Field Theory - a General Theory of Psychology

by Edward A. Jones, Ph.D.

Background

I believe that Kurt Lewin failed to establish field theory as a unified theory of psychology simply because he stopped trying. Of course, mine is a minority view, since field theory is usually seen as an intellectual curiosity, rather than as a major contribution to psychology. This is largely because it failed to address such areas as psychobiology, conditioning, and psycholinguistics. So it effectively cut itself off from the mainstream of research trends in the United States, insuring that it would have little impact on the field as a whole. Yet, I hold that its fundamental concept of the life space had and still has a great deal to offer psychology, if it is redefined to embrace these areas and to reflect our current state of knowledge.

The Basic Theory

Lewin developed life space theory as a form of psychological field theory. In doing so, he assumed that individuals respond only to a limited portion of the environment at any given time. Thus a person's psychological world is different from the physical environment, because it forms a mental construction of events, rather than occuring simply as a direct sensory response to them. This means that a person's psychological world consists only of those events the individual is responsive to at a given point in time. What these events are is defined by the individual's sensory capacities, attention, memory and the internal and external events occurring at that moment.

Figure 1. The Life Space Model

Figure 1. Lewin's definition of the life space said it was the: "Totality of facts which determine the behavior (B) of an individual at a certain moment. The life space (L) represents the totality of possible events. The life space includes the person (P) and the environment (E). B = f (L) = f (P, E). It can be represented by a finitely structured space.". This space included "everything in which, toward which, or away from which the person can perform locomotions." and the " (1) Motor perceptual stratum (region); (2) inner-personal stratum (region): (a) peripheral regions, (b) central regions."; and Lewin observed that "The motor-perceptual system has the position of a boundary zone between the inner personal regions and the environment." (Lewin)

Lewin's idea essentially states that the life space is a bounded psychological field. This field contains the sub-fields of the person as well any other psychologically significant events in the environment. However, despite his use of the word "locomotion", his topology left little room for movement since it depicted the boundaries on the life space and its sub-fields as being impermeable, and treated them and the fields in them like water filled balloons, capable of interacting only by exerting surface pressures and tensions against each other. Consequently, his model reduced the concept of psychological fields to being an analogy. As a result, Lewin was unable to specify any systematic way in which fields and movements in them could be empirically defined or measured. Yet he did provide anecdotal examples which described movements toward or away from objects or events, and he attributed these to the "positive and negative valences" of the events involved. Yet, despite their concrete nature, even these examples remained essentially analogous, because Lewin never described the sources of positiveness and negativeness in his valences. This limitation is probably the principal reason why his theory has never gained wide acceptance.

Therefore, this area is a major one that must be addressed in any basic revision of the the life space concept. The approach taken here is designed to overcome Lewin's problem of topological analogies, by redefining the life space field as a personal information space or system, whose dimensions are structured by the limits of the individual's sensory and perceptual capacities. Thus the life space is treated as a construction of environmental realities encoded in the binary "all or none" functioning of the nervous system and given specific qualitative characteristics by the response potentials of the related sensors and brain areas involved. In this definition, life space is the totality of sensory and cognitive information that determines the behavior of an individual at a certain moment.

Combing sensory and information theory concepts into the definition of the life space makes a range of other definitions and measurements possible. For example, since all life space information must be detected and processed by the sensory and perceptual systems, the operating limits of those systems set the life space's potential size. A number of other operating parameters can be derived from the fact that the life space is an information system, as is described in the next section.

Information Theory and Life Space Dynamics.

General information theory defines information as being any event capable of yielding a predictable response. However, life space information is more specialized, so it is defined as any event capable of evoking a predictable response in the sensory and perceptual systems. However, it should be noted that the sensory and perceptual systems do not always respond in the same way to the same stimuli, because physiological and psychological conditions in the individual vary over time.

In fact, the impacts of competing stimuli produce varying consequences in a person at any given moment. Therefore the value of information from any stimulus can also change, so we need some means of defining information value that deals with these effects and their impacts on individua functioning. One mechanism may be the use of a utility criterion.

In this approach, information's value lies in the ways in which it affects a person's capacity to continue functioning effectively. People are constantly subjected to a variety of stresses that can produce strain, but effective functioning limits the amount of strain that actually occurs in a person. Therefore meaningful information enables an individual to keep the tensions that produce strain within tolerable limits, while meaningless information does not.

These tensions vary in impact with changes in physiological arousal, so the meaningfulness of information also varies with arousal. People have to constantly compensate for such changes in physiological conditions in order to process information effectively. Thus motivation has a strong impact on the content, scope and activity of the life space, and this needs to be explained in information theory terms. Thus meaningfulness is the effectiveness of information in yielding a consistent capacity to keep tension within acceptable limits, while meaninglessness occurs when information yields inappropriate, or uncertain responses to tension. This distinction mirrors the one that information theory draws between signals and noises. In that signals are non-random events that yield consistent responses, while noises are simply random occurrences that yield random outcomes. So we can think of the environment as containing psychologically meaningful information which issurrounded by psychologically meaningless noise.

Moreover, this expresses the idea that the life space is the totality of psychological events in an environment at a given moment. It also has the advantage of enabling us to define life space theory in terms of operant conditioning concepts, because one can think of psychologically meaningful information as discriminative stimuli and of psychologically meaningless noise as non-discriminative stimuli. This defines the psychological world as a constellation of stimulus and response potentials defined by interactions between behaviors and reinforcers.

This signal/noise cum operant conditioning approach to the life space also enhances our ability to define the relation between sensory potentials and life space structure. It does this by permitting us to incorporate signal detection concepts into our assessments of sensory parameters, and replace the classical psychophysical parameters used in Lewin's time. Signal detection theory and methodology have the added advantage of forming an information oriented approach to testing sensory limits.

They are based on the fact that there can never by any truly absolutely pure stimuli nor pure environments. Instead the signal detection concept presumes that all stimuli occur within an environment that contains background noise. So it tests subjects by ask ing them to discriminate between a compound stimulus set containing a noise and a signal and a simple stimulus set containing only the noise, with the signal noise ratio being varied to determine a discrimination threshold. In doing so, it clearly presumes that sensation must be based on attention rather than on some simple physical reaction potential, so it treats sensation as a response to psychologically significant events, which are defined as signals while all else is defined as noise.

Thus, it restates the idea that one should think of the whole life space as an information environment containing a wide array of both signals and noises. Signal detection studies enable us to objectively define this environment's dimensions at any point in time in terms of the potential of the individual to effectively discriminate between the signals and noises in it. The relative levels of the signals and noises determine the level of external tension or environmental uncertainty the individual experiences and so set the individual's level of potential strain.

Motivational Dynamics

Actual strain is a product of external events interacting with the individual's physical and psycholgical systems. It is clear that an individual's physical condition varies over time, but tends toward a short term equilibrium, as decribed in the concept of physiological homeostasis. In fact, this equilibration dynamic is an essential feature of life that distinguishes living systems from other types of systems.

We see it at all levels of life. Its large scale manifestation is easily observed in the balancing of chemical and energy flows in the ecosystem, while its small scale manifestations are seen within the chemical systems of cells. Each of these is mirrored in organismic homeostasis, which is the balancing of metabolic processes in the body which keeps it functioning and adapts it to changing environmental conditions. In this way, the body functions to actively counter entropy, the trend toward systemic uncertainty which would, if unchecked, lead to the rapid death of all things.

On a simpler scale, we can visualize entropy in the individual as tiredness, hunger, or thirst. Psychologically we can see it in the confusion and indecisiveness that obstruct effective thought and decision making. We can see entropy's impact at times when increased noise or unmanageable changes in the level or rate of environmental activity produce less effective reactions, or when the individuals' response capacities decrease within stable environmental conditions. It is clear that both internal and external events can yield entropy in the individual. Moreover, either form of entropy becomes clearly manifest by interfering with a person's capacity to respond to the environment.

Therefore entropy can be defined in terms of a decrease in response potentials. This decrease in response potentials is an inability to effectively react to the differences between signals and noises, so it can be thought of as an increase in uncertainty. A person's level of uncertainty increases when events reduce the effectiveness of a target signal in its competition with other non-target stimuli, which we define as noise. Therefore one can state that environmental, or absolute,uncertainty is determined by the ratio of the noise (N) to total signal input (Stin), with higher conditions involving higher levels of noise producing greater uncertainty, and ones involving lower levels of noise producing lower uncertainty. This notion is expressed in the formula:

The intensity of a stimulus is defined in terms of the amount physical energy the individual receives from that stimulus. Signal frequencies are defined as the rate of occurrence of the signals, and signal duration is defined as the time between signal onset and offset in a single presentation. Arousal sensitivities are defined as the physiological capacities to detect and respond to given stimuli. Reinforcement history refers to an individual's learning experience with a particular stimulus and the pay-offs associated with it. This latter point is significant, because it integrates conditioning concepts into the life space model.

Operant Conditioning and the Life Space Psychological signals and noises in the life space are identical to operant conditioning's discriminative and non-discriminative stimuli. A discriminative stimulus is defined as one that is able to evoke a predictable response at a given point in time, while a non-discriminative stimulus is one that does not do so. Of course, any stimulus can become either a discriminative or non-discriminative stimulus, depending on the individual's state of arousal, reinforcement potential, learning history and environmental conditions. Thus, operant condition ideas　simply restate the idea that the life space is composed of those current stimuli an individual is responsive or potentially responsive to at a given moment.

However, operant conditioning concepts do add to the idea of the lifespace. They do so, by allowing us to describe its dimensions in terms of stimulus discrimination and generalization. These concepts indicate the particular sensory gradient that an individual is operating along at a given time, so they define how signal versus noise judgements are likely to be made. This indicates how the boundaries on different parts of the system will be set, because discriminative learning defines what will be excluded from a region, while generalization defines what can be included.

Each of these process involves associations made along a specific gradient, or stimulus dimension. These associations are produced by reinforcement conditions which determine what consequences will be associated with a given activity, and the strength of those consequences. This means that the life space's "size" and "shape" can be further defined in terms of stimulus association gradients, reinforcement history and reinforcement strength. Operant conditioning focuses on concrete almost mechanical relations between stimuli and responses. So it may appear far removed from information theory, however, each of its learning sequences is initiated by the individual, in a pattern that fits the test - operate, test - exit learning model that Miller postulated for information theory. In fact, the shaping processes of operant conditioning are basically identical with Miller's model. Moreover, both it and Miller's ideas are consistent with other construct building models, particularly the one developed by G. A. Kelly.

Lewin, Miller and Kelly's systems all treat learning as a tension reduction process, that yields specific changes in individual behavior (B) as a result of environmental feedback (F). However, given the structure of the life space, any feedback that affects the person and the life space must form recursive loop, raising serious questions about entropy, see Figure 2.

Figure 2. Feedback Loop

Figure 2. All life space activity occurs inside the same boundary, so it would seem that it could not be sustained. However, the overall system boundary is not an impenetrable barrier, thus it can both gain and lose content. This happens when a life space enters into or breaks contact with other life spaces. The resulting flows of information are a vital component of the dynamics shaping life space functions.

However entropy is not really a problem, because the life space is permeable. So what appears to be recursive loop is actually a process taking place in a constantly changing place in whichthe activities of competing stimuli insure new feedback inputs. These variations must be accounted for in assessing an individual's learning and decision making. This is done most easily by describing these changes in in terms of the strength, positiveness and negativeness of the reinforcement (R) effects of those stimuli.

Reinforcement effects can be classified as: R+ R+, Approach Approach situations; R+ R-, Approach Avoidance situations and R- R-, Avoidance Avoidance. Their strength is measured in terms of differential reinforcement history, which can be is assessed by pairing target and distractor stimuli in testing. When assessing the impacts of a target stimulus and a distractor ; both R+ R+ and R- R- conditions are essentially subtractive, so target stimulus strength is reduced accordingly, while R+ R- strengths are essentially additive and target stimulus strength is increased accordingly. When there is more than one than one distractor competing with a target stimulus total distractor strengths should first be calculated with R+ R+ and R- R- strengths being treated as additive, while R+ R- strengths being treated as subtractive.

Of course, all of the effects of reinforcing stimuli are influenced by arousal sensitivity at the given point in time. This arousal sensitivity is a product of the strength of physiological arousal (deprivation, etc.) and the activation of cognitive constructs (expectancies) by the given stimulus conditions. These events in combination with reinforcement history and sensory potentials determine the life space dimensions that an individual is operating in at a given point in time. Thus the relation between the individual and the environment is defined by competing stimuli and response potentials. These should ultimately move toward the state of equilibration that exists when tension is in effect eliminated. Psychological Information System Functions Equilibration is a psychological fundamental. Jean Piagetbased his theory of cognitive development on this idea, by positing that the building of cognitive structures is a process of equilibration involving two psychological operations, assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the absorbing of new information into existing cognitive systems, which Piaget called schemata. Accommodation is the process of modifying existing schemata or producing new ones to fit what would otherwise be non-assimilatable information.

At its very beginning cognitive development starts with an almost unstructured assimilation of information into the initial simple schemata of the new born's nervous system. Over time an infant adds so much to these schemata that they reach a point where they no longer function effectively and infant restructures them by accommodation. These restructured schemata are then free to begin assimilating new information until their limits are reached and a new level of accommodation is required. Cognitive development proceeds through this cycle moving the individual through sets of stages that are spurred by the effects of physical maturation, including the growth and maturation of the nervous system. During this process, accommodation provides a counterbalance to assimilation pressures, while new assimilation expands to fill the potentials provided by accommodation or organic change.

Piaget's term schemata can by simply defined as another way of saying cognitive construct. Thushis theory can be easily incorporated within the life space theory outlined here. All that is required is that one visualize Piaget's stages as describing the emerging of the life space at various points in time, as in the examples in Figure 3:

Figure 3. Stages in Life Space Maturation

Adapted from Lewin

Figure 3. These three pictures of life space maturation were developed by Lewin to represent changes in the inner dynamics of the person. In an immature system, such as the sensori motor stage, the individual has a limited set of weakly bounded cognitive structures. In the preoperational stage new boundaries must be established to accommodate changed information system needs. While the formal stage adds new boundaries and modifies old ones to meet its specific needs. However the original information structures are still exist in the background and are capable of affecting behavior, particularly in high stress situations, where an individual may undergo a regression in functioning.

Schemata are essentially clusters of associated sets of information. They can be thought of in terms of bounded information units, because the strength and nature of associations in them determine what information will be included in or excluded from thought processes. Initially, these boundaries define discrete independent clusters of information, to which new associations can be made, however, over time, existing associations become stronger and through discrimination add sub-structures, which limit the possibility of new associations, and hence new assimilations. Yet, in the growing individual, continuing maturation causes increasing assimilation/adaptation pressures, and these require the system to accommodate them by developing new forms of schemata.

These new schemata have their own boundaries. So they alter the previous system to form the basis of a new stage of intellectual development, such as the preoperational stage. In time they gain strength and add sub-systems, and maturation and assimilation/adaptation pressures continue, so once again accommodation must occur. Eventually, this cycle yields a mature cognitive system, which continues to be self balancing, but less open to adapting to changing conditions, because its growth potentials are physiologically limited.

Learning theorists typically do not address this impact of growth potentials. Yet these potentials define the scoper of life space development in a very clear way, and in doing so demonstrate why one thinks in terms of set cognitive fields. These fields are the product of the basic potentials of the individual, which can be defined in terms of neurological and sensory perceptual limits. However they are more easily illustrated by reference to the ideas of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has defined the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of grammar as being largely a product of the development of pre-existing cognitive potentials. In essence, he says that all of us are pre-programmed to acquire language in a similar way. This means that our life spaces, which are shaped by cognitive rules dominated by language or language related signals must also share very similar structures and dynamics. Moreover, these structures and dynamics will be largely mediated by a general set of linguistic rules. Thus the scope and content of individual human life spaces must be similar and so must be limited in similar ways.

Language Use and Life Space Development

Chomsky's ideas have important implications to life space theory. I noted earlier that the linguistic aspect of the life space was not addressed by Lewin. His failure in this regard appears to have stemmed from the fact that he treated language stimuli as being equivalent to all other stimuli, in accord with the then prevailing views in psychology. However, it is now clear from Chomsky's work that people have a special sensitivity to language and that this must be addressed in discussions of the life space.

Vocabulary development plays a very strong role in shaping the life space. New words can either express a new awareness of the environment or actually create one, moreover when a new word is defined, it becomes a new discriminative stimulus in the life space. Thus as one learns new words, one adds symbolic content to one's life space; so much, in fact, that the greater portion of the life space of an adult consists of language defined elements.

The ways in which these elements are affected by grammar, syntax and other internal language mediating mechanisms are often studied in information theory. However, they also have an important, though less studied, social dynamic that Basil Bernstein has described in terms of two language codes, he calls the restricted and elaborated codes. These codes are socially significant, because their information carrying capacities differ in ways that affect how people tend to relate to each other, and how information flows between their respective life spaces.

The impacts of the codes derive from the ways in which they shape language content. Restricted code speech relies heavily on an external mediation of meaning, including facial expressions, gestures and other non-verbal modes of communication. Consequently, it encourages and in fact often requires direct "face to face" contacts. By contrast the meanings of elaborated code utterances are mediated entirely by their verbal content and internal structures. As a result, the use of the elaborated code does not require interpersonal contact, and, in fact, it can easily be used to discourage it. Thus one can think of restricted codes as opening more immediate contacts between the cores of two life spaces and of elaborated codes keeping contacts more superficial.

In addition, restricted code speech is direct and easily communicates the non-verbal component of emotional utterances. Moreover its content requires very little intellectual effort to grasp and restricted codes are quite effective in informal small group settings, where feelings are important and gestures are easily observed. However, its intimate, emotional aspect renders it inappropriate for use in formal or large group settings, moreover facial expressions and gestures are hard to observe in these settings, so restricted codes would only raise noise and uncertainty levels in them. Consequently, large group settings favor elaborated codes, whose meanings are clearly specified by internally, verbally mediated mechanisms, which exclude any extraneous "noise" producing activities.

In social psychology, terms one can say that small primary groups tend to make greater use of restricted codes, while large secondary groups tend to use elaborated codes. This is an important distinction, since the lack of rules and structures in primary groups relates directly to the fact that they rely on a type of language that is not amenable to rule structures, while the rule based structures of larger groups reflect their reliance on highly rule structured language. However, such attributions are not, in themselves, a sufficient explanation of the relationship between group size, group structure and language use.

A well developed explanation of codes and rules must also account for why groups should shift from one code to the other as a function of size. The answer to this question seems to lie in the ways in which people's brains organize clusters of information for memorizing. George Miller found that the human memory has a particular organizational system with definite limits on the size of the random lists that it can learn.

He began by observing that people have a tendency to make lists of seven items, such as the seven wonders of the world, seven digit telephone numbers, and so on. He then carried out a series of experiment sthat showed that people remember random items best when they group them into units of between five and nine items, and that lists which exceed this size tend to be broken up into smaller chunks. Consequently, he called this process of organization "chunking", and referred to the memory unit as a "chunk".

He found that systems of chunks are most easily recalled when they are organized in accord with a logical code. For example, it is easier to remember a shopping list if it is divided into the categories of meats, vegetables, dairy products and so on. Likewise it is easier to remember the various members of a large groups, if they are categorized by job title and functions, rather than simply recognized by their personal names. Thus one's ability to function in large groups depends on the use of a formal or elaborated code system of group definition.

In addition, as a group's size grows its members must adopt language that permits clear communications over distances and involve little need for personal contact. These pressures favor elaborated codes for such communications, because those codes reduce the potential uncertainty that a group might otherwise experience. However, this reduction of potential uncertainty comes at the cost of reducing the emotional closeness that can develop in a group, and thus it can create the potential for a conflict between group standards and personal emotional needs, such as is described in Freud's psychoanalytic theory.

Moreover, a noise controlling elaborated code has to restrict the possibility for variation. In doing, so, it dampens a group's capacity for innovation, and this can pose a serious threat to the group's long survival by restricting its capacity for adaptation. So there must be room in the linguistic environment for some restricted code functioning to meet individual emotional needs and also to provide for creativity. The balance struck here will do a great deal to shape the structure of each member's life space.

However, it does not exercise complete control over them, since the equilibration dynamic demands that all of an individual's functions be consistent with each other. Hence there is a need in the individual for a balancing of relations between words, ideas and experiences, and this may take the form of a defense mechanism, cognitive accommodation or of cognitive dissonance resolution. Whatever the case, this need for balancing relations further illustrates the role of equilibration as the central force shaping life space functions and growth.

Conclusion

It is evident that if human behavior conforms to systems dynamics in the ways described here that it must also open to assessment in terms of the same types of systemic dynamics as are used in the study physical and natural ecological phenomena. In addition, this means that human societies can also be approached from the same perspective, though a discussion of that is beyond the scope of the current paper. However, it is worth noting that there is a fundamental continuum in the functions and principles that govern physical, chemical, and biological events that extends to the psychological and social realms, and that this continuum can be expressed in terms of a few very simple, very basic and very powerful principles.

These principles form a set of unifying forces that should eventually unite all of the sciences in their continued study of the human condition. This development will then enable us to probe even further into our own natures than we have in the past and open up even broader vistas for future study, in time, this should serve to unify all existing human knowledge into a cohesive whole capable of further growth and expansion.