Steps to a “Properly Embodied” cognitive science

The different effects of a sensorimotor grounding on AoA between bilingual concepts

Introduction

Psycholinguistic studies have argued for the age of acquisition (AoA) of words as a marker of concept learning, showing that the semantic features of concepts themselves influence the age at which their labels are learned. However, empirical evidence suggests that semantic features such as imageability and linguistic phenomena such as frequency do not adequately predict AoA. The present study takes the developmental approach of embodied cognition and investigates the effects of sensorimotor experiences on the ease of acquisition of the concept acquired in bilinguals. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether the sensorimotor experience can explain AoA beyond frequency; (2) and whether these patterns are consistent across L1 Chinese and L2 English.

Methods

We conducted sensorimotor rating measures in both Chinese and English on 207 items in which Chinese-English bilingual adults were requested to evaluate the extent to which they experienced concepts by employing six perceptual senses and five effectors for actions located in various regions of the body. Meanwhile, data on AoA and frequency were collected.

Results

The present study showed the sensorimotor experience was closely linked with AoAs in both languages. However, the correlation analysis revealed a trend of higher correlations between AoAs for the same concepts and L1 Chinese, relative to L2 English for the present Chinese-English bilinguals. Importantly, the hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that after controlling for frequency, sensorimotor experience explained additional variance in L1 AoA. However, L2 sensorimotor experience did not explain the variance in L2 AoA. Sensorimotor experience explained more share of variance in L1 AoA but frequency accounted for more variance in L2 AoA.

Discussion

The findings suggest that concept acquisition should consider the grounding in appropriate sensorimotor experience beyond linguistic phenomena like frequency.

Bounded rationality, enactive problem solving, and the neuroscience of social interaction

This article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decision making, which stems from the subjective expected utility theory of Savage (1954) that itself extended the analysis by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). On this view, the cognitive psychology of decision making precisely reflects the conceptual structure of formal decision theory. This article shows that there is an alternative way to understand decision making by recovering Newell and Simon's account of problem solving, developed in the framework of bounded rationality, and inserting it into the more recent research program of embodied cognition. Herbert Simon emphasized the importance of problem solving and differentiated it from decision making, which he considered a phase downstream of the former. Moreover according to Simon the centre of gravity of the rationality of the action lies in the ability to adapt. And the centre of gravity of adaptation is not so much in the internal environment of the actor as in the pragmatic external environment. The behaviour adapts to external purposes and reveals those characteristics of the system that limit its adaptation. According to Simon (1981), in fact, environmental feedback is the most effective factor in modelling human actions in solving a problem. In addition, his notion of problem space signifies the possible situations to be searched in order to find that situation which corresponds to the solution. Using the language of embodied cognition, the notion of problem space is about the possible solutions that are enacted in relation to environmental affordances. The correspondence between action and the solution of a problem conceptually bypasses the analytic phase of the decision and limits the role of symbolic representation. In solving any problem, the search for the solution corresponds to acting in ways that involve recursive feedback processes leading up to the final action. From this point of view, the new term enactive problem solving summarizes this fusion between bounded and embodied cognition. That problem solving involves bounded cognition means that it is through the problem solver's enactive interaction with environmental affordances, and especially social affordances that it is possible to construct the processes required for arriving at a solution. Lastly the concept of enactive problem solving is also able to explain the mechanisms underlying the adaptive heuristics of rational ecology. Its adaptive function is effective both in practical and motor tasks as well as in abstract and symbolic ones.

Multiple Roles of Multimodality Among Interacting Agents

The term ‘multimodality’ has come to take on several somewhat different meanings depending on the underlying theoretical paradigms and traditions, and the purpose and context of use. The term is closely related to embodiment, which in turn is also used in several different ways. In this paper, we elaborate on this connection and propose that a pragmatic and pluralistic stance is appropriate for multimodality. We further propose a distinction between first and second order effects of multimodality; what is achieved by multiple modalities in isolation and the opportunities that emerge when several modalities are entangled. This highlights questions regarding ways to cluster or interchange different modalities, for example through redundancy or degeneracy. Apart from discussing multimodality with respect to an individual agent, we further look to more distributed agents and situations where social aspects become relevant.

In robotics, understanding the various uses and interpretations of these terms can prevent miscommunication when designing robots, as well as increase awareness of the underlying theoretical concepts. Given the complexity of the different ways in which multimodality is relevant in social robotics, this can provide the basis for negotiating appropriate meanings of the term at a case by case basis.

Embodied Interaffectivity in the Emergence and Maintenance of Group Cohesion

Group cohesion is an affect-laden construct, with a large body of research indicating its importance for success of teams. Surprisingly, it has received scant attention in collaborative learning contexts, and little is known about its development as dynamically emergent in the spontaneous, interdependent actions of actors during groupwork. This paper details an illustrative case analysis which took an embodied perspective to explore the role of interaffectivity in the emergence and maintenance of cohesion in one small group of university students who reported a highly positive and productive experience of collaborative science activities over a semester. The case analysis made visible group cohesion as unfolding and enactive in the myriad ephemeral and seemingly inconsequential microlevel behaviors that evolved into macro-temporal patterns of positive embodied interaffectivity, magnifying their visibility and collective impact. A fine-grained embodiment lens unveiled how participants cocreated collaborative affordances in actions that involved corporeal orientation as well as use of space, task, and other material artifacts. Task-related humor within routine task interaction offered the potential for establishing group cohesion in early group life, but also posed a potential threat to task-focused cohesiveness, requiring careful modulation at critical task points. Attentiveness not only to the task but importantly, to one another as interpersonal attentiveness, appeared to be a key factor in developing and maintaining group cohesion, also demonstrating collaborative learning as a process of orienting to and understanding tasks through one another. An embodiment lens highlighted mutual attentiveness in the ongoing orienter-orientee microprocesses that facilitated group orientation early in group life, and in reorienting to positive embodied interaffectivity when the group reconvened for their joint science activities in subsequent weeks.

A Radical Reassessment of the Body in Social Cognition

The main issue addressed in this paper is to provide a reassessment of the role and relevance of the body in social cognition from a radical embodied cognitive science perspective. Initially, I provide a historical introduction of the traditional account of the body in cognitive science, which I here call the cognitivist view. I then present several lines of criticism raised against the cognitivist view advanced by more embodied, enacted and situated approaches in cognitive science, and related disciplines. Next, I analyze several approaches under the umbrella of embodied social cognition. My line of argument is that some of these approaches, although pointing toward the right direction of conceiving that the social mind is not merely contained inside the head, still fail to fully acknowledge the radically embodied social mind. I argue that the failure of these accounts of embodied social cognition could be associated with so-called 'simple embodiment.' The third part of this paper focuses on elaborating an alternative characterization of the radically embodied social mind that also tries to reduce the remaining problems with 'simple embodiment.' I draw upon two turns in radically embodied cognitive science, the enactive turn, and the intersubjective turn. On the one hand, there is the risk of focusing too much on the individual level in social cognition that may result in new kinds of methodological individualism that partly neglect the social dimension. On the other hand, socially distributed and socially extended approaches that pay more attention to the dynamics within social interaction may encounter the risk of ignoring the individual during social interaction dynamics and simultaneously not emphasizing the role of embodiment. The approach taken is to consider several ways of describing and incorporating the (individual) social mind at the social level that includes language. I outline some ideas and motivations for how to study and expand the field of radical embodied social cognition in the future, as well as pose the ubiquitous hazard of falling back into a cognitivism view in several ways.

The Variability-Stability-Flexibility Pattern: A Possible Key to Understanding the Flexibility of the Human Mind

Flexibility is a defining characteristic of our species. The current literature presents cognitive flexibility as having several meanings; this lack of a single definition may hinder work on understanding the concept. In this article, I begin with describing the variability–stability–flexibility pattern in the development of various abilities and then argue that as part of this chain, flexibility can be considered a property of the cognitive system and not in itself an ability. The implications of and challenges to this view are discussed. This view can foster progress in the understanding of cognitive flexibility: It can serve as a unifying framework in which to study the dynamic flow of stability and flexibility in the functioning of the cognitive system.

What's on the Inside Counts: A Grounded Account of Concept Acquisition and Development

Understanding the factors which affect the age of acquisition (AoA) of words and concepts is fundamental to understanding cognitive development more broadly. Traditionally, studies of AoA have taken two approaches, either exploring the effect of linguistic variables such as input frequency (e.g., Naigles and Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998) or the semantics of the underlying concept, such as concreteness or imageability (e.g., Bird et al., 2001). Embodied theories of cognition, meanwhile, assume that concepts, even relatively abstract ones, can be grounded in the embodied experience. While the focus of such discussions has been mainly on grounding in external modalities, more recently some have argued for the importance of interoceptive features, or grounding in complex modalities such as social interaction. In this paper, we argue for the integration and extension of these two strands of research. We demonstrate that the psycholinguistic factors traditionally considered to determine AoA are far from sufficient to account for the variability observed in AoA data. Given this gap, we propose groundability as a new conceptual tool that can measure the degree to which concepts are grounded both in external and, critically, internal modalities. We then present a mechanistic theory of conceptual representation that can account for groundability in addition to the existing variables argued to influence concept acquisition in both the developmental and embodied cognition literatures, and discuss its implications for future work in concept and cognitive development.

Aesthetic perception and its minimal content: a naturalistic perspective

Aesthetic perception is one of the most interesting topics for philosophers and scientists who investigate how it influences our interactions with objects and states of affairs. Over the last few years, several studies have attempted to determine "how aesthetics is represented in an object," and how a specific feature of an object could evoke the respective feelings during perception. Despite the vast number of approaches and models, we believe that these explanations do not resolve the problem concerning the conditions under which aesthetic perception occurs, and what constitutes the content of these perceptions. Adopting a naturalistic perspective, we here view aesthetic perception as a normative process that enables agents to enhance their interactions with physical and socio-cultural environments. Considering perception as an anticipatory and preparatory process of detection and evaluation of indications of potential interactions (what we call "interactive affordances"), we argue that the minimal content of aesthetic perception is an emotionally valued indication of interaction potentiality. Aesthetic perception allows an agent to normatively anticipate interaction potentialities, thus increasing sense making and reducing the uncertainty of interaction. This conception of aesthetic perception is compatible with contemporary evidence from neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and interaction design. The proposed model overcomes several problems of transcendental, art-centered, and objective aesthetics as it offers an alternative to the idea of aesthetic objects that carry inherent values by explaining "the aesthetic" as emergent in perception within a context of uncertain interaction.