Embodied cognitive restructuring: The impact of posture and movement on changing dysfunctional attitudes

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Previous theoretical and empirical work has pointed to the important role of the body in emotion generation and emotion regulation. In the present study, we wanted to investigate if the performance of certain body postures and movement could facilitate cognitive restructuring of dysfunctional cognitive attitudes more effectively than traditional, verbal-only methods.

METHODS

In total, 130 participants were randomized to one of two groups. One group was subjected to cognitive restructuring (i.e., restructure only group; CR-only), verbally exploring a dysfunctional attitude from a curious, strong, and courageous perspective. The other group received the same verbal instructions but in addition to this, was asked to perform different bodily exercises (i.e., motor-enhanced restructuring group; M-CR) supposed to enhance experience of the different perspectives from which cognitive restructuring was employed.

RESULTS

Results confirmed the primary hypothesis, showing that the M-CR-group showed a larger decline in belief in dysfunctional attitudes compared with the CR-only group (F = 4.2, p = 0.041, d = 0.25). No differences on secondary outcomes were observed between the two groups.

LIMITATIONS

Future research should explore the effects of motor-enhanced CR both more long-term (e.g., durability over weeks) and in clinical samples (e.g., anxiety and depression).

CONCLUSION

Should the findings be replicated in clinical samples, it is encouraging that simple bodily exercises can enhance the effect of one of the most central skills of cognitive therapy.

Stages in Theory and Experiment. Fuzzy-Structuralism and Piagetian Stages

The theory of stages in cognitive development is one of Jean Piaget's enduring legacies, but it has also borne the brunt of much criticism. It maintains that intelligence develops in an invariant sequence of stages, and, in this paper, I situate Piaget's conceptions of stages historically and functionally in the context of genetic epistemology, his research programme. I highlight some of the objections raised, and I show how the disparity between the conceptions of theoretical and empirical stages in Piaget's theory is commensurate with the fuzzy-structuralist model of the relationship between theory and empirical research conceived by Rudolf Seising on the basis of Lofti A. Zadeh's fuzzy set theory. Further, I propose a fuzzy conception of the notion 'stage', which not only captures its ordinary use in fuzzy space between theory and empirical research but also does justice to both the construct validity and quantitative variability of stages in empirical research. I therefore open a fuzzy-structuralist perspective on the Crisis of Variability afflicting Piaget's stage theory during the 1970s and conclude retrospectively that the rift it caused was not necessary since the invariance and variability of stages is not irreconcilable.

Effect evaluation of case-based learning with situated cognition theory on competence training for student nurses in pediatric surgery

Objective

The case-based learning with situated cognition theory (CBL-SCT) approach focuses on teaching over learning, making it suited to student nurse education. However, it is rare in student nurse training in pediatric surgery, and some subjective evaluations of the learning effect are still affected by the assessor. This study investigated the effect of the CBL-SCT approach on improving the nursing quality/safety and comprehensive performance of student nurses, and explored a method for analyzing the reliability of subjective evaluations.

Methods

Thirty-six student nurses were divided into a control group and an experimental group and received seven days of orientation via conventional and CBL-SCT training, respectively. The learning effect was evaluated via examining their implementation of nursing quality criteria within the following month and their comprehensive clinical performance after six months. Among the evaluation indicators, professional skills, job competency, and professional quality were evaluated by assessors, whose scores were tested for consistency using Cronbach's alpha.

Results

Among the 11 nursing quality criteria, the correct implementation of patient identification and communication (t = 2.257, P = 0.031), medication-checking (t = 5.444, P < 0.001), tumbles/bed-falling prevention (t = 3.609, P = 0.001), pressure injury prevention (t = 3.834, P = 0.001), catheter management (t = 3.409, P = 0.002), and nursing record writing (t = 2.911, P = 0.006) in the experimental group were all higher than in the control group. Six months after training, the experimental group was also higher in professional theory (t = 4.889, P < 0.001), professional skills (t = 2.736, P = 0.010), job competency (t = 5.166, P < 0.001), and professional quality (t = 16.809, P < 0.001). Cronbach's alpha test verified that the assessors' evaluations had good internal consistency and reliability for job competency (alpha = 0.847, 95% CI lower limit = 0.769), professional quality (alpha = 0.840, 95% CI lower limit = 0.759), and professional skills (alpha = 0.888, 95% CI lower limit = 0.822).

Conclusions

The CBL-SCT method can help student nurses quickly change their nursing role, and Cronbach's alpha test can verify the reliability of subjective evaluations, thus indirectly reflecting the training effect equitably and objectively.

Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.

"BreaThink": breathing affects production and perception of quantities

Cognition is shaped by signals from outside and within the body. Following recent evidence of interoceptive signals modulating higher-level cognition, we examined whether breathing changes the production and perception of quantities. In Experiment 1, 22 adults verbally produced on average larger random numbers after inhaling than after exhaling. In Experiment 2, 24 further adults estimated the numerosity of dot patterns that were briefly shown after either inhaling or exhaling. Again, we obtained on average larger responses following inhalation than exhalation. These converging results extend models of situated cognition according to which higher-level cognition is sensitive to transient interoceptive states.

Varieties of Artifacts: Embodied, Perceptual, Cognitive, and Affective

The primary goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the various relations between material artifacts and the embodied mind. A secondary goal of this essay is to identify some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts. First, based on their functional properties, I identify four categories of artifacts co-opted by the embodied mind, namely (a) embodied artifacts, (b) perceptual artifacts, (c) cognitive artifacts, and (d) affective artifacts. These categories can overlap and so some artifacts are members of more than one category. I also identify some of the techniques (or skills) we use when interacting with artifacts. Identifying these categories of artifacts and techniques allows us to map the landscape of relations between embodied minds and the artifactual world. Second, having identified categories of artifacts and techniques, this essay then outlines some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts, focusing on neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and personalization algorithms nudging their users toward particular epistemic paths of information consumption.

Situated anticipation

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of 'higher' cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to 'affordances,' i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as 'higher' cognition in terms of engaging with affordances.

Repair Avoidance: When Faithful Informational Exchanges Don't Matter That Much

Common-sense intuition suggests that, when people are engaged in informational exchanges, they communicate so as to be reasonably sure that they perform the exchanges faithfully. Over the years, we have found evidence suggesting that this intuition, which is woven into several influential theories of human communication, may be misleading. We first summarize this evidence and discuss its potential limitations. Then, we present a new study that addresses the potential limitations. A confederate instructed participants to "pick up the skask" from a tray containing six objects and move it to a specific location. Since skask is a non-word invented by us, participants had to ask for clarification to perform the instruction faithfully. In contradiction with the intuition that people pursue faithfulness when engaged in informational exchanges, 29 of the 48 participants we tested performed the instruction without asking for clarification. We identified a possible cause for this behavior, which occurred more frequently when avoiding the clarification was unlikely to result in an overt consequence (an error in the execution of the instruction that could be noticed by the confederate or the experimenter). Other factors such as individual differences and the specific interpersonal dynamics of the experimental settings, if they played a role at all, did it to an extent that is unlikely to be comparable to that of the role played by overt consequences. Considered together, our various assessments of the extent to which people engage in faithful informational exchanges converge on a simple conclusion: Communicating faithfully is a substantially demanding task, and people often fail at it. We discuss the implications of this conclusion and speculate on its relevance for understanding the evolutionary past of human communication.

Complex Communication Dynamics: Exploring the Structure of an Academic Talk

Communication is a multimodal phenomenon. The cognitive mechanisms supporting it are still understudied. We explored a natural dataset of academic lectures to determine how communication modalities are used and coordinated during the presentation of complex information. Using automated and semi-automated techniques, we extracted and analyzed, from the videos of 30 speakers, measures capturing the dynamics of their body movement, their slide change rate, and various aspects of their speech (speech rate, articulation rate, fundamental frequency, and intensity). There were consistent but statistically subtle patterns in the use of speech rate, articulation rate, intensity, and body motion across the presentation. Principal component analysis also revealed patterns of system-like covariation among modalities. These findings, although tentative, do suggest that the cognitive system is integrating body, slides, and speech in a coordinated manner during natural language use. Further research is needed to clarify the specific coordination patterns that occur between the different modalities.

A large-scale survey on finger counting routines, their temporal stability and flexibility in educated adults

A strong link between bodily activity and number processing has been established in recent years. Although numerous observations indicate that adults use finger counting (FC) in various contexts of everyday life for different purposes, existing knowledge of FC routines and their use is still limited. In particular, it remains unknown how stable the (default) FC habits are over time and how flexible they can be. To investigate these questions, 380 Polish participants completed a questionnaire on their FC routines, the stability of these routines, and the context of FC usage, preceded by the request to count on their fingers from 1 to 10. Next, the test-retest stability of FC habits was examined in 84 participants 2 months following the first session. To the best of our knowledge, such a study design has been adopted for the first time. The results indicate that default FC routines of the majority of participants (75%) are relatively stable over time. At the same time, FC routines can flexibly adapt according to the situation (e.g., when holding an object). As regards prevalence, almost all participants, in line with previous findings on Western individuals, declared starting from the closed palm and extending consecutive fingers. Furthermore, we observed relations between FC preferences and handedness (more left-handers start from the left hand) and that actual finger use is still widespread in healthy adults for a variety of activities (the most prevalent uses of FC are listing elements, presenting arguments and plans, and calendar calculations). In sum, the results show the practical relevance of FC in adulthood, the relative stability of preferences over time along with flexible adaptation to a current situation, as well as an association of FC routines with handedness. Taken together our results suggest that FC is the phenomenon, which is moderated or mediated by multiple embodied factors.

Context and clinical reasoning : Understanding the medical student perspective

INTRODUCTION

Studies have shown that a physician's clinical reasoning performance can be influenced by contextual factors. We explored how the clinical reasoning performance of medical students was impacted by contextual factors in order to expand upon previous findings in resident and board certified physicians. Using situated cognition as the theoretical framework, our aim was to evaluate the verbalized clinical reasoning processes of medical students in order to describe what impact the presence of contextual factors has on their reasoning performance.

METHODS

Seventeen medical student participants viewed three video recordings of clinical encounters portraying straightforward diagnostic cases in internal medicine with explicit contextual factors inserted. Participants completed a computerized post-encounter form as well as a think-aloud protocol. Three authors analyzed verbatim transcripts from the think-aloud protocols using a constant comparative approach. After iterative coding, utterances were analyzed and grouped into categories and themes.

RESULTS

Six categories and ten associated themes emerged, which demonstrated overlap with findings from previous studies in resident and attending physicians. Four overlapping categories included emotional disturbances, behavioural inferences about the patient, doctor-patient relationship, and difficulty with closure. Two new categories emerged to include anchoring and misinterpretation of data.

DISCUSSION

The presence of contextual factors appeared to impact clinical reasoning performance in medical students. The data suggest that a contextual factor can be innate to the clinical scenario, consistent with situated cognition theory. These findings build upon our understanding of clinical reasoning performance from both a theoretical and practical perspective.

Information-theoretic decomposition of embodied and situated systems

The embodied and situated view of cognition stresses the importance of real-time and nonlinear bodily interaction with the environment for developing concepts and structuring knowledge. In this article, populations of robots controlled by an artificial neural network learn a wall-following task through artificial evolution. At the end of the evolutionary process, time series are recorded from perceptual and motor neurons of selected robots. Information-theoretic measures are estimated on pairings of variables to unveil nonlinear interactions that structure the agent-environment system. Specifically, the mutual information is utilized to quantify the degree of dependence and the transfer entropy to detect the direction of the information flow. Furthermore, the system is analyzed with the local form of such measures, thus capturing the underlying dynamics of information. Results show that different measures are interdependent and complementary in uncovering aspects of the robots' interaction with the environment, as well as characteristics of the functional neural structure. Therefore, the set of information-theoretic measures provides a decomposition of the system, capturing the intricacy of nonlinear relationships that characterize robots' behavior and neural dynamics.

Learning situated emotions

From the perspective of constructivist theories, emotion results from learning assemblies of relevant perceptual, cognitive, interoceptive, and motor processes in specific situations. Across emotional experiences over time, learned assemblies of processes accumulate in memory that later underlie emotional experiences in similar situations. A neuroimaging experiment guided participants to experience (and thus learn) situated forms of emotion, and then assessed whether participants tended to experience situated forms of the emotion later. During the initial learning phase, some participants immersed themselves in vividly imagined fear and anger experiences involving physical harm, whereas other participants immersed themselves in vividly imagined fear and anger experiences involving negative social evaluation. In the subsequent testing phase, both learning groups experienced fear and anger while their neural activity was assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A variety of results indicated that the physical and social learning groups incidentally learned different situated forms of a given emotion. Consistent with constructivist theories, these findings suggest that learning plays a central role in emotion, with emotion adapted to the situations in which it is experienced.

Curb Your Embodiment

To explain how abstract concepts are grounded in sensory-motor experiences, several theories have been proposed. I will discuss two of these proposals, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Situated Cognition, and argue why they do not fully explain grounding. A central idea in Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that image schemas ground abstract concepts in concrete experiences. Image schemas might themselves be abstractions, however, and therefore do not solve the grounding problem. Moreover, image schemas are too simple to explain the full richness of abstract concepts. Situated cognition might provide such richness. Research in our laboratory, however, has shown that even for concrete concepts, sensory-motor grounding is task dependent. Therefore, it is questionable whether abstract concepts can be significantly grounded in sensory-motor processing.

The Roles of Implicit Understanding of Engineering Ethics in Student Teams' Discussion

Following previous work that shows engineering students possess different levels of understanding of ethics-implicit and explicit-this study focuses on how students' implicit understanding of engineering ethics influences their team discussion process, in cases where there is significant divergence between their explicit and implicit understanding. We observed student teams during group discussions of the ethical issues involved in their engineering design projects. Through the micro-scale discourse analysis based on cognitive ethnography, we found two possible ways in which implicit understanding influenced the discussion. In one case, implicit understanding played the role of intuitive ethics-an intuitive judgment followed by reasoning. In the other case, implicit understanding played the role of ethical insight, emotionally guiding the direction of the discussion. In either case, however, implicit understanding did not have a strong influence, and the conclusion of the discussion reflected students' explicit understanding. Because students' implicit understanding represented broader social implication of engineering design in both cases, we suggest to take account of students' relevant implicit understanding in engineering education, to help students become more socially responsible engineers.

Contextual factors and clinical reasoning: differences in diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning in board certified versus resident physicians

BACKGROUND

The impact of context on the complex process of clinical reasoning is not well understood. Using situated cognition as the theoretical framework and videos to provide the same contextual "stimulus" to all participants, we examined the relationship between specific contextual factors on diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning accuracy in board certified internists versus resident physicians.

METHODS

Each participant viewed three videotaped clinical encounters portraying common diagnoses in internal medicine. We explicitly modified the context to assess its impact on performance (patient and physician contextual factors). Patient contextual factors, including English as a second language and emotional volatility, were portrayed in the videos. Physician participant contextual factors were self-rated sleepiness and burnout.. The accuracy of diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning was compared with covariates using Fisher Exact, Mann-Whitney U tests and Spearman Rho's correlations as appropriate.

RESULTS

Fifteen board certified internists and 10 resident physicians participated from 2013 to 2014. Accuracy of diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning did not differ between groups despite residents reporting significantly higher rates of sleepiness (mean rank 20.45 vs 8.03, U = 0.5, p < .001) and burnout (mean rank 20.50 vs 8.00, U = 0.0, p < .001). Accuracy of diagnosis and treatment were uncorrelated (r = 0.17, p = .65). In both groups, the proportion scoring correct responses for treatment was higher than the proportion scoring correct responses for diagnosis.

CONCLUSIONS

This study underscores that specific contextual factors appear to impact clinical reasoning performance. Further, the processes of diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning, although related, may not be interchangeable. This raises important questions about the impact that contextual factors have on clinical reasoning and provides insight into how clinical reasoning processes in more authentic settings may be explained by situated cognition theory.

Rhythm histograms and musical meter: A corpus study of Malian percussion music

Studies of musical corpora have given empirical grounding to the various features that characterize particular musical styles and genres. Palmer & Krumhansl (1990) found that in Western classical music the likeliest places for a note to occur are the most strongly accented beats in a measure, and this was also found in subsequent studies using both Western classical and folk music corpora (Huron & Ommen, 2006; Temperley, 2010). We present a rhythmic analysis of a corpus of 15 performances of percussion music from Bamako, Mali. In our corpus, the relative frequency of note onsets in a given metrical position does not correspond to patterns of metrical accent, though there is a stable relationship between onset frequency and metrical position. The implications of this non-congruence between simple statistical likelihood and metrical structure for the ways in which meter and metrical accent may be learned and understood are discussed, along with importance of cross-cultural studies for psychological research.

The Embodied and Situated Nature of Moods

In this paper I argue that it is misleading to regard the brain as the physical basis or "core machinery" of moods. First, empirical evidence shows that brain activity not only influences, but is in turn influenced by, physical activity taking place in other parts of the organism (such as the endocrine and immune systems). It is therefore not clear why the core machinery of moods ought to be restricted to the brain. I propose, instead, that moods should be conceived as embodied, i.e., their physical basis should be enlarged so as to comprise not just brain but also bodily processes. Second, I emphasise that moods are also situated in the world. By this I do not simply mean that moods are influenced by the world, but that they are complexly interrelated with it, in at least three different ways: they are shaped by cultural values and norms; they are materially and intersubjectively "scaffolded"; and they can even "experientially incorporate" parts of the world, i.e., include the experience of parts of the world as part of oneself.

Situating Machine Intelligence Within the Cognitive Ecology of the Internet

The Internet is an important focus of attention for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science communities. This is partly because the Internet serves as an important part of the material environment in which a broad array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated. The Internet can thus be seen as an important part of the ‘cognitive ecology’ that helps to shape, support and (on occasion) realize aspects of human cognizing. Much of the previous philosophical work in this area has sought to analyze the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of human cognition. There has, as such, been little effort to assess the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of ‘machine cognition’. This is unfortunate, because the Internet is likely to exert a significant influence on the shape of machine intelligence. The present paper attempts to evaluate the extent to which the Internet serves as a form of cognitive ecology for synthetic (machine-based) forms of intelligence. In particular, the phenomenon of Internet-situated machine intelligence is analyzed from the perspective of a number of approaches that are typically subsumed under the heading of situated cognition. These include extended, embedded, scaffolded and embodied approaches to cognition. For each of these approaches, the Internet is shown to be of potential relevance to the development and operation of machine-based cognitive capabilities. Such insights help us to appreciate the role of the Internet in advancing the current state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.

Establishing the situated features associated with perceived stress

We propose that the domain general process of categorization contributes to the perception of stress. When a situation contains features associated with stressful experiences, it is categorized as stressful. From the perspective of situated cognition, the features used to categorize experiences as stressful are the features typically true of stressful situations. To test this hypothesis, we asked participants to evaluate the perceived stress of 572 imagined situations, and to also evaluate each situation for how much it possessed 19 features potentially associated with stressful situations and their processing (e.g., self-threat, familiarity, visual imagery, outcome certainty). Following variable reduction through factor analysis, a core set of 8 features associated with stressful situations-expectation violation, self-threat, coping efficacy, bodily experience, arousal, negative valence, positive valence, and perseveration-all loaded on a single Core Stress Features factor. In a multilevel model, this factor and an Imagery factor explained 88% of the variance in judgments of perceived stress, with significant random effects reflecting differences in how individual participants categorized stress. These results support the hypothesis that people categorize situations as stressful to the extent that typical features of stressful situations are present. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to establish a comprehensive set of features that predicts perceived stress.

Sex differences in visuospatial and navigational working memory: the role of mood induced by background music

Sex differences in visuospatial abilities are long debated. Men generally outperform women, especially in wayfinding or learning a route or a sequence of places. These differences might depend on women's disadvantage in underlying spatial competences, such as mental rotation, and on the strategies used, as well as on emotions and on self-belief about navigational skills, not related to actual skill-levels. In the present study, sex differences in visuospatial and navigational working memory in emotional contexts were investigated. Participants' mood was manipulated by background music (positive, negative or neutral) while performing on the Corsi Block-tapping Task (CBT) and Walking Corsi (WalCT) test. In order to assess the effectiveness of mood manipulation, participants filled in the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule before and after carrying out the visuospatial tasks. Firstly, results showed that after mood induction, only the positive affect changed, whereas the negative affect remained unconfounded by mood and by sex. This finding is in line with the main effect of 'group' on all tests used: the positive music group scored significantly higher than other groups. Secondly, although men outperformed women in the CBT forward condition and in the WalCT forward and backward conditions, they scored higher than women only in the WalCT with the negative background music. This means that mood cannot fully explain sex differences in visuospatial and navigational working memory. Our results suggest that sex differences in the CBT and WalCT can be better explained by differences in spatial competences rather than by emotional contexts.

Consequences of contextual factors on clinical reasoning in resident physicians

Context specificity and the impact that contextual factors have on the complex process of clinical reasoning is poorly understood. Using situated cognition as the theoretical framework, our aim was to evaluate the verbalized clinical reasoning processes of resident physicians in order to describe what impact the presence of contextual factors have on their clinical reasoning. Participants viewed three video recorded clinical encounters portraying straightforward diagnoses in internal medicine with select patient contextual factors modified. After watching each video recording, participants completed a think-aloud protocol. Transcripts from the think-aloud protocols were analyzed using a constant comparative approach. After iterative coding, utterances were analyzed for emergent themes with utterances grouped into categories, themes and subthemes. Ten residents participated in the study with saturation reached during analysis. Participants universally acknowledged the presence of contextual factors in the video recordings. Four categories emerged as a consequence of the contextual factors: (1) emotional reactions (2) behavioral inferences (3) optimizing the doctor patient relationship and (4) difficulty with closure of the clinical encounter. The presence of contextual factors may impact clinical reasoning performance in resident physicians. When confronted with the presence of contextual factors in a clinical scenario, residents experienced difficulty with closure of the encounter, exhibited as diagnostic uncertainty. This finding raises important questions about the relationship between contextual factors and clinical reasoning activities and how this relationship might influence the cost effectiveness of care. This study also provides insight into how the phenomena of context specificity may be explained using situated cognition theory.

Situated phenomenology and biological systems: Eastern and Western synthesis

Phenomenology was born with the mission to give foundations for science of experience and to open consciousness to scientific study. The influence of phenomenology initiated in the works of Husserl and continued in a wide range of works of others was immense, but mainly within the confines of philosophy and the humanities. The actual attempts to develop a scientific discipline of the study of consciousness and to carry out research on cognition and consciousness were always based on the methods of traditional science in which elimination of the subjective has been always a primary tenet. Thus, focus was mainly on neurological correlates of conscious phenomena. The present paper is an attempt to initiate an extension and revision of phenomenological methodology with the use of philosophical and scientific experience and knowledge accumulated in a century of inquiry and research in relevant disciplines. The question which disciplines are relevant is crucial and our answer is innovative. The range of disciplines involved here is from information science and studies of computation, up to cultural psychology and the studies of philosophical traditions of the East. Concepts related to information and computation studies provide a general conceptual framework free from the limitations of particular languages and of linguistic analysis. This conceptual framework is extending the original perspective of phenomenology to issues of modern technology and science. Cultural psychology gives us tools to root out what in phenomenology was considered universal for humanity, but was a result of European ethnocentrism. Most important here is the contrast between individualistic and collectivistic cultural determinants of consciousness. Finally, philosophical tradition of the East gives alternatives in seeking solutions for fundamental problems. This general outline of the research methodology is illustrated by an example of its use when phenomenology is studied within the conceptual framework of information.

Cognitive ecology

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson's ecological psychology, Bateson's ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science.

Communication, concepts and grounding

This article discusses the relation between communication and conceptual grounding. In the brain, neurons, circuits and brain areas are involved in the representation of a concept, grounding it in perception and action. In terms of grounding we can distinguish between communication within the brain and communication between humans or between humans and machines. In the first form of communication, a concept is activated by sensory input. Due to grounding, the information provided by this communication is not just determined by the sensory input but also by the outgoing connection structure of the conceptual representation, which is based on previous experiences and actions. The second form of communication, that between humans or between humans and machines, is influenced by the first form. In particular, a more successful interpersonal communication might require forms of situated cognition and interaction in which the entire representations of grounded concepts are involved.

Get rich quick: the signal to respond procedure reveals the time course of semantic richness effects during visual word recognition

According to several current frameworks, semantic processing involves an early influence of language-based information followed by later influences of object-based information (e.g., situated simulations; Santos, Chaigneau, Simmons, & Barsalou, 2011). In the present study we examined whether these predictions extend to the influence of semantic variables in visual word recognition. We investigated the time course of semantic richness effects in visual word recognition using a signal-to-respond (STR) paradigm fitted to a lexical decision (LDT) and a semantic categorization (SCT) task. We used linear mixed effects to examine the relative contributions of language-based (number of senses, ARC) and object-based (imageability, number of features, body-object interaction ratings) descriptions of semantic richness at four STR durations (75, 100, 200, and 400ms). Results showed an early influence of number of senses and ARC in the SCT. In both LDT and SCT, object-based effects were the last to influence participants' decision latencies. We interpret our results within a framework in which semantic processes are available to influence word recognition as a function of their availability over time, and of their relevance to task-specific demands.