Читать книгу The Research Experience - Ann Sloan Devlin - Страница 12

Humans are limited information processors; what this characteristic means is that people cannot process all incoming information at once. As a consequence, individuals learn to focus on the most important features of an object (or situation). An important consequence of this limitation is that humans are forced to make predictions. Predictions are the essence of research: as humans we make hypotheses (proposed explanations about the relationships of variables we want to test). If you see traffic lined up along an artery where traffic usually flows smoothly, you likely conclude there is some kind of traffic tie-up.

This limited ability to process information has some important effects on how humans organize material (and think about research). To manage the overload of information around us, humans evolved to chunk or categorize information into groupings or clusters. This kind of organization leads us to form overarching categories; there are words that designate those categories, like vegetable or sports or furniture. A term that is often used to describe such mental representations of knowledge is a schema. If you have a schema for something, you understand its gist or essence; a schema serves as a generalized description of the core characteristics of a given role, object, or event. You might have a schema for a role (e.g., father), for an object (e.g., a chair), or for an event (e.g., going to a restaurant). The benefit of having a schema is that it provides a condensed version of the information that is available about an entity in the world and it helps you make predictions.

Schema: Mental representation of a category that can be a role, an object, or an event (e.g., parent, table, or going to the dentist, respectively).

The ability to compartmentalize by categories minimizes the cognitive load and leaves the brain available to respond to incoming information that may have implications for survival (a car speeding toward a pedestrian; a loud noise). That’s the upside. The downside is that such compartmentalization leads to stereotypes and overgeneralizations, which can interfere with thinking objectively about research. Redheads are tempestuous, people who live in Detroit drive American-made cars, New Yorkers like to wear black, and so on. The propensity for categorization may lead humans to minimize the differences across dimensions and to categorize stimuli as similar when, in fact, there may be important differences.