Origins of Order in Cognitive Activity

Most cognitive scientists have run across The War of the Ghosts, a Native American story used by Bartlett (1932) in his classic studies of remembering. British college students read the story twice and recalled it in detail after 15 minutes, hours, days, months, or years “as opportunity offered” (p. 65). The compelling finding was that participants reinterpreted parts of the story, in addition to omitting details. The mystical story was reorganized and changed in the retelling to fit cultural norms of the British participants. In other words, errors in retelling the story were neither random nor arbitrary but fit together within a larger created narrative. The memory errors illustrate the ordinary constructive performance of cognition and the creation of orderly and sensible thought. Despite perpetually moving eyes, swaying body, and ambiguous stimuli, people perceive coherent and orderly objects. Despite the lack of explicit links between events, higher-order cognition fits thought and behavior within larger coherent narratives. However, the origin of such order remains a mystery. What is the basis of orderly thought, memory, speech, and other cognitive abilities?

The origin of order in cognition is the topic of this chapter. We begin with a discussion of how order is explained within a traditional approach of information processing. Taking the shortcomings of this account seriously, we then turn to other disciplines – those that have framed the question of order more successfully.