Captured by a Frame
The quiet mechanism behind “obvious” solutions we can’t see
The four sentences below are normal, coherent English sentences:
The ship sailed past the harbor sank.
The building blocks the sun shining on the house faded are red.
The granite rocks by the seashore with the waves.
The cotton clothing is made of grows in Alabama.
On first reading these sentences, most of us feel stuck; they do not cohere, they do not work somehow. We may be driven to try rather farfetched ideas to make sense of them: Maybe sentence (1) is really two conjoined clauses, such as “The ship sailed past and the harbor sank?” But harbors do not sink, so that interpretation does not work either. If we truly believe that these are normal English sentences, the experience of trying to understand them can be intensely frustrating and annoying.
What is going on? Consider the following frame for sentence (1):
A small part of Napoleon’s fleet tried to run the English blockade at the entrance to the harbor. Two ships, a sloop and a frigate, ran straight for the harbor while a third ship tried to sail past the harbor in order to draw enemy fire. The ship sailed past the harbor sank.
If you have just encountered sentence (1) for the first time, this little story should help solve the problem. “Oh! You mean ‘The ship (comma) sailed past the harbor (comma) sank!’ But that’s dirty pool!” Not so; the sentence is really quite normal, as we can see when it is put in framing context. We could, of course, insert the subordinate clause marker “which” to create
(1′) The ship which sailed past the harbor sank;
but this use of “which” is optional in English, though we tend to insert it when needed for clarity.
The problem we encountered with sentence (1) is one kind of fixedness. We approach sentences in English with the contextual framing assumption that the first verb will be the main verb, barring contrary semantic or syntactic information (viz., Milne, 1982). If “sailed” is assumed to be the main verb, then we do not know what to do with the verb “sank.” But “sailed” may also be the verb of a subordinate clause, as in the following examples:
a. The ship sailed by the commodore was a beautiful sight.
b. The ships sailed at Newport are racing sloops.
c. To my surprise, a ship sailed by a good crew sank.
Here the main verbs always come later in the sentence. The trouble with sentence (1) is that we tend to become committed to one syntactic interpretation before all the evidence is in, and we may find it impossible to back away from it. In the most general terms we are captured by one unconscious interpretation of the beginning of the sentence. We are fixated by the wrong syntactic frame.
Fixedness can be found in all kinds of problem solving. It is found in vision, in language perception, in solving puzzles, in science, literature, politics, and warfare.
In retrospect, some of those assumptions are questionable. But that is just the point about fixedness: Seen in retrospect or from “the outside,” it is hard to believe that the fixated person cannot see the “obvious” solution. But within the fixating frame the solution is not obvious at all: It is literally impossible to perceive. Yet fixedness is a completely normal part of learning. Whenever we try to learn something before we have the knowledge needed to make sense of the material, we may find ourselves interpreting it in the wrong framing context. McNeill (1966) cites the example of a mother trying to teach her child something about English negation — a bit prematurely:
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me.”
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me.”
(Eight repetitions of this dialogue)
Mother: No, now listen carefully, say, “Nobody likes me.”
Child: Oh! Nobody don’t likes me.
A year later the same child would laugh at the error, but when the dialogue was recorded he was not prepared to perceive the difference. In learning, as in life, readiness is all. A major point is to realize that our notion of “fixedness” depends critically on having an outside point of view in which the mistake is a mistake. That is to say, as adults we can find the above example comfortably amusing, because we know the right answer. But for the child the error is no error at all. The “flawed” sentence is not experienced as erroneous; in terms of the child’s internalized rules, it is not an error at all.
As often says, CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.
or for better grammar, As Often says, CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.
"Often" ass s a roper noun makes it grammatically correct.
Another great article.
Priming shapes perception!