The Ontogenesis of the Gurwitschian Perceptual Structure

The Ontogenesis of the Gurwitschian Perceptual Structure: A Model for its Investigation in Preverbal Infants

by Joe E. Dees

        ABSTRACT

   The experimental methodology of genetic epistemology is discussed. Difficulties in its use to investigate the ontogenesis of perceptual structure arising from the maturation of the sensorimotor stage prior to verbal facility are discussed. Kraft's evidence for a physical substrate for Piaget's developmental stages is reviewed. Gurwitch's theme - thematic field - margin structure is outlined. It is conjectured that Kraft's evidence also supports the ontogenesis of Gurwitsch's structure. The use of semiotics to extend Piaget's methodology to preverbal infants is proposed, and a prior study be Lewis and Brooks-Gunn is outlined as an example of such an extension. Two experiments are proposed to investigate the development of visuospatial and auditory structure in preverbal infants. Possibilities for the use of phenomenology, genetic epistemology and semiotics as aids to the investigations of cognitive science are explored, and the interrelations of the disciplines are discussed.

THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF PIAGETIAN            METHODOLOGY

   A plethora of studies have been conducted on the development of child cognition, with the main influence in the field being the French structuralist Jean Piaget. His work on genetic epistemology and the equilibration of cognitive structures has largely framed the context within which subsequent explorations have been formulated. The reason for this pervasive influence is that the investigative methodology of genetic epistemology is one of observation of verbal and manipulative behavior, and thus has been well received by behavioristically oriented psychologists. This is true in spite of the fact that Piaget himself may fairly be characterized as a cognitivist of the emergent mentalist stripe. In Piagetian-type studies, the evolution of child cognition is inferred from the frequiency and types of mistakes children of diverse ages make during responses to questions and the performance of various tasks.
   If Piaget was correct, however, concrning the order of succession of his developmental stages, the ontogenesis and development of perceptual structures would of necessity be much more difficult to ascertain, since it would occur prior to the development of symbolic verbal facility. Perception, unlike manipulative or communicative action, is not open to direct outside observation. Furthermore, even the verbal child lacks the experience of adult perception, and thus cannot compare his or her own with it in order to report observed differences.
   Ut is highly likely that Piaget was indeed correct. In an important review, R. Harner Kraft (1985) has provided, via the correlations of the work of others, evidence of a physical substrate for Piaget's developmental stages by perusing a number of studies of the cerebra of children who died at various ages. The myelination of different structures and connections within the developing brain at certain critical periods seems to parallel the appearance of new Piagetian cognitive capacities within the child at those periods, and the structures (and their connections) so myelinated are areas of the brain commonly associated with these capacities. Myelination both canalizes and increases the efficiency of axonal impulse transmission. According to Kraft, the visual and primary sensorimotor cortices, as well as the subcortical acoustic fibers from the cochlear nerve to the medial geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, complete their myelinogenetic cycle prior to the major myelination of the corpus callosum and the projections from the medial geniculate nucleus to the temporal lobe cortical analyzer. The intrahemispheric association and supralimbic cortical fibers mature later, and the fibers interconnecting the nonspecific associational cortices later still. At this point the nonferal child is developmentally capable of verbally describing his/her perceptual structures to others, but they will have already completed their developmental cycle.
   Seeing and hearing mature prior to the ability to abstractly say how one sees or hears, and thus the develoment of the child's visuospatiol and auditory structures is verbally indescribable by the child.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF PERCEPTION

   The theme - thematic field - margin structure was proposed by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch (1957). According to Gurwitsch, within every perceptual or conceptual field there is always a theme, or focus of intention, surrounded by a thematic field, or context, which is in turn bounded by a margin, or fringe. Visually, this structure is primarilyspatial; in audition it is mainly temporal, and if our focus is an internally grasped concept, its thematic field consists of other concepts relevant to it. The focus can be narrowed or widened at will with an adjustment of one's scope of attention, but one loses in intensity what one gains in extension. The demarcation between the theme and its field is neither smoothly sloped nor radically discontinuous, and the margin fades into nonawareness at the limits of the structure.
   If this seems both Gestaltist and somewhat Piagetian, it must be remembered that both Piaget and phenomenology were influenced by Gestalt theory. In fact, a perusal of Piaget's development of child cognition from syncretism (combining elements that do not belong together) and juxtaposition (bifurcating elements that do belong together) to correct discrimination and synthesis supports the view that, in cognition at least, Piaget has approximately described the ontogenesis of Gurwitsch's theme - thematic field - margin structure.
   Kraft's data can also be read to indicate the perceptual ontogenesis of Gurwitsch's theme thematic field - margin structure. From primarily unorganized visuo-spatial and auditory fields subserved by relatively isolated and nonspecialized cerebral hemispheres, by the age of two years one might expect such structures to emerge in the visual and auditory systems consequent upon visual, acoustic and sensorimotor myelination. In addition, Kraft notes that the development of specific capacities in a cerebral hemisphere occurs in parallel with the increase of interhemispheric connection and communication, and tends to inhibit the duplication of these functions and abilities within the other hemisphere. Interhemispheric co-operation and interhemispheric specialization seem to mutually reinforce, avoiding redundancy. Would the appearance of such a structure have to follow the myelination of the corpus callosum, or could both hemispheres, the left in audition and the right visually, manifest it prior to efficient interconnection? Or is such a perceptual structure hard-wired? Up until recently, it has been impossible, for the reasons previously stated, to discern.

      THE CONTRIBUTION OF SEMIOTICS

   The growth of the discipline of semiots has furnished investigators with more precise and powerful ways of seeking to answer such questions. Semiotics is the study of signs and sign systems, and is subdivided into syntactics (the study of sigh-sign relations within a sign system), pragmatics (the study of the relationship of signs to their producers), and semantics (the study of the relationship between signs and the referents which they represent). Far broader than the study of language per se, semiotics studies all types of symbolic behavior, and insights garnered in the field have made possible the deveopment of experiments the results of which unambiguously indicate the presence or absence of capacities within preverbal infants. For instance, a study by Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) explored the acquisition of self-awareness in preverbal infants by attempting to elicit behavior symbolic of its presence or absence. Infants were placed in front of mirrors after a spot of rouge was applied to each infant's nose. If the infant ignored the rouge or touched the mirror (as if the image was one of a conspecific, or another infant), self-awareness was judged to be absent. If, however, the infant touched his or her own nose, he or she was deemed to be self-aware. Such nose-touching behavior was never observed in infants younger than fifteen months of age, and rarely prior to eighteen; between the ages of eithteen and twenty months a dramatic increase in self-directed behavior was noted, and at the age of twenty-four months practiaclly all subjects tested touched their noses. This is the same period in which object permanence appears, thus corroborating Piaget's hypothesis that construction of self and reality proceed in parallel from their perceptual interface into internalized self-identity and externalized world-stability (1972, 1976). An experiment of this type would seem to offer the best hope of investigating the development of perceptual structure within the child.

        EXPERIMENTAL RATIONALE

   The disruption of the mother's face-voice relationship has been shown to distress infants four months old, and perhaps as early as one month old (Aronson & Rosenbloom, 1971; Carpenter, 1973; McGurk and Lewis, 1974). This entails that by the age of four months (and possibly earlier), both the mother's face and her voice are known to and recognizeable by the infant, and this fact can be used in studies based upon selective attention.

EXPERIMENT ONE - EXPLORING THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRUCTURAL SOPHISTICATION IN THE VISUAL FIELDS OF PREVERBAL INFANTS

   Infants of various ages are chosen who demonstrate selective attention to pictures of their mothers' faces. They are than presented with increasingly abstract representational renderings of their mothers' faces, nested within arrays of representations, rendered in the same styles, of the faces of adults unfamiliar to them. Some forms of abstraction which readily suggest themselves are color, shape (mirror distortion), and gestalt closure, as well as two or more types of alteration in concert. The percentage of presence of selective attention to the renderings of their mothers' faces is noted for each age group and the data is analyzed for significant statistical differences.

EXPERIMENT TWO - EXPLORING THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRUCTURAL SOPHISTICATION IN THE AUDITORY FIELDS OF PREVERBAL INFANTS

   Infants are chosen who display selective attention to recordings of their mothers' voices. They are than presented with increasingly distorted recordings of their mothers' voices, nested within sequences of strangers' voices distorted in the same manner. Possible forms of distortion include pitch, timbre, inflection, and two or more types of distortion in combination. The percentage of presence of selective attention to the recordings of their mothers' voices is noted for each age group and the data is anlyzed for significant statistical differences.

     COMMENTS UPON PROPOSED EXPERIMENTS

   In both experimental cases, the develoment of perceptual sophistication in the studied modality may be inferred from the level of abstraction and distortion which nevertheless elicits statistically significant selective attention from the preverbal infants. It is hypothecized that older infants will selectively attend to more complexly altered stimuli, and that critical periods akin to the one for self-awareness which Lewis and brooks-Gunn found will be discovered, one for visuospatial stimuli and one for auditory stimuli, where dramatic increases in the infants' recognition (measured via selective attention) of altered or distorted mother-based stimuli will be observed, and that these critical periods will be mappable onto the sequence of cortical myelination noted in Kraft.

PHENOMENOLOGY, GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND SEMIOTICS: AN OVERVIEW AND PROSPECTUS FOR FUTURE SYNTHESIS

   Constructivism has had as its major focus of study the development of the mind/world interrelation. The eminent philosopher Henri Bergson (1903) distinguished two ways in which things may be investigated. One may study them perspectivally and externally, by means of symbols, or nonperspectivally and internally, without symbolic mediation. The first method results in relative knowledge, and the second in absolute knowledge. he goes on to state that the only possible object of study by the second method is the enduring self. I agree with Bergson that there are these two ways, but disagree that only the self may be studied via the second method. Perhaps the world (including other people) can only be studied perspectivally, and one's own mind can only be studied introspectively (although with biofeedback tis, too, is in doubt). Bergson state that the results of such an introspection are inexpressible symbolically, in any event.
   However, I propose that the mind may also be indirectly investigated, by means of an exploration of the structures of the mind/world interrelation, and a deduction of what the discovered parameters of this interrealtion's structures might entail concerning the structure of the mind.The structures of the mind/world interrelation are assumed to be dependent upon the structures of the poles - mind and world - of the system. From this we may infer that the structure of this interrelation may serve as a semiologic, informing us as to the characters of the relata so mediated. These structures may be investigated from both the internal perspective, by means of the structures of perception, and externally, by means of the structures of action, including communication (although there is an interpaly at work here, since every action involves a change in one's perceptual gestalt and every perception involves an action to fix one's focus within or alter one's focus between perceptual modalities). The first way is the way of phenomenology, the way of Gurwitsch, and the second is the way of genetic epistemology, the way of Piaget.
   Neither way offers absolute knowledge of its object, in the sense of complete, nor do they together; the first offers knowledge of an apodictic, or self-evident, anture, the second offers data of a statistical neture, from which may be deduced likely consequences.
   Nevertheless, taken together, they provide more evidence than either can alone. For instance, phenomenology cannot offer apodictic knowledge concerning the genesis and evolution of mind's reflection on the structures of the mind/world interrelation, for it is by means of this reflection that phenomenology proceeds. It may begin only when one may reflect upon the structures of perception, extract invariants, and represent them to some extent in a common symbol system. In other words, the phenomenologist must be at the Piagetian level of formal or abstract operations in order to philosophize (notice that our proposed experiments offer a THAT, but not a WHAT; they indicate the presence of recognition, but can offer nothing as to its character as experienced by the child). Genetic epistemology, on the other hand, can offer us likelihoods concerning this genesis and evolution, but nowhere can it offer the apodictic certainty which phenomenology can in the cases of reflective descriptions of self, soma, world and society. The contributions of these two investigative methods demonstrate a kind of complementarity; phenomenology is a synchronic and symbolic description of the invariant structures preceptible to the reflective mind, and genetic epistemology is a diachronic extrapolation, from observed action, of the evolution of mind to reflective and symbolic capacity.
   Phenomenology has discovered many structures whose ontogeneses have yet to be explored. Genetic epistemology is well suited for this exploration, especially when (as in the proposed experiments) it is sharpened by semiotics.
   Semiotics is not a method, but a doctrine. It is composed of a set of principles concerning the nature of symbolic apprehension and behavior and the structure of signification itself. For instance, one principle is that the relations between signs within a sign system and the relations of signs to their respective referents impose mutual constraints. Although its adherents tend to resemble carnivores, attempting to consume every other discipline as a semiotic branch, I view semiotics more as the mistletoe which can grow on any methodological tree, helping each discipline by sharpening its awareness of its own practices, options, and directional choices, much as the mistletoe logic helps methodological disciplines sharpen procedural precision, concision, evidentiary soundness, validity, and closure.
   All these disciplines and doctrines can do, however, is to draw the wide parameters of the possible, and suggest questions to ask of the organ itself, the answers to which may narrow the parameters asymptotically closer and closer to singularity. The bundles and connections to which these questions must be addressed are the purview of cognitive science. Surely many nonexistent designs might have served as substrates for human function, and many nonexistent functions might have utilized the cerebral design. But there is only one actual spectrum of match - structure to function - and that rainbow needle is hiding in a quickly shrinking haystack of alternatives. I believe that the usage of the disciplines of phenomenology and genetic epistemology and the doctrine of semiotics can assist cognitive psychology in speeding its winnowing along.