(This is my Chapter 1 ELOG for CS3790: Cognitive Science )
Dual-coding Theory [wikipedia]
When we first talked about dual-coding theory in class, it intrigued me. I began to look at how I use my brain on a day to day basis and tried to see how well dual-coding applies to my own mental processes.
The basic idea is that we process mentally on two distinct channels – visual and verbal. When our brain must process information, the information comes generally in two forms – analog and digital. Analog information is basically that which is present in the physical world (buildings we see, faces, cars, etc). Digital information is that which is represented symbolically (words, feelings, math). Analog information tends to be better processed visually, while the digital information tends to work with the verbal side of things.
Often we can come up with a digital representation of an analog thought, but it loses a lot of the detail. Turning the time of a mechanical clock into the time 3:32 has the same general meaning, but we don’t know what color or size the clock was. At the same time, a symbolic, digital representation may require many images, or even be impossible to completely capture in an analog fashion.
A story was brought up in class of a woman who was unable to think of things in a digital way. All symbolic information had to be coded in her brain with analog mental pictures. She could not think of love just as an idea, but needed a picture to associate with love to understand it.
When I try to think about working with that sort of limitation, I find it hard to imagine I would be functional. My day-to-day mental process is almost completely based on speech. When I think, I talk silently to myself, phrasing the thoughts as if I am presenting them to an outsider. The purely symbolic nature of this internal dialogue is only occasionally interrupted by something concrete like visualization.
As we currently understand the brain, memory is not a distinct mental process, but actually quite related to the processing of new experiences. For example, the same parts of the brain are shown to be active when shown a picture as when asked to recall a picture. This implies that the memory is actually a stimulus reconstructed on the fly, and processed in the same way we would process external stimuli.
The Dual-code hypothesis and Baddeley’s model of memory are then somewhat related. Considering my own experiences, they would seem to accurately describe my typical thought processes. Like I said, I usually think in words and not pictures, but the lack of pictures can be explained by the abundance of visual stimuli I am encountered with on a day to day basis. I imagine that my study would be helped by giving myself a chance to process more visual stimuli along with my “inner voice” explaining everything.
