A View of Sherlock Holmes and Friends Through Cognitive Psych - Term Paper Example

? A View of Sherlock Holmes and Friends Through Cognitive Psych Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that focuses on the mental processes of human beings. It is different from regular psychology in that it uses scientific method to test its theories and rejects methods such as introspection which are important in other branches of psychology such as Freudian or Jungian psychology. However, it does not insist that the mind is little more than a fancy computer we haven't fully understood, yet it also acknowledges that there are internal mental states that can play a role in how mental processes occur. In the study of these ideas, many scientific, physical, and metaphysical elements must be considered. Understanding these concepts might be easier when one attempts to apply them to a real-life, or near-to-life, representation such as through the analysis of a video clip from the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes. The particular segment to be analyzed is the dinner scene in which Sherlock Holmes meets John Watson's fiancee, Mary Morstan, for the first time. It begins with Sherlock sitting at an empty table in a busy restaurant, proceeds through Watson and Mary's arrival, a brief discussion between the three of them, and Holmes' analysis of Mary's character before Mary becomes offended and leaves with Watson trailing behind her. The clip ends with Holmes carelessly tucking his napkin into his collar and happily biting his freshly delivered meal. Within the clip, Holmes demonstrates many of the elements of cogitation listed by Smith and Kosslyne (2006). He shows his awareness of perception, "the processing of information from the senses," as an important tool in determining information about others. However, he seems relatively unimpressed by hints of emotion shown by Watson or Mary, even going so far as to ignore any of his own emotion when Mary throws her drink in his face. His assessment of other people comes out in a stream, as if the process of encoding occurs in direct relation to his words, relating the information he perceives to elements stored in the long-term memory as well as working memory to create an idea of Mary's past. His attention is very clear as he studies Mary, but his executive processes are weak, as he blurts out everything he deduces without filtering it first to ensure he doesn't offend her. Decision-making, problem solving, and reasoning all play a part in his ability to assess Mary's past as well as his determination not to buffer his words. Holmes also demonstrates the concept of levels of abstraction as he analyzes the details he sees in front of him at ever-deepening levels until he is finally stopped by Mary's wine splashing in his face. It seems clear that as Holmes' assessment progresses, Mary's emotions are beginning to get the best of her. As chapter 1 of our book explains, the ANS system which plays a key role in emotions will do several things to prepare an organism to deal with an emergency. These things include increased heart rate, increased breathing rate, dilated pupils, causes the palms of the hands to become moist, reduces digestive functions, and relaxes the bladder (Smith & Kosslyne, 2006, p. 19). Although it is difficult within a film to see all of these reactions in Mary, the actress did a fantastic job in allowing her breathing rate to increase; the camera zooms in to show her eyes as if they had dilated; she rubs her hands together both to hide the tan line around where a ring used to be and to show how her hands are clenched and presumably moist. As Holmes begins to make his own inferences about the meaning of the clues he's pointed out, she takes a few sips of her wine, swallowing hard, as if her mouth has suddenly gone dry. This assessment of her reaction might easily be classified as a behaviorist approach. Although Holmes is very good at analyzing the perceptions he has of Mary, he proves that sensory information does not contain enough information to form accurate perceptions. For example, although he is very good at finding out a great deal about Mary just by looking at her and studying various things about her, he needs to connect these pieces of information with his own experience to assess what they mean through a bottom-up process of reasoning. Because he is doing this, he misinterprets the cause of her unease. After seeing the edges of her ring line, he recognizes the significance of its placement and, in top-down fashion with a Bayesian approach (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 93), suggests that she is a gold-digger, having left a false fiancee abroad in order to find a better prospect, such as a doctor, back home in England. At the same time, Mary displays a lack of perception of her own in ignoring Watson's shake of the head when she decides to insist that Holmes tell her what he can discover about her. While Watson is attempting to tell her not to test Holmes' deductive abilities, she seems to see this as a challenge and insists that Holmes indulge her curiosity. If Holmes had paid attention to Watson's suggestion that he is not to go into it or to Mary's delight following his first deductions, he would have stopped at a point where they could have still had a pleasant evening together. The director of the film very capably shows the overwhelming amount of sensory stimulation present at the restaurant in the scene's opening sequence. Holmes sits at the table attempting to shut out the various things happening around him such as the couple arguing at a nearby table, a waiter stealing silverware, and the restaurant manager straightening the tie of the water boy. When assessing Mary, Holmes expresses a failure of selection in that he is completely blind to her change in emotional state. He has a focused attention on reading the clues he can assess from her physical presence and is oblivious to the warnings being sent by Watson or by Mary herself. His focus is determined by the top-down processes of endogenous attention, which is internal goal-driven attention (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 118), but it is interrupted by the exogenous attention grabber of Mary's wine on his face. The way in which Holmes goes about this analysis seems to support the Broadbent model of early selection in which a great deal of the sensory store is created at first after which there is a bottleneck of information processing that allows only a small amount of further information to be processed (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 128). Due to Holmes, it can be agreed that "attention can be understood as a competitive system in which tuning into one thing results in the inhibition of competing information" (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 130). While it is relatively easy to track the evidence of knowledge through the character of Holmes as he analyzes the evidence he sees before him, it is more interesting to look at the character of Watson as he displays, through his body language, his knowledge of Holmes' somewhat abnormal character traits. His attitude toward Holmes is wary from the beginning, as if he isn't quite sure he should be introducing his girlfriend to the detective. This indicates he already has a fairly detailed representation in his mind of how Holmes behaves in a polite company. His changing responses as Holmes progresses through the scene indicate that Holmes is presenting features that Watson recognizes as potentially dangerous, since Holmes has entered into his criminal-finding mode. This recognition relies on amodal systems of knowledge, though built upon Watson's knowledge of the gentleman category of knowledge (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 170) and its exemplars (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 174) along with the commonly accepted schemata for this type of social event (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 180). Throughout the scene, Watson's actions are based on this type of dynamic representation he has of Holmes and of what might be expected. To reach these conclusions and display this sort of uncomfortable body language, Watson is also drawing on semantic memory, memory that "is not bound to the specific context in which [he] acquired that knowledge" (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 195), because Holmes' behavior is something he has become accustomed to over a period of time. If he thought about it carefully, he could probably state numerous instances within his explicit memory in which Holmes' inability to behave in an expected, polite manner proved embarrassing, but within the given scene, he is simply drawing on the general conclusion of these memories. Watson also demonstrates implicit memory in the way that he carries himself, as Holmes says, like a military man, even though he is now a doctor. As compared to Watson's long-term memory, Holmes demonstrates an impressive use of his working memory as he pulls together all the pieces of evidence under consideration. These include the material of Watson's cane as well as the concealed sword within and the boxing stub in Watson's pocket to assess Watson's character. Regarding Mary, these elements include the ink from her student, the expensive jewels at her neck, and the missing ring. In both cases, he does not exceed Miller's magic number 7 (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 243) and he is not required to retain these facts for long in his working memory before he uses them. He quickly forgets these facts as soon as Mary and Watson leave the restaurant, turning his attention back to his food and paying attention to what other people are doing in the restaurant. His attention switching from the restaurant in general to Watson to Mary and back to the restaurant indicate his executive processes at work. This is more evident when one considers that he tunes out the noise of the restaurant in order to focus on his old friend and meet Mary, then switches thought processes again as he moves from casual social conversation to professional analysis, and then from this back to observation of the restaurant itself. Response inhibition can perhaps be seen in Holmes' calm acceptance of Mary's wine splashing in his face, although he is clearly not able to bring it to bear while engaged in the task of assessing her character (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 308). While Holmes delivers a highly objective assessment as he's been requested to do, the mood of the table begins to shift with each deeper revelation. When he touches on the subject of the missing ring, Mary registers shock and moves to hide the finger. Between Mary and Watson, the mood shifts to one of caution and, perhaps, fear. As Holmes continues, dismissing or perhaps misinterpreting the causes of this shift, Mary's emotions begin to take over as can be seen in her heavier breathing and in her emotional outburst of throwing her wine at Holmes. Because emotional arousal can enhance memory, and Holmes is discussing Mary's first fiancee, it is possible that she has been driven to her emotional outburst by strong feelings of grief relived. Her decision to leave the restaurant at that point might have been the combination of a variety of emotions including grief, anger, and embarrassment. Like Holmes, Watson expresses very little in the way of emotion, but the slightly sarcastic "Well done, old boy" comment he leaves as he stands to follow Mary indicates his displeasure, while his brief comments throughout Holmes' assessment indicate a rising level of stress. Goal-setting is another mental process that figures strongly in cognitive processes such as decision-making, and it is again Watson who best expresses this concept. It is clear that the goal of the dinner was for Holmes to get to know Mary a little better, since Mary and Watson are planning to get married. However, Watson seems to have reached his decision to introduce the two under duress – both from Holmes who indicates he's wanted to meet Mary as he helps her to her seat and from Mary who indicates she has been fascinated by the stories Watson tells of Holmes. Although he doesn't seem to hold out much hope that the two of them will get along, Watson is also exposed by Holmes as a betting man, showing that his risk-aversion is not high, while his attachment to both of these people perhaps leads him to believe the payoff of them actually getting along would be high. Following Mary's challenge, Holmes ceases to see her as a person and instead looks at her as a problem to be solved. After a few moments of intense scrutiny, he begins to deliver his conclusions, beginning with the most basic and becoming increasingly more intrusive. Part of the problem in their communication is that Mary and Holmes each have different goal states in mind. Mary just wants Holmes to surprise her with the degree to which he can discern something about her from tiny clues about her person. Holmes, on the other hand, lives by his ability to ferret out secrets and finds it impossible to set a goal state anywhere less than probing the deepest elements of the woman's life. This difference in approach clearly sets up the problem of Mary as an ill-defined problem, as there are no clearly defined goals. There are plenty of intermediate states at which Holmes might have stopped to the satisfaction of both Mary and Watson, but, as has been stated earlier, his attention is fully focused on the task of solving Mary rather than being concerned with the social situation in which he is taking part. In reaching his conclusion, Holmes uses the verbal protocol analysis (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 435), in which the solver describes his thought process as he solves the problem. He also uses inductive reasoning (Smith & Kosslyn, 2006, p. 443) as a means of filling in the gaps regarding what he has learned about Mary from her clothing and jewelry. Mary's reaching for and taking a drink from the glass is an example of motor cognition; it also prompts motor simulation within the audience. When she takes her first drink, the audience automatically begins to feel a bit dry in the mouth as well and may even go so far as to lick the lips in mimicry. Her action of throwing the wine is also a cognitive act, expressing her displeasure with Holmes to a much greater degree than the words she says following this act. In explaining what happened to the old fiancee, she simultaneously settles the record straight and lets Holmes know that she is insulted at his insinuation that she is simply after Dr. Watson's money. While most of this information is passed back and forth in the form of language, there are unspoken elements to the communication that take place at another level, including facial expressions, tone, and repetition of basic ideas such as Holmes' suggestion that Watson doesn't have money of his own. While cognitive psychology has a great many concepts to understand, such an analysis demonstrates that many of the processes discussed overlap and interact. It may be possible to study some of them separately, but none of them operates in a vacuum, and separation is much more problematic than it may seem. References Silver, J., Wigram, L., Downey, S., Lin, D. (Producers), & Ritchie, G. (Director). (2009). Sherlock Holmes [Motion Picture]. USA: Warner Brothers Pictures. Smith, E.E., & Kosslyn, S.M. (2006). Cognitive psychology: Mind and brain. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Read More