Music performance as knowledge acquisition: a review and preliminary conceptual framework

To what extent does playing a musical instrument contribute to an individual's construction of knowledge? This paper aims to address this question by examining music performance from an embodied perspective and offering a narrative-style review of the main literature on the topic. Drawing from both older theoretical frameworks on motor learning and more recent theories on sensorimotor coupling and integration, this paper seeks to challenge and juxtapose established ideas with contemporary views inspired by recent work on embodied cognitive science. By doing so we advocate a centripetal approach to music performance, contrasting the prevalent centrifugal perspective: the sounds produced during performance not only originate from bodily action (centrifugal), but also cyclically return to it (centripetal). This perspective suggests that playing music involves a dynamic integration of both external and internal factors, transcending mere output-oriented actions and revealing music performance as a form of knowledge acquisition based on real-time sensorimotor experience.

Young Children's Interactions with Objects: Play as Practice and Practice as Play

Objects permeate human culture and saturate the imagination. This duality offers both opportunity and challenge. Here we ask how young human children learn to exploit the immense potential afforded by objects that can exist simultaneously in both physical and imaginary realms. To this end, we advance a new framework that integrates the presently siloed literatures on manual skill and play development. We argue that developments in children's real and imagined use of objects are embodied, reciprocal and intertwined. Advances in one plane of action influence and scaffold advances in the other. Consistent with this unified framework, we show how real and imagined interactions with objects are characterized by developmental parallels in how children a) gradually move beyond objects' designed functions, b) extend beyond the self, and c) transcend the present to encompass future points in time and space. As well, we highlight how children's real and imagined interactions with objects are intertwined and reciprocally influence each other throughout development: Play engenders practice and skill in using objects, but just the same, practice using objects engenders advances in play. We close by highlighting the theoretical, empirical and translational implications of this embodied and integrated account of manual skill and play development.

The spiral: The concept of development after Werner and Kaplan

At the core of Heinz Werner’s concept of development is what he called “the genetic principle of spirality:” over the course of ontogenetic development, lower levels, processes, and functions do not disappear, and can even resurface again under specific conditions, normal and pathological. Werner’s work with Bernard Kaplan on symbol formation is a primer on this idea. This paper examines the idea of spirality and develops the notion of dynamic coexistence that can clarify the issue of directionality of development; that is, what is the general trajectory or ground plan that development assumes. Directionality is discussed in terms of the organism-in-environment unfolding over time as the unit of developmental analysis. Thinking on this issue has proceeded from the nature–nurture debates, to recognition of the interaction of external and internal processes, to transactions between the organism and the environment. The idea of dynamic coexistence is developed on this foundation. In the context of Werner and Kaplan’s work, dynamic coexistence represents the syncretic nature of processes and levels of organization: they are neither innately fused nor organized. Instead, the antithesis between fusion and differentiation is resolved only in concrete, context-bound conditions, even as development is generally oriented towards differentiation in maturity. Idiographic science, with its orientation towards generalizing from the unique and its attention to intra-individual variation over time, is discussed as the adequate methodological orientation for Wernerian developmental analysis.

Meaning making in motion: Bodies and minds moving through institutional and semiotic structures

What is meaning? And how does it arise? Werner and Kaplan’s approach to symbol formation was prescient in understanding the importance of the body and activity. However, their embodied approach needs to be complemented by a broader conceptualization of social institutions and complex semiotic structures in the genesis and function of symbolic processes. Specifically, human bodies, which are the medium and locus of experience, are embedded in social situations and institutions. Thus embodied experience, the origin of meaning, must be understood as societally structured. Moreover, human experience is never unmediated; it is refracted through the complex semiotic artifacts that comprise human culture, such as discourses, social representations and symbolic resources. The present article focuses on the importance of bodies moving within institutions and minds moving within semiotic structures as a basis for meaning making. We argue that such movement has been neglected; yet, it has the potential to enhance our understanding of how experiences are differentiated and integrated within individuals to produce individuals who are products of society and who also have agency in relation to society.

Aspects of ‘physiognomic depiction’ in pictures: From macchia to microgenesis

“Figurativity”, roughly paraphrased as that which is not accounted for by the system, is a residue concept of both Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and of Greimasean semiotics. In the latter case, however, figurativity has been related to the second, so-called plastic layer of the picture, which is opposed to the pictorial layer, by means of which the picture is doing its job of depicting something in the world. The plastic layer of any picture is, according to the same conception, like a specimen of abstract arts: it consists of mere spots and lines organized in a particular pattern. A classical art historical term for this vague first-hand view is macchia: but this could also be seen as an anticipation of the microgenetic method, normally credited to Werner. Although the discussion of pictures in Werner and Kaplan’s Symbol Formation (Werner & Kaplan, 1963) is rather limited in scope, the idea of physiognomic meaning, which plays such an important part in that book, and which has precursors in earlier Ganzheitzpsychologie, may hold the key to understanding the nature of plastic language – to grasp in what way the picture is not only less, but at the same time more, than the real thing. It may also give a clue to the establishment of a developmental psycho-semiotics of plastic language and, beyond that, of figurativity in general.