Unconscious inference

Last updated

In perceptual psychology, unconscious inference (German : unbewusster Schluss), also referred to as unconscious conclusion, [1] is a term coined in 1867 by the German physicist and polymath Hermann von Helmholtz to describe an involuntary, pre-rational and reflex-like mechanism which is part of the formation of visual impressions. While precursory notions have been identified in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, and Francis North [2] (especially in connection with auditory perception) as well as in Francis Bacon's Novum Organum , [3] Helmholtz's theory was long ignored or even dismissed by philosophy and psychology. [4] It has since received new attention from modern research, and the work of recent scholars has approached Helmholtz's view.

Contents

Elaborate theoretical frameworks concerning unconscious inference have persisted for a thousand years, originating with Ibn al-Haytham, ca. 1030. These theories have enjoyed widespread acceptance for nearly four centuries, beginning with René Descartes' contributions in 1637. [5] In the third and final volume of his Handbuch der physiologischen Optik [6] (1856–1867, translated as Treatise on Physiological Optics in 1920-1925, available here), Helmholtz discussed the psychological effects of visual perception. His first example is that of the illusion of the Sun rotating around the Earth:

Every evening apparently before our eyes the sun goes down behind the stationary horizon, although we are well aware that the sun is fixed and the horizon moves. [7]

Optical illusions

Two sets of arrows that exhibit the Muller-Lyer illusion. The set on the bottom shows that all the shafts of the arrows are of the same length. Muller-Lyer illusion.svg
Two sets of arrows that exhibit the Müller-Lyer illusion. The set on the bottom shows that all the shafts of the arrows are of the same length.

We are unable to do away with such optical illusions by convincing ourselves rationally that our eyes have played tricks on us: obstinately and unswervingly, the mechanism follows its own rule and thus wields an imperious mastery over the human mind. While optical illusions are the most obvious instances of unconscious inference, people's perceptions of each other are similarly influenced by such unintended, unconscious conclusions. Helmholtz's second example refers to theatrical performance, arguing that the strong emotional effect of a play results mainly from the viewers' inability to doubt the visual impressions generated by unconscious inference:

An actor who cleverly portrays an old man is for us an old man there on the stage, so long as we let the immediate impression sway us, and do not forcibly recall that the programme states that the person moving about there is the young actor with whom we are acquainted. We consider him as being angry or in pain according as he shows us one or the other mode of countenance and demeanour. He arouses fright or sympathy in us [...]; and the deep-seated conviction that all this is only show and play does not hinder our emotions at all, provided the actor does not cease to play his part. On the contrary, a fictitious tale of this sort, which we seem to enter into ourselves, grips and tortures us more than a similar true story would do when we read it in a dry documentary report. [8]

The mere sight of another person is sufficient to produce an emotional attitude without any reasonable basis whatsoever, yet highly resilient against all rational criticism. Obviously, the impression is based on the spontaneous, spurious attribution of traits - a process we can hardly avoid, for the human eye, so to speak, is incapable of doubt and thus cannot ward off the impression.

The formation of visual impressions, Helmholtz realized, is achieved primarily by unconscious judgments, the results of which "can never once be elevated to the plane of conscious judgments" and thus "lack the purifying and scrutinizing work of conscious thinking". [9] In spite of this, the results of unconscious judgments are so impervious to conscious control, so resistant to contradiction that they are "impossible to get rid of" [10] and "the effect of them cannot be overcome". [11] So whatever impressions this unconscious inference process leads to, they strike "our consciousness as a foreign and overpowering force of nature". [12]

The reason, Helmholtz suggested, lies in the way visual sensory impressions are processed neurologically. [13] The higher cortical centres responsible for conscious deliberation are not involved in the formation of visual impressions. However, as the process is spontaneous and automatic, we are unable to account for just how we arrived at our judgments. Through our eyes, we necessarily perceive things as real, for the results of the unconscious conclusions are interpretations which "are urged on our consciousness, so to speak, as if an external power had constrained us, over which our will has no control". [14]

In recognizing these attitude-formation mechanisms underlying the human processing of nonverbal cues, Helmholtz anticipated developments in science by more than a century. As Daniel Gilbert has pointed out, "Helmholtz presaged many current thinkers not only by postulating the existence of such [unconscious inferential] operations, but also by describing their general features". [15] At the same time, he added, it is "probably fair to say that Helmholtz's ideas about the social inference process have exerted no impact whatsoever on social psychology". [16] Indeed, psychologists have largely felt that Helmholtz had fallen prey to an error in reasoning. As Edwin G. Boring summed up the debate, "Since an inference is ostensibly a conscious process and can therefore be neither unconscious nor immediate, [Helmholtz's] view was rejected as self-contradictory". [17] [18] However, several recent authors have since approached Helmholtz's conception under a variety of headings, such as "snap judgments", [19] "nonconscious social information processing", [20] "spontaneous trait inference", [21] "people as flexible interpreters", [22] and "unintended thought". [23] Siegfried Frey has pointed out the revolutionary quality of Helmholtz's proposition that it is from the perceiver, not the actor, whence springs the meaning-attribution process performed when we interpret a nonverbal stimulus:

By failing to distinguish appearance from reality, the psychology of expression merely perpetuated a fallacy deeply ingrained in everyday language: with unswerving belief in our perceptions, we routinely call the other person’s expression what is, in plain truth, our own impression of her or him. [24]

Influences in current computer science and psychology

The Helmholtz machine

Work in computer science has made use of Helmholtz's ideas of unconscious inference by suggesting the cortex contains a generative model of the world. They develop a statistical method for discovering the structure inherent in a set of patterns:

Following Helmholtz, we view the human perceptual system as a statistical inference engine whose function is to infer the probable causes of sensory input. We show that a device of this kind can learn how to perform these inferences without requiring a teacher to label each sensory input vector with its underlying causes. [25]

Free energy principle

The Free energy principle provides an explanation for embodied perception in neuroscience and tries to explain how biological systems maintain order by restricting themselves to a limited number of states or beliefs about hidden states in their environment. A biological system performs active inference in sampling action outcomes to maximise the evidence for its model of the world:

The notion that self-organising biological systems – like a cell or brain – can be understood as minimising variational free energy is based upon Helmholtz’s observations on unconscious inference [26] and subsequent treatments in psychology [27] and machine learning. [25]

Notes

  1. ↑ Unconscious conclusion is the term used by James P. C. Southall in his 1925 English translation of Helmholtz's Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Treatise on Physiological Optics, available here). Today, the concept is more widely referred to as unconscious inference, notably by Edwin G. Boring in his widely received 'History of Experimental Psychology', and Daniel T. Gilbert. Cf. Boring 1950, pp. 309-311.
  2. ↑ Cf. Kassler 2004, pp. 125-126.
  3. ↑ "[B]y far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important" (Bacon 1620, bk. 1, aphorism L, transl.).
  4. ↑ Cf. Boring 1942, p. 289; Gilbert 1989, p. 191.
  5. ↑ Heyer, Dieter; Mausfeld, Rainer, eds. (2002). Perception and the physical world: psychological and philosophical issues in perception. Chichester, West Sussex, UK New York: J. Wiley & Sons. p. 135. ISBN   978-0-471-49149-1.
  6. ↑ Helmholtz 1867.
  7. ↑ Helmholtz 1925, p. 28.
  8. ↑ Helmholtz 1925, p. 28.
  9. ↑ Helmholtz 1925, p. 27.
  10. ↑ Helmholtz 1925, p. 28.
  11. ↑ Helmholtz 1925, p. 5.
  12. ↑ Helmholtz 1925, p. 28.
  13. ↑ Edgar, Scott (2015). “The Physiology of the Sense Organs and Early Neo-Kantian Conceptions of Objectivity: Helmholtz, Lange, Liebmann,” in Flavia Padovani, Alan Richardson & Jonathan Y. Tsou (eds.), Objectivity in Science: Approaches to Historical Epistemology. Boston Studies in Philosophy and History of Science. Springer.
  14. ↑ Helmholtz 1925, p. 26.
  15. ↑ Gilbert 1989, p. 189.
  16. ↑ Gilbert 1989, p. 191.
  17. ↑ Boring 1942, p. 289.
  18. ↑ Helmholtz himself had justified the use of the term: "The psychic activities that lead us to infer that there in front of us at a certain place there is a certain object of a certain character, are generally not conscious activities, but unconscious ones. In their result they are equivalent to a conclusion [...]. But what seems to differentiate them from a conclusion, in the ordinary sense of that word, is that a conclusion is an act of conscious thought. [...] Still it may be permissible to speak of the psychic acts of ordinary perception as unconscious conclusions, thereby making a distinction of some sort between them and the common so-called conscious conclusions. And while it is true that there has been, and probably always will be, a measure of doubt as to the similarity of the psychic activity in the two cases, there can be no doubt as to the similarity between the results of such unconscious conclusions and those of conscious conclusions" (Helmholtz 1925, p. 4).
  19. ↑ Schneider, Hastorf, & Ellsworth 1979.
  20. ↑ Lewicki 1986.
  21. ↑ Newman & Uleman 1989.
  22. ↑ Newman, Moskowitz, & Uleman 1996.
  23. ↑ Uleman & Bargh 1989.
  24. ↑ Frey 2005, p. 47.
  25. 1 2 Dayan, P., Hinton, G. E., & Neal, R. (1995). The Helmholtz machine. Neural Computation, 7, 889–904.
  26. ↑ Helmholtz, H. (1866/1962). Concerning the perceptions in general. In Treatise on physiological optics (J. Southall, Trans., 3rd ed., Vol. III). New York: Dover.
  27. ↑ Gregory, R. L. (1980). Perceptions as hypotheses. Phil Trans R Soc Lond B., 290, 181–197.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilhelm Wundt</span> German founder of psychology (1832–1920)

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hermann von Helmholtz</span> German physicist and physiologist (1821–1894)

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The Helmholtz Association, the largest German association of research institutions, is named in his honour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Optical illusion</span> Visually perceived images that differ from objective reality

In visual perception, an optical illusion is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions. A classical example for a physical distortion would be the apparent bending of a stick half immersed in water; an example for a physiological paradox is the motion aftereffect. An example for a physiological fiction is an afterimage. Three typical cognitive distortions are the Ponzo, Poggendorff, and Müller-Lyer illusion. Physical illusions are caused by the physical environment, e.g. by the optical properties of water. Physiological illusions arise in the eye or the visual pathway, e.g. from the effects of excessive stimulation of a specific receptor type. Cognitive visual illusions are the result of unconscious inferences and are perhaps those most widely known.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fundamental attribution error</span> Psychological phenomenon

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (FAE) is a cognitive attribution bias in which observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality (e.g., he is late because he's selfish) and underattribute them to the situation or context (e.g., he is late because he got stuck in traffic). Although personality traits and predispositions are considered to be observable facts in psychology, the fundamental attribution error is an error because it misinterprets their effects.

In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently of focal awareness.

Self-knowledge is a term used in psychology to describe the information that an individual draws upon when finding answers to the questions "What am I like?" and "Who am I?".

The adaptive unconscious, first coined by social psychologist Daniel Wegner in 2002, is described as a set of mental processes that is able to affect judgement and decision-making, but is out of reach of the conscious mind. It is thought to be adaptive as it helps to keep the organism alive. Architecturally, the adaptive unconscious is said to be unreachable because it is buried in an unknown part of the brain. This type of thinking evolved earlier than the conscious mind, enabling the mind to transform information and think in ways that enhance an organism's survival. It can be described as a quick sizing up of the world which interprets information and decides how to act very quickly and outside the conscious view. The adaptive unconscious is active in everyday activities such as learning new material, detecting patterns, and filtering information. It is also characterized by being unconscious, unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient without requiring cognitive tools. Lacking the need for cognitive tools does not make the adaptive unconscious any less useful than the conscious mind as the adaptive unconscious allows for processes like memory formation, physical balancing, language, learning, and some emotional and personalities processes that includes judgement, decision making, impression formation, evaluations, and goal pursuing. Despite being useful, the series of processes of the adaptive unconscious will not always result in accurate or correct decisions by the organism. The adaptive unconscious is affected by things like emotional reaction, estimations, and experience and is thus inclined to stereotyping and schema which can lead to inaccuracy in decision making. The adaptive conscious does however help decision making to eliminate cognitive biases such as prejudice because of its lack of cognitive tools.

In psychology, a dual process theory provides an account of how thought can arise in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process and an explicit (controlled), conscious process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes usually take a long amount of time to change with the forming of new habits. Dual process theories can be found in social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychology. It has also been linked with economics via prospect theory and behavioral economics, and increasingly in sociology through cultural analysis.

Gordon Blaine Moskowitz is a social psychologist working in the field of social cognition. He is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Lehigh University. His primary research interests are in examining: 1) social inferences which occur with neither the intention of forming an impression nor the awareness that one has done so ; and 2) the non-conscious nature of motivation and goals, with emphasis on how the goals to be egalitarian and creative are more efficiently pursued when one is not consciously trying to pursue them. This work has been applied to the question of how stereotypes impact medical diagnosis and treatment and contribute to health disparities, as well as to how medical training can implement what is known about controlling stereotyping and prejudice to reduce such bias and minimize health disparities.

Jeffrey Alan Gray was a British research psychologist. He is known for his biopsychological theory of personality. He is also notable for his contributions to the theory of consciousness.

Implicit personality theory describes the specific patterns and biases an individual uses when forming impressions based on a limited amount of initial information about an unfamiliar person. While there are parts of the impression formation process that are context-dependent, individuals also tend to exhibit certain tendencies in forming impressions across a variety of situations. There is not one singular implicit personality theory utilized by all; rather, each individual approaches the task of impression formation in his or her own unique way. However, there are some components of implicit personality theories that are consistent across individuals, or within groups of similar individuals. These components are of particular interest to social psychologists because they have the potential to give insight into what impression one person will form of another.

John A. Bargh is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory. Bargh's work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will. Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words.

Ernst Wilhelm Theodor Trendelenburg was a German physiologist known for his work in physiological optics.

Bayesian approaches to brain function investigate the capacity of the nervous system to operate in situations of uncertainty in a fashion that is close to the optimal prescribed by Bayesian statistics. This term is used in behavioural sciences and neuroscience and studies associated with this term often strive to explain the brain's cognitive abilities based on statistical principles. It is frequently assumed that the nervous system maintains internal probabilistic models that are updated by neural processing of sensory information using methods approximating those of Bayesian probability.

Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision, color vision, scotopic vision, and mesopic vision, using light in the visible spectrum reflected by objects in the environment. This is different from visual acuity, which refers to how clearly a person sees. A person can have problems with visual perceptual processing even if they have 20/20 vision.

The globe effect, also known as rolling ball effect, is an optical illusion which can occur with optical instruments used visually, in particular binoculars or telescopes. If such an instrument is rectilinear, or free of rectilinear distortion, some observers get the impression of an image rolling on a convex surface when the instrument is panned.

Unconscious thought theory (UTT) posits that the unconscious mind is capable of performing tasks outside of one's awareness, and that unconscious thought (UT) is better at solving complex tasks, where many variables are considered, than conscious thought (CT), but is outperformed by conscious thought in tasks with fewer variables. It was proposed by Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren in 2006.

Automatic and controlled processes (ACP) are the two categories of cognitive processing. All cognitive processes fall into one or both of those two categories. The amounts of "processing power", attention, and effort a process requires is the primary factor used to determine whether it's a controlled or an automatic process. An automatic process is capable of occurring without the need for attention, and the awareness of the initiation or operation of the process, and without drawing upon general processing resources or interfering with other concurrent thought processes. Put simply, an automatic process is unintentional, involuntary, effortless, and occurring outside awareness. Controlled processes are defined as a process that is under the flexible, intentional control of the individual, that the individual is consciously aware of, and that are effortful and constrained by the amount of attentional resources available at the moment.

Spontaneous trait inference is the term utilised in social psychology to describe the mechanism that causes individuals to form impressions of people, based on behaviours they witness them exhibiting. The inferences being made are described as being extrapolated from the behaviour, as the link between the inferred trait and the perceived behaviour is not substantiated, only vaguely implied. The inferences that are made are spontaneous and implicitly formed, with the cognitive mechanism acting almost reflexively.

Tanya L. Chartrand is a social psychologist known for her research on consumer behavior and on non-conscious processes influencing emotions, cognition, and behavior. Chartrand is the Roy J. Bostock Marketing Professor and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.