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In this chart, color words like YELLOW, BLUE, RED are printed on a chart using font colors that are different from the word. The challenge is to look at each word in the chart and say the **color** of the font, and ignore the color **word** that the letters form. Compare this challenge with doing the opposite, saying the word being formed, and ignoring the font color. The latter will probably seem easier.
This appears to demonstrate that, for some or perhaps many, it is easier to read the words and ignore the font color than it is to notice the color of the font and ignore the word meaning. To do the latter seems to take special concentration. Persons affected by this chart in this manner seem to need . Perhaps this could be seen as a demonstration of Leontiev's point. In some ways, it seems to go even further.
In any case, it is surprising to observe how the meaning of a **word** can disrupt and least some people's ability to immediately and consistently correctly notice and state the color of the **font** (what Leontiev calls the "outward aspect of the text"). The symbolic content of the words seems to overshadow the physical characteristics of the font unless the reader makes a special effort to focus on these physical characteristics specifically. The use of color in this situation seems to exaggerate this general phenomenon.
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Cheers, - StevePS: What prompted this was a post the other week by David Kg where he offered an interpretation of AN Leontiev's writing on this subject that included the statement that Leontiev held "a theory of reading in which consciousness has no part in the recognition of text." I am having difficulty deriving this interpretation of what Leontiev was saying from the quote David offered from pg 237 of the 1981 edition of Problems of Development of Mind. Perhaps I am missing something. When the opportunity arises, I think it could be valuable to revisit what Leontiev says about this.
Here is an expanded form of this quote from Leontiev to think about while trying out the font color challenge. Notice his description of bringing the font characteristics to the consciousness of a reader as a "kind of unnoticed conversion of operations into action."
"In order to avoid misunderstanding here, we must note simply that the relation of consciousness described above is also preserved, as we have seen, in its developed forms, but is not grasped immediately by introspection. [David's quote from pg 237 begins here -sg] When a person is reading, for example, it seems to him that both the ideas expressed in the book and the outward graphic form of their expression, i.e. the text itself, are recognised identically – both the one and the other. In fact, however, that is not wholly so; in fact only the ideas and their expression are presented in consciousness, and the outward aspect of the text may only seem to be conscious, as it usually is when there are omissions, crude typographical errors, etc. [David's quote ends here. -sg] But if the reader asks himself whether he is also conscious of the outward aspect of the text and so shifts the aim from the content of the text to that very aspect of it, he is, of course, clearly aware of it. That kind of unnoticed conversion of operations into action – in our example the conversion of perception of the text as an operation of reading into perception of it as an independent, purposive inner activity – also creates an illusion of the ‘field’ of consciousness being structureless."
-Steve On Aug 18, 2009, at 1:33 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Dear Monica:The ref is to Problems of the Development of Mind, Progress Publishers, 1981. See also pp. 65-66:“Thus in the course of attaining a general isolated goal intermediate goals may also be identified as a result of which the unitary action is split up into several spearte successive actions. This is especially (66) characteristic of those cases in which the action is performed under conditions that make it difficult to carry it out with the help of operations that have been formed earlier. The opposite process consists of strengthening previously isolated units of activity. This happens when the objectively attained intermediate results merge together and the subject is no longer conscious of them. Accordingly one can see the processes of division or conversely consoldation of the units of mental images: a text by a child just learning how to read is broken down in his/her perception into separate letters or even into the graphic elements of the letter. At a later point in this process whole words or even sentences become the perceptual elements.”You can see that ANL is really considers "consciousness" to be a) awareness, and b) volition. This gets him into a terrible contradiction: the fluent reader is deliberately unconscious of text as text. But how is it possible to be deliberately unconscious of text as text unless you are conscious of it?Why not just say that we are aware of text but that we are deliberately not foregrounding or highlighting it because we are busy foregrounding and highlighting something else?David Kellogg Seoul National University of Education--- On Tue, 8/18/09, Monica Hansen <monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu> wrote:From: Monica Hansen <monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu> Subject: RE: [xmca] When does an action begin and end? To: "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2009, 12:05 PM David: You wrote:And on p. 237 we have an unmitigated disaster, when this passable model of a physical skill is used to produce a theory of reading in which consciousness has no part in the recognition of text.“When a person is reading, for example, it seems to him that both the ideas expressed in the book and the outward graphic form of their expression, i.e. the text itself are recognized identically- both the one and the other. In fact, however, that is not wholly so; in fact only the ideas and their expression are presented in consciousness and the outward aspect of the text may only seem to be conscious, as it usually is when there are omissions, crude typographical errors, etc.”I have two questions, please:1.) What Leontiev are you reading? You give page numbers, but I don't know the original source. (Haven't even started that yet, but apparently need to...)2.) What do you mean in this comment? Can you expand? It looks to me like he is not suggesting that consciousness has no part in text recognition, but that the reader is usually unaware of the part of the process that is not conscious.Thanks, Monica -----Original Message-----From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca- bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David KelloggSent: Monday, August 17, 2009 4:29 PM To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu; Culture ActivityeXtended Mind Subject: Re: [xmca] When does an action begin and end? Andy--I thought you meant "action" as opposed to operation as opposed to activity. If that's the case then I think that your question should be "where does an action begin and end?" rather than "when".In Problems of the Development of Mind, Leontiev tries to solve this problem. If, for example, you have not completely automatized the operations of changing gears on the car, then each operation becomes a conscious action, with a discernible goal, not simply something that is the helpless prey of operational conditions. Once you have automatized the operations of changing gears on the car, then changing gears becomes itself the operation, and goal directed actions include things like going around a corner.I am not happy with this solution (I'm also not happy with Bakhtin's purely objectivist definition of the utterance, for similar reasons). On p. 235, Leontiev gives the example of a trained marksman which is almost identical to his example of shifting gears. The process of aiming and steadying his grip and breathing and so on are considered automatized: “For the trained marksman noneof these processes is an independent action and their objectives are not singled out in his consciousness.”This is actually untrue, as the recent example of the Navy SEAL marksmen who freed a ship captain taken hostage by Somali pirates will show. But even if it WERE true it would be irrelevant to language.I think it was Bakhurst who pointed out that a lot of Leontiev's ideas are really lead to a kind of Piagetianism without Piaget. Here, though, his ideas lead to a kind of skills theory without Gagne or Anderson. Essentially, Leontiev is taking the position that all skill learning is the automatization of declarative knowledge in the form of procedural knowledge. This is why Leontiev (and also Wertsch) like examples of sensorimotor skills and hand to eye coordination; the Anderson model handles this quite well for hte most part.On p. 236, Leontiev writes: “These transformations of unconscious content in conscious and vice versa that occur in connection with a change of the place occupied by the content in the structure of the activity, can now be understood neurophysiologically.” p. 236.And on p. 237 we have an unmitigated disaster, when this passable model of a physical skill is used to produce a theory of reading in which consciousness has no part in the recognition of text.“When a person is reading, for example, it seems to him that both the ideas expressed in the book and the outward graphic form of their expression, i.e. the text itself are recognized identically- both the one and the other. In fact, however, that is not wholly so; in fact only the ideas and their expression are presented in consciousness and the outward aspect of the text may only seem to be conscious, as it usually is when there are omissions, crude typographical errors, etc.”The reason I am not very happy with Bakhtin's definition of the utterance is twofold. First of all, many turns (and in fact almost all "feedback" turns that a teacher takes) consist of several utterances within a single turn.T: How are you all today? (one turn, and one utterance) S: Fine, thanks, and you? (one turn, but three utterances)So it's actually much more useful to define an utterance as a POTENTIAL turn than as an actual one. But even this definition is too objectivist for what I want to do.It does not help us at all at the most crucial moment of language development, the transformation of inter-mental vertical constructions in discourse into intra-mental horizontal constructions.Imagine a small child nagging a parent for an ice lolly on a hot day. The child can only utter one or two word turns, but the child can do this for HOURS, using gestures, intonation, tears and tandrums.An older child has learned to ventriloquate objections and respond to them, to incorporate the adults turns into his or her own, like this;"You promised me I could have a lolly if it was hot and I'm really hot and thirst and I know it won't spoil my supper and besides you promised."Now this is only OBJECTIVELY a single utterance; when we begin to analyze it we realize that it is a vitiated dialogue. The same thing is true of paragraphs, of novels and so on, all of which a purely OBJECTIVIST analysis would render as a single utterance.David Kellogg Seoul National University of Education . --- On Mon, 8/17/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote: From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?To: ablunden@mira.net, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu >Date: Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:22 AMPepper's discussion of "events" as units of analysis within a contextualistworld view might be helpful, Andy. World HypothesesOn Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:I'll look in my Dewey and see what I can find. Then there's the internetwhich has lots of Dewey.It occurred to me that Bakhtin's utterance is delimited by turn- taking, and this is quite a nice definition for a pragmatic theory of social interaction etc. And then I realized that Vygotsky's conception seems to be very elastic on this point. Word-meaning shorter and much more cognitivist, the 'double stimulation experiments' more like Bakhtin's turn-taking, but the child development stuff much more open ended. And then 'activity' carries thisconnotation of being on-going and not delimited, which gives it quite different implications I think. And I certainly go with Im Anfang war der Tat. Andy Mike Cole wrote:Some time before it ends, Andy?For sure I recommend that you take a look at Dewey's early critique of thereflex arc concept in dealing withthis issue. Which was in the beginning, anyway, the word or the deed?mikeOn Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:Can anyone tell me whether there has ever been any discussion about when an action begins and ends? (By "action" I mean in the technicalsense of Activity Theory.) Andy------------------------------------------------------------------------Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media) http://www.erythrospress.com/ Orders: http://www.erythrospress.com/store/main.html#books _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media) http://www.erythrospress.com/ Orders: http://www.erythrospress.com/store/main.html#books _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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