Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies (2008)

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12177&page=20

 

Typical didactic schemes for organizing psychological constructs imply a more rigid separation between them than actually exists and operates. Today, the main organizing constructs for understanding psychology at the individual level are affect, cognition, and motivation.¹ However, such organization does not necessarily reflect how affective, cognitive, and motivational processes interact. Indeed, attempting to understand each construct in isolation rather than the three as an interdependent triumvirate is to wander in an epiphenomenal domain rather than a realistic psychological domain. If scientists could, for example, accurately determine how a particular soldier processes information about a member of the enemy force (cognition), that knowledge would do very little to help us understand how the soldier will behave toward that enemy unless scientists also take into account how he or she feels about that enemy (affect) and how both constructs play into motivational processes.

When behavioral scientists ask why individuals behave in certain ways, they typically are asking a motivational question. During the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists focused on external environmental factors such as reinforcement to explain motivation. In the latter half of that century, they focused on internal processes to explain affect (moods and emotions) and cognition (information processing, memory) but without knowing details of the causal interconnections among the processes. Today, psychologists understand that behavior occurs between interrelated affective, cognitive, and motivational processes on the one hand and environmental factors and processes on the other. This complex set of interrelated factors must be understood and accounted for to detect a psychological state—that is, to “read” a mind—using any technology.

There has been growing use of the term “mind reading” in the popular press and in a few circumscribed areas of the Department of Defense (DOD). Because the precise meanings of the terms that are used to communicate understanding are critical to the scientific endeavor, the committee believes it is important that the DOD and IC communities understand what is meant in this study by “mind reading” and “psychological state.” Mind reading typically refers to the capacity (imparted by an external mechanism—that is, some form of technology) to determine precisely what an individual is thinking or intending, whether or not the individual is willing to communicate that state of mind. As discussed below, to “read” minds scientists must understand how minds really work to come up with a technology that is of real use, and there are several formidable barriers to

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Individual psychology is also determined by important factors such as fundamental biological drives and programming of behavior, cognition, and affect by all levels of biology, including genes, proteins, receptors, synapses, and nuclei, among others. In addition, endogenous and genetic drivers dominate cognition, affect, and behavioral capability—for example, in human development, sleep and circadian rhythms of cognition and affect, eating, the need for social affiliation and for salt and water, sexual drive, aggression, and nurturing—and dominate human behavior. This section of the report discusses in some detail environmental factors relating to individual psychology, but this is not meant to de-emphasize the importance of biological factors such as the ones just described.