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Child Development, November/December 2006, Volume 77, Number 6, Pages 1563 – 1567
Dissociations, Developmental Psychology, and Pedagogical Design
Angeline Lillard
University of Virginia
Although dissociations in children’s responses are sometimes about ‘‘getting it right’’ for an experimenter, they
might also often reflect differences between conscious and subconscious processing that are not geared to
correct performance. Research with adults also reveals many cases of dissociation, and adults can more easily be
subjected to neuroimaging methods that might help shed light on dissociation. Finally, much of the research on
dissociations shows that human cognition is optimized in some contexts over others. School environments often
correspond to less optimizing contexts. Research on dissociation could be used to inform pedagogical design.
Woolley’s (2006) wide-ranging and thought-provoking article does a tremendous service in pointing out
the interest of and exploring reasons for several cases
of dissociation in children’s responses to experimental tasks. She covers cases of verbal – behavioral
dissociation in the realms of fantasy, false belief,
mathematical reasoning, and conservation, and she
proposes that considering children’s goals in each
situation may shed light on the phenomenon: one
response might reflect the child’s goal of ‘‘getting the
right answer’’ while another response reflects a different goal (or no goal at all). In her examples, typically the child’s goal for the (often) less-apt answer
is to convey knowledge to an experimenterFexcept
when it is to help someone (and they get it right, as in
Garnham & Perner, 2001; Woolley & Phelps, 1994).
Although a goal of ‘‘getting it right’’ can make sense
of dissociations in these tasks, it does not explain
some other known dissociations, described below.
Dissociations deserve close study because they
have the potential to reveal a great deal about the
human mind. In this commentary I first consider
dissociations in terms of the historical context of our
view of mind, and point out their relation to research
in embodied cognition. I then point out some additional dissociations and suggest looking for similarities in the adult literature as an additional avenue
for understanding what dissociations reveal about
the human mind. Finally I consider the implications
of these discoveries for the environments and
methods used in education.
I thank Jennifer Van Reet and an anonymous reviewer for
comments on an earlier draft of this commentary.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed
to Angeline Lillard, University of Virginia, Gilmer Hall,
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400. Electronic mail may be sent to
[email protected].
Unconscious Processing
Tim Wilson has noted that ‘‘Consciousness is a
limited capacity system, and to survive in the world
people must be able to process a good deal of information outside of conscious awareness’’ (Wilson,
2002, p. 8). He cites estimates that our sensory systems take in 11 million bits of information per second
and yet conscious awareness processes only about 40
of them! The child’s brain is developing to do this,
and our analysis of dissociation errors is much expanded if we also consider how unconscious processing might be guiding the child’s behavior, and
either gradually becoming conscious (development)
or exerting its effects in parallel with those of conscious processing. Piaget (1930), of course, foreshadowed this with a discussion of sensorimotor
intelligence, which can become conscious and operational (Lucienne opening and closing his mouth,
then realizing he could manually open the matchbox
to retrieve the chain), or can simply exist in parallel
to operational intelligence.
Dissociations direct us to attend much more to the
importance of the body to the mind, to the cumulative effects of those 11 million bits of information
taken in through the body and not necessarily entering consciousness. Considering the history of
ideas in broad strokes, one can say that Western
thought did not pursue this angle; Eastern thought,
in contrast, with Tai Chi, meditation, yoga, and a
holistic, contextual approach founded its philosophical traditions on the entwining of body and
mind (for an interesting discussion, see Nisbett,
2003). Western thought has held the body and mind
much more separate, early on in the oral methods of
schooling, using speaking rather than doingFthe
Socratic tradition of argument, the recitations of the
r 2006 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2006/7706-0005
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Lillard
monksFand finally in Descartes’ famous assertion
that conscious thought (rather than say intentional
movement) is the proof of existence (Descartes, 1641/
1993). This was referred to by Damasio (1994) as
Descartes’ ‘‘error’’ because of its ignoring of the body:
instead, Damasio stated, ‘‘Nature appears to have
built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the
apparatus of biological regulations, but also from it
and with it’’ (p. 128). With some notable exceptions
(e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), the Western theory-ofmind ensconced in psychology and philosophy literature has tended to follow Descartes, largely ignoring the body and the context (Lillard, 1998).
It is ironic that behaviorism was for a time a
dominant sequel to Descartes’ disembodied view of
mind. When members of the European psychophysics laboratories of the late 1800s gave responses
on introspective tasks about their perceptions that
suggested they were unduly influenced by their laboratories’ different theories, behaviorists responded
that we should ignore minds, and focus only on
objectively measurable behaviors (Watson, 1913). A
focus on behaviors could have led to attention on the
body, and then directly to an embodied view of
cognition, but instead minds and their interpretive
capacities were purposely overlooked by behaviorists. Behaviors were studied out of natural contexts
and with imposed consequences: Skinner boxes,
shocking mazes. When the mind was brought back
into psychology, in the late 1950s, it was in part
through showing that contexts matter (The New Look,
Bruner, 1957), but not with attention to the role of
bodies. The wave of research on conservation in the
1970s was very much about contexts, showing dissociations within a verbal form: when one asked a
conservation question one way, one got one answer,
and when one asked in another context, one got a
different answer. Context is still working its way into
psychology, for example in attention to how, overdevelopment, culture becomes ingrained in thought
(Shweder et al., 1998).
Yet another new New Look in psychology today is
at the body’s role in the mind’s processes (Barsalou,
Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003; Diamond, 2000;
Glenberg, 1999; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Niedenthal,
Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005;
Proffit, 2006), highlighting that minds evolved to
serve bodies (Witt & Proffitt, 2005). The role of the
body in our thinking processes is clear in studies that
show dissociations that hinge on people’s different
bodily states. When wearing a heavy backpack,
undergraduates say a hill is steeper than when they
are not wearing one (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). When
holding a stick that could retrieve an object, the ob-
ject is judged to be closer (Witt, Proffitt, & Epstein,
2005). Our minds are geared toward perceiving the
environment in a way that is appropriate to our
potential interaction with it: it is harder to climb a
hill with a backpack; hence it will subjectively seem
steeper. But note another dissociation here: if asked
to position a board so its angle reflects the steepness
of the hill, the backpack has no impact. Apparently
the eye can pass along to the body what would be
parallel, while the conceptual systemFthe explicit
judgmentFviews that same surface as being steeper
than it would be with no backpack on.
A wealth of research in embodied cognition
complements these findings, showing how important bodies are to thought, and how we can get one
answer when we involve bodies and a different one
when we ask for judgments from those who must sit
still (for a review, see, Lillard, 2005, Chapter 2). For
example, babies who crawl through a space find
hidden objects more than do babies who are carried
(Benson & Uzgiris, 1985) and children who walk
through an imagined space are better able to state the
locations of objects in the real space than are those
who sit still while imaging the space (Rieser, Garing,
& Young, 1994). But spatial knowledge might especially lend itself to bodily representation; hence it is
important to note that body-dependent dissociations
are seen in other realms as well. For example, we
recall sentences about actions better when we enact
those sentences at encoding (Cohen, 1989; Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1994). Long after their last performance of a play, actors better recall lines they
spoke when moving across the stage than lines
spoken while standing still (Noice, Noice, & Kennedy, 2000). Gesture appears to assist early language
development (Goodwyn, Acredolo, & Brown, 2000;
Ozcaliskan & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Dissociations
call attention to the role of the body in cognition
because different responses are often given when
bodies are involved, and these dissociations make
quite clear the validity of embodied cognition as an
approach to the functioning of the mind (see also
Niedenthal et al., 2005).
Child/Adult Parallels
To capitalize on what dissociations can teach us
about the function of the human mind, an additional
approach is to look for similarities in the child phenomenon and the voluminous adult literature that
Woolley (2006) (for good reasons) refrained from
discussing. Take for example the child phenomenon
of manual versus visual dissociation on A-not-B
object permanence tasks (Baillargeon, DeVos, &
Dissociations, Developmental, and Pedagogy
Graber, 1989). What the child does in getting the
answer wrong manually might be analogous to what
makes adults get the answer right in sequence
learning tasks. Adults are often not conscious that
they are learning the rules of a particular motor sequence but their behaviors show that they are
(Curran, 1998). One difference across the child and
adult tasks is that reality was switched on the
childFthe adult’s performance is correct because
reality does not change, and the child’s is incorrect
because it does. When the motor element of reaching
to get the object is removed in Baillargeon’s visual
task, we learn that the child’s visual system correctly
takes the changed world into account; only the
child’s body lives in a previous world. Our ability to
learn sequences and to detect patterns leads to the
incorrect motor response when the world changes,
resulting in the dissociation. Diamond has found
that prefrontal changes appear to govern responses
to the A-not-B task (Diamond & Doar, 1989), whereas
the adult sequence learning literature has looked to
both prefrontal function and the basal ganglia
(Middleton & Strick, 2000). Both the adult and child
literatures suggest that the motor system has its own
representation of the world, which may or may not
be filtered through conscious awareness. A closer
look at sequence learning in adults might shed further light on these dissociations in children.
The phenomenon of choking under pressure (Beilock & Carr, 2005), observed in golf, responding to
rapid-fire math questions, and so on, seems similar to
a dissociation in understanding pretending observed
in my laboratory (Ma & Lillard, in press). When 2year-olds watch someone pretend to eat alongside
another person who really eats (but whose food is not
visible to the infant), infants’ implicit responses suggest that they know which one is pretending: when
watching the real but not the pretend eater, they are
apt to smack their lips, swallow, and reach out.
However, when asked to ‘‘get the real grapes,’’ 2-yearolds respond at chance. By 2 12 or 3, children correctly
reach for the covered bowl containing real grapes on
the first trial, but not on later ones. This suggests that
short-term memory reserves (keeping track of which
bowl is which) are taxed after the initial trial for children; research also suggests that the choking phenomena in adults stems from taxation of short-term
memory (Beilock & Carr, 2005). As research with
adults regarding these phenomena increasingly capitalizes on neuroimaging methods, it might assist in
understanding such dissociations in children too.
When children go from one- to two-word speech,
many go through a phase when they can give the
second word in gesture, and this predicts when they
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will be able to use two actual words (Iverson &
Goldin-Meadow, 2005). This seems similar to descriptions of high-level physicists using gesture
while struggling to understand particularly difficult
concepts as they explain new hypotheses (Ochs,
Gonzales, & Jacoby, 1996). In fact, when their gestures are redundant with speech (conveying the
same information), adult speakers remember more
(Wagner, Nusbaum, & Goldin-Meadow, 2004). This
is a dissociation between knowledge revealed by talk
alone versus what is revealed by talk and gesture,
and gesture is thought to assist by helping people
offload some of the cognitive work to the motor
realm (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). Again, neuroimaging
might be very helpful in understanding how gesture
serves cognition in adults, and such findings might
shed light on the process in children. The dissociation between gesture and speech frequently observed in Goldin-Meadow’s research is important in
helping bring attention to the relation between
movement and thought, which has profound implications for how the mind functions and, consequently, for education.
Implications for Education
The movement in psychology from a disembodied
mind, to a mind with context (observed in cultural
psychology), to a mind that is also closely connected
to a body and serves that body has very important
implications for the environments and methods by
which we educate children. Our educational system
was designed for a different sort of organism than
current research suggests we are, and the troubles
youth have in our society bespeak those issuesFas
Eccles has put it, schools are a case of very poor
person-environment fit (Eccles et al., 1993). But
whereas Eccles focuses on poor fit at adolescence,
after the transition from small, neighborhood elementary to larger middle or junior high schools, a poor
fit to the workings of the human mind might actually
be a problem all along. Schools were designed for a
model of the child appropriate to the psychology of
the early 1900s, rather than for the model of the child
that psychology research evokes today (Lillard, 2005).
Perhaps middle or junior high is when things go so
badly for so many children because the cumulative
effects of what children face before then come to
fruition as one sheds the stability of one’s middle
childhood self to begin to become an adult. Consider
here just the implications of disembodiment, and the
contingent dissociations seen in that realm.
We know that people generally think better when
their movements are aligned with their thinking, and
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Lillard
yet we have a school system that typically has children learn while seated at desks. They listen to the
teacher, and occasionally they write something or
say something. This made good sense to Thorndike
(Jonich, 1962), because he was interested in what he
termed ‘‘connectionism’’: getting the child to form
connections between entities like ‘‘dime’’ and ‘‘10
cents.’’ Rewarding the child (with candy or nice
looks) when the connection was properly made was
one of the teacher’s main functions. This could occur
perfectly well while the child was seated, listening to
the teacher, and reciting information orally or on
tests. Thorndike was a major force in the design of
the schools that we basically still have today.
Yet if we take seriously the finding that we learn
best when our bodies reflect what we are learning
through movement, children should learn by carrying out actions with dimes, trading them for 10
pennies and for the goods they might buy. Children
should be learning with materials that bring their
bodies in line with their minds. In addition, if
learning is to involve the body interacting with materials, to keep focus on the materials (rather than the
teacher), children must go at their own pace. Dissociations show this by revealing that people have
different modes of cognition.
Dissociations also point to the need to take seriously the notion of context and cognition in
schooling, because dissociation occurs not only
across tasks that involve the body more and less, but
also across tasks that have a meaningful context or
do not. School tasks, as currently implemented, often
lack meaningful contexts. One learns the Pythagorean theorem, but not who Pythagoras was, how he
derived this theorem, what the theorem applies to in
the real world, and so on. Yet we know that knowledge is often best accessed in meaningful contexts:
that American housewives can perform mathematical calculations when considering sales in grocery
stores that they cannot do with pencil and paper
(Lave, 1988), for example, and that nursing students
learn probability best when the examples come from
medicine (Ross, 1983). Our traditional schools are not
designed to provide contexts that support cognition,
although the best teachers try to. There are alternative school systems, like Montessori, that are constructed from the ground up in ways that appear to
better support children’s social and academic development (Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006).
Conclusions
We can capitalize on dissociations for what they can
teach us about how the human mind works. Seeking
and attending to parallel dissociations in adults and
children can further this effort because of the relatively easier task of using neuroimaging techniques
with adult subjects. In line with Woolley’s (in press)
suggestions, developmentalists should use more
multimethod approaches to shed more light on
functioning of the mind via dissociations. Dissociations also point quite importantly to the need to
consider the body – mind relationship more in
psychology, a task recently advancing under the rubric
of embodied cognition. Much of human thinking is in
response to stimuli of which we might not even be
consciously aware, and developmentalists need to
consider this large swathe of underground thinking
when studying children’s responses to tasks. Finally,
the schools we have were designed in response to a
model of the child’s mind that we now knowFpartly
through work showing dissociationsFis not apt.
Developmental psychologists should go further in
considering how their findings suggest differentF
even radically differentFmodels of schooling that are
better suited to children than is the model bequeathed
to us by behaviorism.
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