The short term memory of humans has been found to be able to process approximately seven bits of information per unit of time.
But, practically speaking, we seem to handle much more than that, particularly in the perception of language where the flow of information is layers deep.
The brain seems to have developed a strategy that increases the amount and the speed of information processing manifold. This is what expectancies is all about.
We have mentioned that perception is always a guess as to what the stimulus is that we are receiving now. But it is even more than that. It is a guess as to what the next stimulus will be.
More often than not, when someone talks to you, you know in advance what the next word will _____. Because you knew I would write or say "be," you didn't have to really process all of the sentence through short-term memory.
Hence, expectancies short circuit that 7 bit limit of information we have to deal with in the short term memory process.
If you glance into my classroom from the hallway for less than a half of a second, you could write a ten page essay on what you saw.
You could describe how the people were arranged; what they were wearing, what they were doing, how the room was designed and what it is used for; what the person in the front of the room was doing etc. etc. etc.
You can do all this because your expectancies (your experience) add to the process of reconstructing the percept.
Of course, just as something is gained, something is lost. In seeing what we expect to see, we can easily miss that which we do not. Here is an interesting example to that effect.
Our expectances can be so powerful as to re-construct a percept and give us an experience that is not really there...that does not exist in reality.
Some more examples below will hopefully demonstrate this.
Above is a picture of a cat. Do you see anything peculiar or incorrect in that picture about the phrase, "THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT." You may not have noticed that the word "THE" is repeated twice. Our expectancy is that it would only occur once, and so this is what we generally see.
Now I will ask you to say the letters "S -- P -- O -- T," out loud, ten times, and then answer the multiple choice question that follows:
I hope I caught you on that. Did you answer "B" for "STOP," instead of "E" for "NONE" (since you should "GO" when you come to a green light)? If not try this one.
If you answered "B," I caught you at last. The correct answer was "E," because an aluminum roof is made aluminum.
If I didnÅt catch you on either, then try them orally on someone else, only don't make it a multiple choice question.
Just ask them "What do you do when you come to a green light?" or "What is an aluminum roof made of?" The chances are you will catch them on this.
If so, it will demonstrate that their expectancies have totally overridden the aural stimulus they received.
They saw or heard what they expected to see or hear, based on the expectancies you provided. They did not hear what was actually written or spoken!
Here is another example of expectancies. Look at the cards below. On first glance they all look normal...just what we would expect to see on a card (when you're playing with a professor at CSUN.)
But on a closer look, only one of the four is really correct. Can you tell which one it is?
We have to look really hard at those cards to counteract our expectancies and see them as they really exist (all incorrect except for one--counting left to right, the fourth card is correct).
The last demonstration will show how expectancies play a very strong role in organizing the shape (and meaning of ) the figure. For the symbols below, please read the 2 rows, and go to the next figures below.
Now please read the two columns below.
Notice that the second number in the first column, "13," and the third letter in the second column, "d," are identical structurally in the figure above to the second letter of row one, "B," and the fifth and sixth letters of the second row, "cl," .
That's confusing, but you can see this more clearly in the illustration that follows below.
The matching figures were the same for both, but were perceived differently depending upon our expectancies, which were based on the direction we read.
Expectancies arise form our past experiences...recent and/or remote. So what is the source of these expectancies. Let's examine some of the origins.
Repetition. One of the most obvious sources of expectancies is repetition.
Humans are very quick to pick up on this feature.
Come to think of it alligators are too. That is why it is never a good idea to go to the same place to drink more than twice at a watering hole in the Australian back-country.
In the following example, what letter would you expect next:
A - A - A - A - __?__.
If you said "A," you were, of course, correct. We actually have a lot in common with alligators, although they may deny it.
Routines: Very close to repetition is a routine. Babies, of course, being new at the life game have few if any expectancies to help them decode the world about them.
But we can quickly develop some through the development of some daily routines. For example, there can be morning getting up routines or night going to bed routines (almost rituals), eating meals routines, taking a bath routine, going for a walk routines, etc., etc.
In all these routines, the same language is used. It does not have to be exactly repeated verbatim each time, but there is a general similarity.
For example, at bath time we always talk about the same objects (the yellow rubber ducky, the bubble soap, the tug boat, the wash cloth etc.); and the same actions (taking off clothes, turning on the water and getting into the tub, putting in the baby soap etc.
Through the routines, the baby quickly develops expectancies for the language in each context. The expectancies help him to decode the language in greater chunks and with greater speed and understanding.
Re-Reading: This is really a combination of repetition and routine, but it is very important.
Very soon, when parents are reading regularly to their child, they will note that the child wishes to have the same book read over, and over, and over, and over and over again.
Although it is mentally punishing to the parents to do this, they should humor the child as many times as he/she wants.
The repetition sets up expectancies that enable the child to extract more and more linguistic information from the text, including not only the story line, but nuances of phonology, grammar, semantics and pragmatics.
Overall, what expectancies do for us is actually make the world appear to slow down.
The first time one travels a the freeway, for example, the Exit Signs the go past so swiftly that we donÅt have enough time to read them.
But when we have traveled a freeway many times, the signs are easy to read. They seem to pass more slowly. The same thing is true for listening to speech.
Grammar. Another important source of expectancy is Grammar.
Because we have rules by which we put words together, we have expectancies of what class of word probably will come next.
For example please fill in the missing word in this sentence:
"The b_?_ wolf was chasing t_?_ little rabbit who was very fr____?_____.."
You probably had no problem filling in the words "the" and "big" and "frightened"; although you had to find them in your a memory bank of words from a list of more than 100,000 words.
But you knew that in English, a determiner comes typically first before the noun, and that may be followed by an adjective; and that a noun or adjective will follow the copula. We may not know we know it, but we do!
This unconscious grammatical knowledge (linguistic competence) narrows sharply the range of words we need to search among in our lexicon.
Add to this our knowledge of the semantic features of words, and our familiarity with the cultural scripts in which they occur, and we know much of the time almost what people are going to say before they say it! This makes the decoding process proceed very rapidly in large chunks.
The same is true for this nonsense sentence, "The gladdled tallywagle strupedly zloggled through the sloggity wonkeys." Although we may not know the words, our grammar tells us from what class to expect each word.
For example, "gladdled" is an adjective, "tallywagle," is a noun; "strupedly," is an adverb; "zlogged" is a verb in the past tense, etc.
When we first learn a foreign language, it appears to us that the native speakers all talk much too fast.
But after we have begun to master the grammar, the native speakers mysteriously seem to slow down.
Actually, it is we who are speeding up and processing language faster, thanks to our newly developed grammatical expectancies.
Concepts. As we develop concepts about the world, they become, in turn, screens through which we see the world. Let me refer back to my example before of -glancing into my on-campus classroom for a fraction of a second and then writing a 10 page essay on what you saw.
The reason you can process this volume of information from such a short glance, is that you have a concept (expectancy) of what a college classroom is all about.
Your transducer needs, then, only enough input to steer you in the direction of that mental set, and then all the information you already have about classrooms in can be added to the creation of the percept (your experience of what you saw).
But something may be lost too, in that you may have missed seeing that I was prancing on stage in a sumo suit waving a spear and reading excerpts from Winnie the Pooh. That is the price we pay for using expectancies, and also for attending a class II University.
Non literal language. There are many phrases which exist in a Gestalt form in the right side of the brain. We have discusses these earlier. One example was swearing.
Other examples are idioms, proverbs and speech formulas. They all exist as complete units.
Hence, if some one uses the speech formula, "On your mark...Get set...and ______!" we will have a strong expectancy of what the last word will be.
Of course Dads love to trick their kids by starting a race by saying, "On your mark... get set...STOP!
Needs. When we have serious needs, the expectancy factor in perception can become especially strong.
If I am on the desert and need water, I may easily construct the shimmering heat waves coming off the desert floor in the distance as a glistening lake.
Sailors in the days of schooners when it took months at sea to get any where, would develop a strong need to see girls.
You can imagine how they might have viewed some fairly large seals on rocks from a distance, and have thought they had discovered some lovely mermaids.
I suspect that more than one sailor has leaped overboard only to find that his perceptions were sorely incorrect.
A child may have a strong need to go Disney Land to see Mickey Mouse, but his mother may say, "Not to day dear." The child may nevertheless hear what he needs to hear, "Right away dear," and be overjoyed to the puzzlement of his parents.
On the other hand, needs can, and more often do, significantly sharpen our expectancies and hence, our perceptual skills.
Mothers, for example, who lived near the elevated railway lines in New York could hear their babyÅs tiny cry from another room against the very loud background roar of the trains passing by their window.
Piaget notes that a certain degree imbalance in the childÅs (our) life is good in that it creates the need to adapt.
Needs, then, that are within the scope of the childÅs ability to resolve will aid in the development of expectancies and hence, perceptual skills.
In other words, it isnÅt necessary or even preferable to anticipate and meet every need for a child before it arises!
Short-Terms Sets: Most of the tricky examples that I have used above are short term sets.
This amounts to giving a person an idea of what is coming next. For children it is an excellent teaching technique. It is particularly useful when a child is being taken on an expedition, like to the fire station.
Before the field trip takes place, some preparation can profitably be done.
Discussions (games, play acting, or stories) with pictures and/or if possible toys of fire stations, fire men and fire engines and many of l their tools would be good activities.
These would prepare the children by providing expectancies to facilitate the decoding of the sounds and sights they will experience during the visit.
Without the expectancies, they may be easily over stimulated and overwhelmed perceptually, and may shut down in many ways--become very tired, cranky, distractible, mischievous, withdrawn etc.
Long-term sets. This is perhaps one of the most powerful factors in expectancy development. Ironically, it is also probably the one we are least aware of.
Long-term sets are a function of culture. It is such a part of our lives that it seems like reality and not anything we have learned.
Here is a powerful example. There is a true story, and a movie, about the story about Papillon, a man who was sentenced to DevilÅs Island.
This was a particularly desolate prison (see poem about it in the notes and a picture of how it looks now).
To be put into solitary confinement for six months was equivalent to a death sentence because they did not receive enough protein to survive.
Papillon, of course, was sentenced to solitary confinement. Had I been there with him the outcome of our terms would have been vastly different.
There we would sit starving…but ironically, we are surrounded by an endless multitude of little nuggets of protein!
I (as a result of my culture do not see them). Instead, I see filthy disgusting little cockroaches.
Papillon somehow breaks his cultural bias and eats them readily, survives the six months and later escapes prison to resume his life in France, and wreak vengeance by exposing the cruelty of the prison.
I on the other hand would have starved to death in the midst of an abundance of food I could not recognize or accept.
So strong can the cultural bias be that we can perish because of it.
Cultural Scripts and Routines: There are thousands of scripts and routines in our culture that we are not aware of. They are, of course, just another form of Long-term set, but they seal the interaction and interdependence of culture, language and communication.
For example, if I go into a 7-11 store late at night and pull a gun out of my pocket, you can be pretty sure what is going to happen next.
Although you can do it, a computer could not predict whether the next words would be "Stick-em-up", or "Do you know how to load this pistol?"
In the picture above, you know they are talking about divorce and not about taking the kids to the movies. Computers don't have the tremendous background of scripts to help them decode these pragmatics that affect the word meanings.
It is this knowledge of the routines and scripts of a language that ties culture so closely to the development of language.
This is one of the hardest things for a foreigner to learn about a new language, because they also typically lack a knowledge of the scripts within the culture.
So much for expectancies. We will now look at concepts-- and how they develop. But first one LAST but truly remarkable demonstration how an expectancy in the VISUAL MODALITY can override the Auditory Stimulus.
