Receivers and Their Cognitive Abilities |
ABSTRACT The concept of receiver has been merged with the concept of sender in a dialogical model of communication which obscures their cognitive differences. Whereas senders frame their texts, receivers must re-frame them. Senders compose their texts from remembered concepts and experiences. Receivers interpret these texts using their remembered concepts and experiences which are not identical to the senders. As a result, if the texts cannot be assimilated into receivers' existing frameworks, they must be accommodated. Senders frame their texts in order to have a particular effect on receivers. Receivers attribute motives that form generic expectations about the texts sent to them. Receivers can refuse the communication. |
The concept of receiver has merged with the concept of sender in a dialogical model of communication which obscures their cognitive differences.
One of the adjustments to the standard model of communication made in the 1960s was to introduce a dialogical component (going beyond the concept of "feedback") into previous diagrams of communication as a relatively linear transmission from sender to receiver.
Frequently, this adjustment was marked by altering the concept of sender and receiver into a conception of a turn-taking "sender/receiver" or "communicator." This was an important theoretical preconception of communication but it had the effect of obscuring the differences in the cognitive abilities of senders and receivers.
Whereas senders frame their texts, receivers must re-frame them.
Senders compose their texts from remembered concepts and experiences. Receivers interpret these texts using their remembered concepts and experiences which are not identical to the senders. As a result, if the texts cannot be assimilated into receivers' existing frameworks, they must be accommodated. Senders can but do not have to accommodate the concepts and experiences embedded in the texts they send.
The assimilation/accommodation dimension of communication is often covered by including in the standard model a concept of "shared field of experiences." (See the entry, contexts.) While glosses on such models of communication usually acknowledge that a precondition of communicative exchange is shared concepts and experiences, the picture painted is overly optimistic. In part, this is due to the theory of language that usually accompanied the conception of shared contexts, one that posits a public sign system that is independent of senders and receivers. This linguistic model is challenged by cognitive linguists.
(See the entry, codes.)
Persons are able to construe the meaning of linguistic expressions from a variety of perspectives (Langacker, 122ff.). Thus, what should count as sharing an experience includes the notion that it is construed from a similar viewpoint. For example, a couple on a date may watch the classic film The Maltese Falcon together and discuss it over drinks afterward. They agree that it is a film noir about murder in an urban setting. However, the man may experience the film from Sam Spade's (Humphrey Bogart's) perspective and the woman from Brigid O'Shaughnessy's (Mary Astor's) perspective. Their experience of "the murder" would be quite disparate even though they could carry on a lengthy conversation about it without their views clashing. As feminist film critics have noted, women watching film noir productions in the 1940s frequently sided with the women in the films, even though they were criminals, because they were strong and independent figures.
The reception of texts is a hailstorm of cognitive reactions.
Senders frame their texts in order to have a particular effect on receivers.
One of the salient differences between senders and receivers is that messages are sent to create effects the senders want which are not available in the texts and not directly knowable to its recipients. Much of our understanding of messages is para-linguistic, that is, comes from the cognitive frameworks we possess rather than from the public meanings attributed to them. David Lee offers a good example in his Cognitive Linguistics:
If one were asked to explain the meaning of the word wicket, it would be natural to say not only what a wicket is but also something about its overall role in the game. For example, one might explain that one person (known as the 'bowler') tries to knock the wicket down by throwing a ball at it in a special way, while another person (known as the 'batsman') stands in front of the wicket and tries to prevent the ball from hitting it by using a wooden instrument known as a 'bat'. This could be the beginning of quite a long explanation. In other words, a good understanding of the word wicket requires a significant amount of knowledge that extends well beyond the dictionary definition. We refer to this background knowledge as the 'frame'. (8)
Receivers only partially share cognitive frameworks with senders. For the most part, receivers attribute motives about why the texts were sent to them. In the absence of admissions by senders of their intentions, receivers' guesses are informed by experiences of the persons or situations involved. This easily leads to preconceptions, stereotyping, and other sorts of obstacles to the exchange.
Receivers can refuse the communication.
One area that is difficult to appraise academically is the circumstance wherein receivers of messages refuse them. There are a variety of ways in which this happens, all dependent upon cognition. Here is a short list of types of refusal (with the cognitive abilities in italics):
- deliberately not paying attention
- not believing the message, distrusting the messenger or its source
- overriding the message by assimilating it to an existing framework
- letting the message remain unintelligible by "deciding" not to accommodate it
- mis-understanding the message by mis-contextualizing it
- pre-judging the content of the message as the result of a bias toward its content.
- stereotyping the messenger as not worth listening to.
A dialogical situation can "double" these refusals. (See Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson on "punctuation," Bateson or Laing on "double binds.")
Communication textbooks usually complexify the concepts of senders and receivers in their discussions of them along the lines mentioned above. Nonetheless, their use of a "standard" theoretical model accompanied by rather simple definitions of senders and receivers retained from information-processing views of communication is, at best, inconsistent and potentially confusing to students.
jjs
Notes:
Although the concept of "feedback" was included in models of communication in the 1940s, a dialogical turn-taking component wasn't introduced until Pragmatics of Human Communication published in 1967.
.Langacker argues that "Language is an integral part of human cognition. An account of linguistic structure should therefore articulate with what is known about cognitive processing in general" (Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 12). His colleague, David Lee explains this position: "... linguistic structure is a direct reflex of cognition in the sense that a particular linguistic expression is associated with a particular way of conceptualizing a given situation" (Cognitive Linguistics, 1)
Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" initiated extended discussions of "female spectatorship" in cinema by Ann Kaplan ("Is the gaze male?"), Mary Ann Doane (The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s), Teresa DeLauretis (Alice Dosesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema), and others. These texts show how cognitively complex female spectatorship was and still is.
See Giles Fauconnier on "mental spaces" that are "being built up during ongoing discourse" (Mental Spaces, 16).
.This observation raises doubts about the value of diagrammatic representations of complex experiences. Printed texts are vulnerable in this regard. Electronic texts, particularly with technologies such as Flash, should be able to offer models that represent the complexities of human experience more effectively.
It should be noted that Westley and 1955 model attempted to introduce the complexity of the communicative interaction, moving away from a simplistic encode → signal → decode pattern and emphasizing the fact that not only did messages change during a communication but that not all of the multiple signals sent were received. Models showing the communication process as more complex than the standard model shows were not adopted. Was this a concession to textbook publishers, to students, or to teachers? [One of the goals of the C-CS project is to represent communication as the highly complex array of cognitive processes that it is.]
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last revised:
September 4, 2007
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