Over the past year I have worked on grounding John Boyd’s OODA loop in modern psychology. Both here, and more often in academic drafts, I have described Orientation as System 1 or intuitive cognition, Decision as System 2 or deliberate cognition, Observation as perception and Action as behavior. I still think that the OODA model, or something very much like it, is probably the best high-level conceptual model of the human mind that we have available.
However, it does not help us understand what causes variance in the population, in most tasks. The reason for this is that it does not directly address the issue of Motivation. To use a computer metaphor if Orientation or System 1 is the hard drive, controller cards, and BIOS, while System 2 is RAM, then Motivation is the hypervisor, or that thing that controls the ability of everything else to engage in behaviors to achieve a goal. Motivation, or the hypervisor, is useful because it regulates System 1/Orientation/Long-Term Memory’s and System 2/Decision/Working Memory’s control of behavior, which in turn affects performance. A model of cognition that does not include performance misses both motivation’s regulation of behavior, and motivation’s direct impact on performance. A model derived from Horn et al. (1993) may give us a way forward:
The cognitive components of this model can each be broken down into sub-components. Long-term memory includes both procedural knowledge (how to ride a bike, how to tie your shoes) and declarative knowledge (how you would answer questions: what is a bike? what are shoes?). Many tasks require procedural and decalarative knowledge to operate together. Working-memory includes visual working memory, which is in tasks such as imagining the rotation of objects in three-dimensional space, and verbal working memory, which is used to remember lists, numbers or names. As far as I can tell, motivation loads from both self-efficacy, the believe that as of now you can perform specific tasks to reach a goal, and attitudes, especially the enjoyment of a thing (as it relates to consumption) and desire to block out the world (as it relates to production).
This leaves the question of where the Central Executive is. John Sweller has argueed that it exists in Long-Term Memory, and indeed that no central executive is conceivable other than one that operates through a darwinistic random process within System 1 / Orientation. Alan Baddeley asserts it is a third component of working memory, alongside visual and verbal working memory, because central executive functions appear to tax working memory capacity. Albert Bandura asserts that humans are “agents,” and their Central Executive agency must rely within their Motivation. I don’t know.
The harmonization of John Boyd’s OODA loop with this model of what actually predicts performance is an important task for the field of psychology, especially if it can account for creativity. I hope somebody does it.
