Assignment - Looking for Structure in Recall

One of the major issues that will engage our attention in this course revolves around the question of how our thoughts and ideas are organized or structured. The Empiricist position discussed in chapter 1 of your text suggested that there are three broad principles that serve to structure our ideas. Your text mentions three doctrines of associationism that were suggested as factors that accounted for how our ideas are structured. These were: Contiguity in Time & Space Similarity Contrast      In order to consider this question of how ideas are structured, take 10-15 minutes to try and recall and write down the events that you experienced 3 or 4 days ago (and/or if you were with someone, have them write down the events that they recall). Next, go over the recall and try to identify the ways in which your thoughts are organized. Some hints on how to do this... you will need to identify all the "simple ideas" (one's which would be meaningless if you tried to break them down further...e.g., "brushed my teeth and got dressed" is probably two "simple ideas" and not one....usually, commas, conjunctions, or other linguistic connectives will separate simple ideas or they will appear in different sentences. Now, to identify ideas that are related to each other in your recall, you need to ask yourself, "Why did I output these ideas together?" The answer could be the factors mentioned above or perhaps other factors. See what you find.

An additional way in which to give yourself some feel for how tightly your thoughts were organized is to ask yourself whether you could have organized them differently and still created something that read coherently.

Another way is do a recall task for some static scene...for example, your room or the house you grew up in. Are there different principles of organization or are they pretty much the same? Another thought experiment to do is to think of novels or movies that you are familiar with and think about the ways in which these materials are organized.

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© Charles F. Schmidt