Automatic and Controlled Processing in Reasoning Development

Automatic/Controlled Processing and Development

I have characterized associative inference as a reflexive and rule-based inference as a deliberate form of symbol manipulation. The deliberate quality of rule-based reasoning suggests that it is accomplished through goal-oriented, “optional” strategies (Posner & Snyder, 1975). These characterizations suggest a parallel, on one hand, between associative and rule-based reasoning and, on the other hand, between automatic and controlled processing (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). Historically, the automatic/controlled distinction has been applied to perceptual–motor tasks, like visual search, and not to reasoning, but it may turn out to subsume the associative/rule distinction.

Associative processes may be shown to satisfy the two criteria laid out for automatic processes (Shiffrin, Dumais, & Schneider, 1981): “1: Any process that does not use general, nonspecific processing resources and does not decrease the general, nonspecific processing capacity available for other processes. . . . 2: Any process that demands resources in response to external stimulus inputs, regardless of participants’ attempts to ignore the distraction” (pp. 227–228). I argued earlier that associative processes satisfy the second criterion. No evidence I know of speaks directly to the first, although the correction phenomena in social judgment described earlier are suggestive. The prediction is that cognitive load should place a greater burden on rule-based than associative processes. Tasks that have a large rule-based component, like theorem-proving, should be more adversely affected by a secondary conceptual task than tasks that are mostly associative, like similarity judgment.

Theoretical discussions of the automatic/controlled distinction have focused on learning, in particular the nature of the transformation of controlled processes into automatic ones, analogous to the transformation of rule-based processes into associative ones. The existence of such transformations follows from a modification of an argument made by Vygotsky (1934/1987): The rule-based system must developmentally precede the associative system because an organism with only an associative system would not have the resources to develop analytic thinking skills. Unstructured associative devices are unlikely to find descriptions of their environment that obey rule-based principles like productivity and systematicity. But an organism that can analyze its environment by generating useful and descriptive rules can internalize those rules by using them to nominate features to be associated.

Most associationists take this position. Hinton (1990) states that rational inferences become intuitive over time: “people seem to be capable of taking frequently repeated sequences and eliminating the sequential steps so that an inference that was once rational becomes intuitive” (p. 51). Rumelhart (1989) claims that we develop formal skills like mathematics by internalizing the symbolic manipulations that we learn to do externally. We start doing algebra by manipulating marks that we put on blackboards and paper, but eventually we can do simple manipulations in our heads. The claim is that people first figure the world out deliberately and sequentially and only with time and practice does the knowledge become integrated into our associative network. The idea is not that we are born with a fully functioning system of abstract comprehension, only that we try to analyze the world from the beginning (Carey, 1985).

However, the developmental story is not that simple; effects between reasoning systems are not unidirectional. Evidence also suggests that people rely on associative processes when they do not have knowledge of or access to rule-based ones (Quine, 1977, said that we fall back on our “animal sense of similarity” when a lay theory is not available). In summary, associative and rule-based reasoning are interwoven in development just as they are in task performance. Some rule-based reasoning is needed to know what features to begin with in domains that humans are neither phylogenetically nor ontogenetically adapted to, but associative reasoning predominates when rules that might prove more definitive or certain are inaccessible.