The scaffolded mind: Higher mental processes are grounded in early experience of the physical world

Abstract

It has long been a staple of psychological theory that early life experiences significantly shape the adult's understanding of and reactions to the social world. Here we consider how early concept development along with evolved motives operating early in life can come to exert a passive, unconscious influence on the human adult's higher-order goal pursuits, judgments, and actions. In particular, we focus on concepts and goal structures specialized for interacting with the physical environment (e.g., distance cues, temperature, cleanliness, and self-protection), which emerge early and automatically as a natural part of human development and evolution. It is proposed that via the process of scaffolding, these early sensorimotor experiences serve as the foundation for the later development of more abstract concepts and goals. Experiments using priming methodologies reveal the extent to which these early concepts serve as the analogical basis for more abstract psychological concepts, such that we come easily and naturally to speak of close relationships, warm personalities, moral purity, and psychological pain. Taken together, this research demonstrates the extent to which such foundational concepts are capable of influencing people's information processing, affective judgments, and goal pursuit, oftentimes outside of their intention or awareness.

Rebooting Psychotherapy Research and Practice to Reduce the Burden of Mental Illness

“…These concepts do not require mental capacities of memory retrieval and comparison that do not develop until years later (Clark, 1973;Mandler, 1992). When these abstract concepts are later developed they tend to be "built upon" (and thus strongly associated with) these physical concepts to the extent they are analogous (i.e., share key features; Asch, 1946;Kelley, 1950;Lakoff & Johnson, 1980;Williams & Bargh, 2008a;Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009) and hence could activate one another or be used strategically for psychological intervention.…”

Toward a metaphor-enriched personality psychology.

“…A rationale for this idea is that many of our most important feelings and concepts -such as peace, love, or anger -lack a clear perceptual referent, which creates epistemic problems (Searle, 1998). People resolve such difficulties by scaffolding (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009) abstract feelings and thoughts on perceptual dimensions -such as up-down, warm-cold, close-far, and dirty-clean -that are more concrete, immediate, and visceral, which in turn facilitates their intuitive understanding (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). Lakoff and Johnson (1999) further suggested that metaphor representation processes guide our thoughts like "a hidden hand".…”

Disembodiment: Abstract Construal Attenuates the Influence of Contextual Bodily State in Judgment

“…Finally, in a test of the association between physical and conceptual weight, participants who held a heavy clipboard rated various issues as more important relative to those who made their ratings while holding a light clipboard (Ackerman et al, 2010;Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009). The reasons underlying these various effects may diverge -a functionalist account for biases in visual perception guiding action (Gibson, 1979); metaphoric priming as a developmental artifact of using sensorimotor information to learn higher-order reasoning (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009) -but the relevance of physical experience remains consistent.…”