Last year I was asked to give a speech at a dinner for my school's psychology honor society. I just stumbled across it today and figured I would put it out there.
Thank you for inviting me today. It truly is an honor to speak to you on this special day when you join the prestigious group of psychologists who comprise this honor society. I know I speak for the faculty in saying that we are proud of your accomplishments and enjoy having you all in our classes and laboratories. As psychologists, we often ask ourselves questions. And at some point, as human beings, most of us have asked ourselves the biggest question out there: what is the meaning of life. If you attempt to find an answer to this question, I’m sure you will become frustrated fairly quickly, because you may find there are so many smaller questions that have yet to be answered. And without answers to the smaller questions, you can’t even begin to approach the most massive question of all.
So today I want to tell you about a question so seemingly insignificant that you probably have never thought about it before. However, trivial as it might seem, it has taken up a majority of the past 5 years of my life, and I still believe that I might understand perhaps less than 5 percent of the answer. So the question is this: how do we come to understand that objects have size. To answer this question one must first consider the history of how we have conceptualized the process of cognitive development.
A long standing belief in the history of philosophy and psychology is that infants come into the world with few cognitive abilities or skills. This is best captured by the British Empiricist philosopher John Locke’s proposal that the infant mind is a tabula raza, a blank slate. Locke claimed that experience writes all knowledge upon this slate. This perspective led William James to claim that the infant experiences the world as a blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory information. Jean Piaget, the father of developmental psychology, argued that knowledge emerges through interactive processes of assimilation and accommodation between innate reflexes and the physical world. Yet innate reflexes are relatively primitive, and many have found his theory thus far lacking. But recently, developmental psychologists have come to understand that infants are not so clueless as they might appear, and have a remarkable set of innate skills that, along with experience, gradually develop into the mature abilities that all of us Psi Chi members share – and perhaps some of their parents and loved ones as well.
The skill I have examined extensively in my attempt to answer the question of how we understand size is a curious finding that young infants seem to have a primitive ability to automatically encode the size of an object. This finding was a surprise to a lot of people, because the traditional view was that children do not understand the concept of size until about eight years of age when they are able to use rulers to measure things. But what I found was that infants do notice a change in the size of an object, but only when that object is next to another object that serves the functional role of a ruler. They encode the size of the object as a proportion of that second object. When such objects are not available (such as when you have a glowing ball in a dark room) they can not encode size. Yet when you consider the ecological world of infants, there are plenty of objects in their perceptual world that can serve the role of perceptually-available rulers. A parent, for instance, always walks through the door, and the door itself remains the same size over time, so the infant simply encodes the size of the adult relative to the size of the door. So long as these objects do not change size, infants are able to remember and recall how big or small an object happens to be. Only later, when a teacher or parent shows the child how to use a ruler, do they begin to understand the functional role of conventional standard objects such as rulers, and decontextualize the size of objects from their immediately surrounding contexts. Thus, this primitive ability becomes obsolete and replaced with a new understanding of the concept of size.
But these primitive strategies for encoding size never become obsolete enough. Have any of you ever bought a piece of furniture that looked small in the enormous warehouse where you bought it but once in your home it ended up taking up half the living room? This happened because instead of using your mature adult brain and digging out a ruler or tape measure, you used the primitive strategy from your infant brain and encoded the size of the piece of furniture relative to an available context, namely the size of he warehouse itself. The problem is that the warehouse is much larger than your living room, and thus the piece of furniture appeared a heck of a lot smaller. Only when you bring it home and find it is far too large do you begin to regret the fact that you bought it at a going-out of business sale where there is no hope of a refund! But the point is that as adults we can sometimes see this primitive ability to encode size contextually echoes through our lives and affects us as adults.
But I would like to tell you the story of how I came to this knowledge about infant sensitivity to size. Like many of you, I started working in a psychology lab as an undergraduate probably. I designed an infant study in which I presented babies with sticks of various lengths either inside glass containers or alone on a small stage in a visual habituation task. I predicted that the glass containers provided the role of a perceptually available standard. I spent weeks collecting data that consisted of the amount of time infants stared at the different sticks. Finally, in the lab one night at 2:00 AM, I opened SPSS and conducted an ANOVA on the data. I clicked analyze, and the output showed the following, which, if you took my methods and theory class, you will know exactly what this means F(1, 47) = 5.6, p < .01. For those of you who missed class those days, this means that the experiment worked – I found a real result. I sat there, alone, with my coffee, and just stared at the screen in wonder, because I realized that I was the first person on earth to know this fact about the world. I was addicted.
But not every night has been so lucky. In another study, I spent several months collecting data from infants. I was interested in whether infants could rotate an object in working memory to encode its size. It's not important. I entered the data, hit analyze, and out spat a ANOVA with a p value of .78, meaning I had nothing, nada, ziltch. Three months of waiting for parents to bring in their babies on Saturday afternoons, with many of them not showing up, and those that did often crying in the middle of the experiment and thus rendering their data useless. A lot of sweat and elbow grease for nothing.
The next day I went to my advisor, Janellen Huttenlocher, in frustration. I told her that these goddamn babies were not behaving as they were supposed to. I told her that these infants were ruining my theory. I truly believed that I just had a batch of stupid babies.
She looked at me, in consternation and bemusement, and said, “Sean, the world has spoken to you: Listen to it.” And I realized at that moment that this statement is the essence of what we as psychologists do: we listen to what the world has to say. Many times, it had nothing to say. Many times we asked the world the wrong question. Many times the world speaks a language that we can’t even begin to comprehend.
But when the world does speak to us, and we have the knowledge and wisdom to listen, it usually is says something so fascinating that it is worth all the times that you have to throw up your hands and admit that your presumptions were wrong. Psychological science allows us to understand that we often view the world through myopic lenses; that we might think we understand the way things work and have a theory to explain it, but end up, in the end, being totally wrong. And as disappointing as this may be, this fact speaks to the very complexity of both the questions that we as psychologists wrestle with and the answers we come up with. Even questions so simple as how we understand the concept of size have not so simple answers.
So far, we have waded only ankle deep in this sea of psychological knowledge, and the waters seem warm and inviting. But I also know that we will never really swim far enough out there to answer enough of the unanswered smaller questions so that we can finally answer the question of the meaning of life. But I DO believe that I have come to a better understanding of what the meaning of my life is about, and perhaps a bit of what your lives are about, as well. And it is this: To use the tools of psychological science to come to a better understanding of the world around us, the people within it, and the processes that govern our thoughts and actions. And through this understanding, change the world, inspire the people within it, and help each other maximize all the potential in all of our thoughts and actions.
So I applaud all of you for pursuing an education and career in psychology. I applaud your friends and family for putting up with late night studying sessions and for being guinea pigs in your psychological experiments. I applaud you for doing so well in your coursework and research that you are able to join this elite group of psychologists who are members of Psi Chi. And most importantly, I hope all of you continue to enjoy listening to the world throughout the rest of your lives.
Thank you.
