Culture and Thought: A Psychological Introduction by Michael Cole, Sylvia Scribner (review)

Books 247 His ‘best bet’ by the brain is modified by additional external inputs towards, presumably, arriving at an even ‘better bet’. But this begs the question of what form the ‘best bet’ takes. To say, as he does, that ‘. .. the pattern of neural activity represents the object and to the brain is the object’ (his italics) seems close to the formulation of Gestalt psychologists that he rejects. Even though he makes the point that no internal ‘picture’ is involved in the brain, he nevertheless seems to imply that the brain is observing some kind of informational entity that is separate from itself. The fact that he does not define what he means by external input or information in the book leaves a great gap in his analysis of vision. Much of the difficulty in the psychology of visual perception seems to arise from the question as to whether the retinal image is a picture of any kind. The idea that an image on the retina is basic to visual art work is implicit in his chapter entitled Art and Reality and it is here that many artists will probably feel misgivings. He discusses pictorial art mainly in terms of painters making representations of their retinal images, or rather of their brain’s interpretations of these retinal images, since the sizes and shapes of the retinal images are modified in the brain by the phenomenon of size constancy (interpretations of the size of objects as they vary in distance from the eye). Most painters are not primarily concerned with depictions in perspective but with expressing their experiences of reality, of which perspective may be one aspect. The idea that the brain considers successive hypotheses of the appearance of external reality from discrete inputs to arrive at ‘the best bet’ places an emphasis on the importance of perspective. The history of painting does not reflect this emphasis. Painters are concerned mainly with the deriving of meaning from the portrayal of selected aspects of the visible external world. It is the possibility to invent new combinations of aspects drawn from the real environment that provides one of the mainsprings of artistic activity. The perspective aspect, as described in the book, is a Western phenomenon and a very small part of world art history. It is perhaps inevitable that in a small book of a popularscience type there would be a concentration on the approach to understanding vision favoured by the author. The addition of several qualifying phrases in the w o n d edition of the book indicates that his interpretation of certain data is not shared by some researchers. The reader would do well, therefore, to bear in mind that there are competing hypotheses of visual perception to take into account. Culture and Thought: A Psychological Introduction. Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner. Wiley, New York and Chichester, England, 1974. 227 pp., illus. €5.15. Reviewed by Jan B .Derqgowrki* This is a highly readable book on cross-cultural studies, an area of psychology that in recent years has grown in size, but that is not in itself new. The main concern of the book’s eight chapters is with cultural differencesin psychological processes involving language, perception, learning, thinking and memory. The term ‘cultural’ is used rather loosely, since in most of the studies considered the postulated cultural effects are confounded with possible genetic factors. One can adopt a variety of attitudes to such confounding. One can, irrationally, regard culture as obviously a dominant factor or one can regard the phenomena described as being of great interest because they show us something of the rich variety of human experience, even if their origin is not well defined. Alternatively, one may, as is often done in the arts, regard the psychological processes involved as of secondary importance and be primarily concerned with the results of such processes, results that to a psychologist may appear to be mere *Dept. of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Old Aberdeen, AB9 2UB, Scotland. epiphenomena. One certainly cannot dismiss the findings and ideas discussed as trivial or uninteresting. The readers of Leonardo, one presumes, would be most interested in the chapter on Culture and Perception. I shall therefore review...