perspective on mental life is that it is best understood in the tradition in psychology known as Information Processing. The basic idea in Information Processing is that we are surrounded by information — that the things we can see and hear, everything we experience is information that we can work with. Mental activity can be described as being like those things we do at a desk. We put some things on the desktop and work with it, and some things we might put in the drawers of the desk, or on shelves near the desk, or (if you’ve seen my office), on the floor. Some things go in the wastepaper basket, too. When we work with the information at our desk, we examine it, change it, and create new products. We write things down, and create lasting records of our work. We might also take something off the shelf and change it, or leave it as is…
I am interested in certain aspects of that processing, and my research over the years has addressed selective attention (deciding what to process), working memory (the active processing), and various aspects of remembering, including remembering our experiences and remembering (learning and knowing) what things mean.
Context… Context is a difficult concept, and psychologists aren’t very good at disentangling that formally. So I won’t bother to define it formally. Instead, I’ll define it by examples:
Aging changes us, and our aging bodies (and minds) are therefore a changing context for cognitive processing.
Information can be presented to us clearly or not so clearly, and the form that information takes is a context in which we process it.
Words are a context for other words.
What we know is a kind of context in which we perceive, learn, and remember.
Our expectations, based on experience, form a context for remembering.
Theoretically, I have referred to context as “environmental support”, but I’m not sure that term captures what I mean entirely, because referring to our past experiences and knowledge as “environment” is a bit sketchy.
Impact… How do we know whether something in our cognitive context is having an impact on processing? By exploring variables in research, and so one of the important aspects of my scholarly work is methodology. Much of my work is directly or indirectly about the research methods used to explore the impact of context. My interest in methodology is a result of one of my intellectual strengths: I have always just had a knack for research methodology and my mind just seems to work that way. Why do I mention this? It’s a context!
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Cognitive processing… My perspective on mental life is that it is best understood in the tradition in psychology known as Information Processing. The basic idea in Information Processing is that we are surrounded by information — that the things we can see and hear, everything we experience is information that we can work with. Mental activity can be described as being like those things we do at a desk. We put some things on the desktop and work with it, and some things we might put in the drawers of the desk, or on shelves near the desk, or (if you’ve seen my office), on the floor. Some things go in the wastepaper basket, too. When we work with the information at our desk, we examine it, change it, and create new products. We write things down, and create lasting records of our work. We might also take something off the shelf and change it, or leave it as is…
I am interested in certain aspects of that processing, and my research over the years has addressed selective attention (deciding what to process), working memory (the active processing), and various aspects of remembering, including remembering our experiences and remembering (learning and knowing) what things mean.
Context… Context is a difficult concept, and psychologists aren’t very good at disentangling that formally. So I won’t bother to define it formally. Instead, I’ll define it by examples:
Aging changes us, and our aging bodies (and minds) are therefore a changing context for cognitive processing.
Information can be presented to us clearly or not so clearly, and the form that information takes is a context in which we process it.
Words are a context for other words.
What we know is a kind of context in which we perceive, learn, and remember.
Our expectations, based on experience, form a context for remembering.
Theoretically, I have referred to context as “environmental support”, but I’m not sure that term captures what I mean entirely, because referring to our past experiences and knowledge as “environment” is a bit sketchy.
Impact… How do we know whether something in our cognitive context is having an impact on processing? By exploring variables in research, and so one of the important aspects of my scholarly work is methodology. Much of my work is directly or indirectly about the research methods used to explore the impact of context. My interest in methodology is a result of one of my intellectual strengths: I have always just had a knack for research methodology and my mind just seems to work that way. Why do I mention this? It’s a context!
Click to Shrink <<