Automatic vs. controlled processes - Relevant to Visual-Impedance Hypothesis?

As sparked by my browsing of Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland's (1990) "On the Control of Automatic Processes: A Parallel Distributed Processing Account of the Stroop Effect", I'm wondering if the cognitive task analysis at the level of automatic vs controlled processing is relevant to understanding the computational mechanisms putatively involved in the visual impedance effect.

It seems that Knauff and his colleagues argue that visual images can impede reasoning because the generation of visual images in response to highly visualizable premise terms is automatic, and therefore precedes controlled processing of the premises into reasoning-specific representations (e.g., mental models or spatial imagery). As far as I can understand, then, it may be that the visual images are automatically generated by the cognitive system in response to the premises, and these images are inappropriate (or perhaps cannot be used at all) for deductive reasoning computations. Inefficient systems (e.g., we're hoping measured by WM capacity) may erroneously attempt to operate on these representations before "realizing" that the spatial representations are needed in order to make the inference.

Alternatively, it may be that the visual images are not automatically generated but are instead a controlled response to verbal input; by this reasoning, it is possible that we might see disparities between high and low efficiency systems (in our study, high spans vs low spans). However, the best data source would probably be temporally marked neuroimages of participants at each stage of the reasoning process. We might hypothesize that high spans would show little or no activity in the occipital lobes or "what" visual pathway (or at least less activation than low spans) during all stages of the reasoning process, but more interestingly, at the comprehension stage of the reasoning process. In other words, if the visualization is a controlled process, then it's possible that an efficient cognitive system might learn that the visual images are unsuitable for deductive reasoning and thereafter refrain from generating them in response to the verbal input from the premises.

In terms of the dependent measures we are using, we might expect little or no priming effects in the high spans for the categorical decision task, owing to the fact that they might either suppress visual images generated in response to verbal input (if visualization is automatic), OR refrain from generating visual images at all (if visualization is controlled), and therefore no priming effect would be present in their responses to the visual representations of the target words.

How can working memory relate to the role of visual imagery in deductive reasoning?

Current views on working memory:

"flexibly deployable, limited cognitive resources, namely activation, that support both the execution of various symbolic computations and the maintenance of intermediate products generated by these computations" (Shah & Miyake, 1996, p. 4).

"the brain system for holding and manipulating a small amount of information temporarily" (Cowan & Morey, 2006, p. 139)

"a system responsible for the active maintenance, manipulation, and retrieval of task relevant information" (Unsworth & Engle, 2008, p. 616)

"is needed when control is needed to override automatic response tendencies" (Unsworth & Engle, 2007, p. 105)

"fulfills two basic functions, maintenance and retrieval: (a) Maintenance is needed to keep new and novel information in a heightened state of activity, particularly in the presence of internal and external distraction. (b) Because the system is limited by how much information can be maintained at any given time, sometimes retrieval of that information in the presence of irrelevant information is required. To retrieve task relevant information, a discrimination process is needed to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information on the basis of a combination of cues, particularly context cues" (Unsworth & Engle, 2007, p. 105)

A system for temporarily storing and maintaining information in the performance of complex cognitive processing (Baddeley, 2001)

Thus, after Unsworth & Engle (2007), I take the view that individual differences in working memory have a lot to do with the degree to which the system is able to effectively focus on what's relevant, and keep what's irrelevant (at least at the present moment) out of focus while working on the task at hand.

This has implications for understanding the relationship between visual imagery and deductive reasoning. Regardless of the theoretical controversy surrounding computational explanations of deductive reasoning, we can probably agree that the nature of the task requires that the system focus on the logical relations between the entities described in the premises in order to make a deductive inference. For this reason, if Knauff & Johnson-Laird (2002) argue that the deductive reasoning process can be impeded by the phenomenal experience of a visual image, than it follows that working memory should be implicated, and that individual differences in working memory might constrain the direction or degree of this relationship. For instance, individuals with "high working memory capacity" or "high-spans" are, by our understanding of working memory, more effective at maintaining task-relevant processing; therefore, the impeding effect of a visual image should be smaller for high-spans. Conversely, the impeding effect might be larger for "low-spans" due to their diminished capacity to maintain task-relevant processing.

Introduction to Senior Seminar: Rethinking Thinking with Pictures

Despite common introspective reports of visualizing during some kinds of deductive reasoning, and empirical evidence that visualization aids other kinds of thinking (e.g., mental simulation), cognitive scientists still disagree about whether or not visual imagery is functionally related to deductive reasoning or simply a phenomenon that commonly accompanies specialized reasoning processes.

The purpose of the current research project is to investigate the role of visual imagery in deductive reasoning, and whether individual differences in working memory capacity provide constraints on this relationship.

The results of this study will contribute to understanding how humans reason deductively, and how visual imagery and working memory are involved in this process.