These are the instructions that Professor Harley gave us when the Fall 2000 Cognitive class came in to take our third Cognitive Psychology exam. Of course I chose option A. I love Professor Harley.

Cognitive Psychology: Exam III

There are two options for taking this exam.

OPTION A:

Cognitive psychology is the study of psichological phenomenon that occur in every interaction in which you engage--including those with yourself. You see the results of perceiving, reasoning, talking, thinking ALL the time. You also see these results in good, honest fiction.

Now it's your turn to create them on paper.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to perform Steven King's exercise (below) (which he presents to illustrate that one can write situationally--vs. based on plotting), AND to include in the product (labeled--on the side or in parentheses in bold or in footnotes or in some other obvious way) examples of:

(a) The (natural) use of formal (logical) reasoning;
(b) The use of heuristics (specific ones--your choice);
(c) Natural problems with speech processing (explain why briefly);
(d) The use of grammatical (some specific one--again, labeled) processing;
(e) The use of Hockett's features (some specific ones--labeled);
(f) The use of Marshall's reading model (explain how briefly);
(g) The use of 3 other any-old-things we've discussed this term.

This option is offered in the for of a take-home exam. Turn it in a week from Wednesday, i.e., turn it in on November 29, 2000. It should be typed.

A Steven King Exercise: From On Writing (2000)

I am going to show you the location of a fossil. Your job is to write five or six pages of unplotted narration concerning this fossil. Put another way, I want you to dig for the bones and see what they look like. I think you may be quite surprised and delighted with the results. Ready? Here we go.

Everyone is familiar with the basic details of the following story; with small variations, it seems to pop up in the Police Beat section of metropolitan daily papers every other week or so. A woman--call her Jane--marries a man who is bright, witty, and pulsing with sexual magnetism. We'll call the guy Dick; it's the world's most Freudian name. Unfortunately, Dick has a dark side. He's short tempered, a control freak, perhaps even (you'll find this out as he speaks and acts) a paranoid. Jane tries mightily to overlook Dick's faults and make the marriage work (why she tries so hard is something you will also find out; she will come onstage and tell you). They have a child, and for a while things seem better. Then, when the little girl is three or so, the abuse and the jealous tirades begin again. The abuse is verbal at first, then physical. Dick is convinced that Jane is sleeping with someone, perhaps someone from her job. Is it someone specific? I don't know and don't care. Eventually, Dick may tell you who he suspects. If he does, we'll both know, won't we?

At last poor Jane can't take it anymore. She divorces the shmuck and gets custody of their daughter, Little Nell. Dick begins to stalk her. Jane responds by getting a restraining order, a document about as useful as a parasol in a hurricane, as many abused women will tell you. Finally, after an incident which you will write in vivid and scary detail--a public beating, perhaps--Richard the Schmuck is arrested and jailed. All of this is back story. How you work it in--and how much of it you work in--is up to you. In any case, it's not the situation. What follows is the situation.

One day shortly after Dick's incarceration in the city jail, Jane picks up Little Nell at the daycare center and ferries her to a friend's house for a birthday party. Jane then takes herself home, looking forward to two or three hours' unaccustomed peace and quiet. Perhaps, she thinks, I'll take a nap. It's a house she's going to, even though she's a young working woman--the situation sort of demands it. How she came by this house and why she has the afternoon off are things the story will tell you and which will look neatly plotted if you come up with good reasons (perhaps the house belongs to her parents; perhaps she's house-sitting, perhaps another thing entirely).

Something pings at her, just below the level of consciousness, as she lets herself in, something that makes her uneasy. She can't isolate it and tells herself it's just nerves, a little fallout from her five years of hell with Mr. Congeniality. What else could it be: Dick is under lock and key, after all.

Before taking her nap, Jane decides to have a cup of herbal tea and watch the news. (Can you use that pot of boiling water on the stove later on? Perhaps, perhaps.) The lead item in /Anchor News at Three/ is a shocker: that morning, three men escaped from the city jail, killing a guard in the process. Two of the three bad guys were recaptured almost at once, but the third is still at large. None of the prisoners are identified by name (not in the newscast, at least), but Jane, sitting in her empty house (which you will now have plausibly explained), knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of them was Dick. She knows because she had finally identified that ping of unease she felt in the foyer. It was the smell, faint and fading, of Vitalis hair-tonic. Dick's hair-tonic. Jane sits in her chair, her muscles lax with fright, unable to get up. And as she hears Dick's footfalls begin to descend the stairs, she thinks: Only Dick would make sure he had hair-tonic, even in jail. She must get up, must run, but she can't move...

It's a pretty good story, yes? I think so, but not exactly unique. As I've already pointed out, Estranged Hubby beats up (or murders) ex-wife makes the papers every other week, sad but true. What I want you to do in this exercise is change the sexes of the antagonist and protagonist before beginning to work out the situation in your narrative--make the ex-wife the stalker, in other words (perhaps it's a mental institution she's escaped from instead of the city jail), the husband the victim. Narrate this without plotting--let the situation and that one unexpected inversion carry you allong. I predict you will succeed swimmingly...if, that is, you are honest about how your characters speak and behave. Honesty in story-telling makes up for a great many stylistic faults, as the work of wooden-prose writers like Theodore Dreiser and Ayn Rand shows, but lying is the great unrepairable fault. Liars prosper, no question about it, but only in the great sweep of things, never down in the jungles of actual composition, where you must take your objective one bloody word at a time. If you begin to lie about what you know and feel while you're down there, everything falls down.