Embodied Cognition - Science topic

There are no accepted theories of learning apart from Pavlov's conditioning. In terms of teaching, there is a multitude of these. The question of where the mind (knowledge) resides cannot be answered by any empirical means. It is a question of where you are and what you are. Contemplate these essential questions for as long as you can!

Here is a paper that might be helpful on psychoanalytic psychodrama and embodiment:

Regards, Keith

Interesting topic.

One place to get a sense (census?) of things related to the Pezzulo paper is to do a forward literature search: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14415125872999652537&as_sdt=400005&sciodt=0,14&hl=en

244 citations in 10 years. You can get a sense of the movement in the field by classifying these citations in various ways.

Dear Gerry Leisman

NONE of what you say is contrary to what I say. I don't, for my most reasonable position, have to believe there are no connections in/to the greater body, JUST THAT THEY ARE LIKELY TRIVIAL AND NOT ALONE (there are plenty of reasons to believe there are the most significant representations in the brain). Neuroscience as a big help to psychology is unlikely (brain patterns are more sophisticated than we can make sense of -- they are LIKELY as sophisticated AS THE NUANCES OF BEHAVIOR PATTERNS THEMSELVES; and, to wit, I have written essays on this and have most-reasonably argued that you must know the BEHAVIOR __PATTERNS__ very well to know what the more obscure brain indicators may refer to -- and DO THIS for the most part, NOT the other way around.)

Sadly all these BIG BELIEFS in/of embodying "representation" in sensori-motor ways is just because you do not have a belief/presumption/assumption structure to believe what is VERY likely, biologically: THAT THERE ARE SUBTLE, BUT IMPORTANT BIOLOGICAL BEHAVIOR SHIFTS WITH ONTOGENY -- these likely BASIC perceptual shifts, in a significant sense originating FROM THE ORGANISM ITSELF in appropriate environments. You are not stage theorists, which essentially means you cannot see behavior __PATTERNS__ (a very rare term, and when used : not correctly) or anything else of the TRUE BIOLOGICAL NATURE OF BEHAVIOR __PATTERNS__ AND PATTERNINGS OF patterns. And, as you are thus separated from the biology of BEHAVIOR ("just behavior", BEHAVIOR PER SE,) you are separated (needlessly) from science (strict empiricism) itself.

Thank you for your comments and suggestions for further readings.

Thanks, Albert. I’ll do that. That’s really useful. I appreciate your help.

In my opinion, a sense of disappointment towards both neuroscience in general and analysis techniques in particular emerges from your "question".

But I'm really convinced that there is no reason at all to make such considerations.

One of your points seems to be the implementation of "machines" in psychology. Although I agree that the "technical technology" should not be de-humanized, this argument is quite shocking. "Machines" allowed to share, merge, and analyze big data with the same purposes that you can have when studying "classical psychology". To give some examples, graph analysis, advanced statistical modelling, neurofeedback, and further analysis carried by "machines" expanded our knowledge in the field of psychology and on related fields (e.g., neuroscience). Importantly, they OFTEN give straightforward evidence to trust or mistrust (both new and old) theories.

You should really reconsider your approach.

As an analogy, a contemporary biologist should not complain about "the old days of pure naturalism" because naturalism has evolved in contemporary fields of research.

Instead of searching for reasons to force a debate around how the novelty is not good, we should embrace the innovations and opportunities brought by new techniques and by theoretical development.

Since basically the same criticisms hold for "embodied" 'theories', that should be noted here. The follow scathing peer critique holds against both enhancement 'theory' and "Embodied" 'Theories':

Dear Pete Boltuc

No one has been able to SHOW that physics is relevant to psychology, or to much Biology, in general. Just because 2 things exist and are real does not mean they are sensibly relatable (with our 'seeing' and thinking). Even Kuhn recognized that connecting 2 apparently separate sciences requires (minimally) a "bridge"; you seem to have no appreciation for that .

I shall never learn any more physics. I know I do not need it.

All who have tried to connect physics to human behavior have seemed silly, irrational, or insane.

Sorry, important edits and some additions made to the Question 4 hr. after the original posting of the Question.

Domenico,

There is no question about this. Human life is certainly possible in weightless conditions. Many hundreds of humans have lived and worked in these conditions over the last 50 years.

Gravity would still be an identifiable phenomenon - indeed, in a microgravity environment experiments such as the Cavendish experiment would be even easier to perform!

You are absolutely right. Not only external conditions are important. Very critical functional state of a person, which determines the effectiveness of knowledge. But people often do not pay attention to this "inner" aspect. You are right, the leveling of personalities is unpromising.

as Edward said, before deciding the kind of task to use you need to define several aspects of this task and it also depends on your conception of the resources available for processing (do you consider an energetic or unitary view such as Cowan, or Ellis & ashbrook) or componential models such as Baddeley's WM?

Additionally, do you want to collect data about the loading task? I recommend collecting performance measures for the loading task as you will be able to analyze whether participants have indeed focused on this task.

Do you want to interfere with processing involved in the sentence completion task? In this case, you need to have a task that also requires similar verbal processes, such a verbal load (with digits?), or in other terms that interfere with processing in the phonological loop.

Finally, you may also consider having two groups with different loads: low and high. However, it is better to collect data about the sentence completion task performed in single task situation. 

I often use secondary tasks in my research on writing (Olive, 2004 for example, or Olive 2010 the section on secondary tasks).

Hope this will help

Thierry

Dear Petar:

You may find some clues in the following articles. A quick way to check them out would be to search for "left" and "right" in each one.

Dehaene, Stanislas; Pegado, Felipe; Braga, Lucía W.; Ventura, Paulo; Nunes Filho, Gilberto; Jobert, Antoinette; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine; Kolinsky, Régine; Morais, José; Cohen, Laurent

2010 “How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language,” in Science (The American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 330, 3 December 2010, pp. 1359-1364 (https://www.academia.edu/5606117/How_Learning_to_Read_Changes_the_Cortical_Networks_for_Vision_and_Language, accessed: 28 April 2017).

Lacey, Simon; Stilla, Randall; Deshpande, Gopikrishna; Zhao, Sinan; Stephens, Careese; McCormick, Kelly; Kemmerer, David; Sathian, K.

2017 “Engagement of the left striate body area during body-part metaphor comprehension,” in Brain and Language (Elsevier), vol. 166, pp. 1-18 (http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0093934X16300694/1-s2.0-S0093934X16300694-main.pdf?_tid=1b7ed1be-c24e-11e6-a1ed-00000aacb360&acdnat=1481755320_eec62dcf1b5fa33175ae96114d012186, accessed: 14 December 2016).

Lacey, Simon; Stilla, Randall; Sathian, K.

2012 “Metaphorically feeling: comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex,” in Brain and Language (Elsevier), vol. 120, pp. 416-421 (http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0093934X12000028/1-s2.0-S0093934X12000028-main.pdf?_tid=172d4640-c24e-11e6-9b23-00000aab0f02&acdnat=1481755313_dc23386aaa455b2d6cf988cca04d5ac4, accessed: 14 December 2016).

Peele, Jonathan E.

2012 “The hemispheric lateralization of speech processing depends on what ‘speech’ is: a hierarchical perspective,” in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Frontiers Media), vol. 6, article 309 (http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00309/full, uploaded: 16 November 2012, accessed: 1 July 2017).

Tian, Xing; Poeppel, David

2012 “Mental imagery of speech: linking motor and perceptual systems through internal simulation and estimation,” in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Frontiers Media), vol. 6, article 314 (http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00314/full, uploaded: 28 November 2012, accessed: 1 July 2017).

Tillas, Alex

2016 “Grounding congnition: the role of language in thinking,” in Proceedings of the International Conference “Sensory Motor Concepts in Language and Cognition,” Liane Ströbel, editor, Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf University Press, pp. 193-217 (http://dup.oa.hhu.de/527/1/PilaC_Vol.%201_finale%20Druckdatei%20Inhalt.pdf, accessed: 8 July 2017).

With my pleasure

Dear RG Colleague Max Bodendorf,

The contemporary subject and identity issues are object of my thesis (Monte-Serrat, 2013). I have studied the implications of materialism and image in the constitution of the subject, since the latter is constituted in enunciation, in the discursive and symbolic play (Lacan 1949; Pêcheux, 1988).So I associate the general and contemporary aspects of the image status with the social and technical dimensions of discourse (effects of meaning between interlocutors in a socio-historical context).

 I suggest you read Lacan 1949 (Mirror stage) and Michel Pêcheux 1975 (Les Verités de la Palice).

I wish you success in your research.

Best regards, 

Dioneia Monte-Serrat

If we talk in a straightforward manner, then the answer is that "habituation as fighting against consciousness and Self conscious". But after all, the process of getting used to, remembering and reproducing information depends also on the functional and specifically psycho-emotional state of a person, the modality and other characteristics of the stimulus, the environment and other factors. Thus, circumstances often change stereotypes.

Dear David,

very intresting question (when reading Jyh's answer I ask myself whether I actually understand the question correctly :)).

Anyway, you might find some hints when following Jan De Houwers work. For instance,:

Mitchell, C. J., De Houwer, J., & Lovibond, P. F. (2009). The propositional nature of human associative learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(02), 183-198.

On page 190 there is a section called 'Verbal Instructions'. And I also remember attending a talk of his where he was speaking about equivalence and consequence in associative learning.

Although this does not really answer your question how to 'assess' or 'determine' 'how'  the type of instruction influences actual learning, but maybe this is a start :)

Best, René

In an embodied cognition perspective, it can also be explained by the fact that all our sensorimotor interactions take place in a 3D space. As a child, we learn about our environment through the coupling between our actions and their sensory consequences. It can be assumed that our higher level cognition (i.e., thinking and imagining) is grounded in these low level sensorimotor contingencies.

In the same line, the following paper proposes that "The emergence of spatial notions does not necessitate the existence of real physical space, but only requires the presence of sensorimotor invariants called 'compensable' sensory changes.". These compensable sensory changes correspond to the changes in our perception that we can compensate by some bodily actions. According to the authors, this could be the key to understanding the notion of space.

Great question and I have no answer to offer, but my understanding is that skin conductivity, for example, is always a pretty reliable indicator of arousal, and one that is difficult to actively control for a participant.

Frances and John, thanks for the leads!

Third form for Spinoza is more linked to System 2 because his intuition this is not the intuition described by System 1, but a metaphysical approach of the reason of System 2. If we can say this, it more like a System 2A. 

Domenico:

The important thing, I think, is to keep an open mind, and to be enactively flexible when a new (from a personal perspective) experience challenges what one imagines one "knows."

Luis:

Thanks for the links. On with the search!

Postscript:

Connect the audio output device, turn up the volume, and click here:

Plan B, in case the latter link becomes inactive:

Hi Norman,

I wish there was an easy answer to the question in your title. Hanne de Jaegher and Shaun Gallager make some suggestions in their TICS paper. Apart from that you could look at things like facial mimicry, bodily mimicry, blinks synchrony, movement coordination, etc. But it's difficult territory.

I'm not sure how your explanation relates to the question you pose in your title.

Best regards,

Sebo

I would avoid the concept of self actualization like the plague--it is unintelligible--what is your purpose?

dear Max, i could find the following reference into the bibliography for the thesis of a [very good] Physio working in my Institute [abstract available in PubMed]: I hope this tiny hint may be somehow useful, Mauro C.

Beschin N, Robertson IH. Personal versus extrapersonal neglect: a group study of their dissociation using a reliable clinical test. Cortex 1997;33:379-84.

Metaphor is a fundamental aspect of human language.You cannot speak or write or sign without them.

There are thousands of books and research articles that have been produced over thousands of years. If you look into the earliest forms of writing, you will find that metaphor plays a critical role. The transition from hieroglyphs to alphabets or ideograms is based on metaphor. The reputation of people has been measured by metaphors for thousands of years. Kings have the hearts of lions. Gasoline and cereal brands prefer tigers. But for many, the lord is a shepherd and they are his sheep, even if they do have the heart of a lion and put a tiger in their tanks.

If nothing in the existing corpus of literary and scientific studies from ancient Egypt, ancient China, central America, south Asia, or anywhere else that writing systems were invented, up to the most recent analyses doesn't convince you that they are relevant, I can't imagine that there is anything that would convince you that they are relevant.

Dear Fuster,

First of all, I would like to say I am a great fellow of your work, that inspire some of mine. Second, thank you for sharing your thoughts with the scientific community. I think this channel could be a good path to promote scientific discussion, and provide a wonderful tool to young and novel scientists as me to get in contact with great scientists as you. 

Regarding your post, I have to admit the challenges that scientific community is facing to measure brain dynamic and structure with an unique neuroimaging technic/algorithm with a high temporal and spatial resolution at the same time. 

For instance, fMRI and fNIRS is an indirect measured (BOLD) of brain activity, because they just measure the cerebral vascular tissue consumption, and not the Cerebral Metabolic Oxygen Rate (CMOR2). Besides, the increased oxygen transported to the brain area typically exceeds the local CMOR2^1,2. So, it is even more complicated, because we "fail" to have an accurate measured of brain structure, dynamics and activity in a single, reliable and valid technic/algorithm.

However, there are promising technics and methods that can be developed to overcome these amazing challenges:

1. Best in Temporal Resolution: MAGNETOENCEPHALOGRAPHY

2. Best Spatial Resolution: fMRI/DTI

3. Best Forthcoming Neuroimaging Technic: Optogenetic (as soon as we can apply this technic on human, we could sort out the methodological limitations we are facing today).

4. An algorithm that I like to measure the dynamics of brain networks is dynamic functional network connectivity (d-FNC).

5. One important advance in neuroscience would be to develop the measured by fNIRS of the cytochrome c oxidase (Cyt-Ox). It is the last enzyme in the respiratory electron transport chain of mitochondria or bacteria located in the mitochondrial or bacterial membrane. So, with this enzyme we could have a directed measured of CMOR2, and fNIRS enables its detection.

6. Nanotechnology and Neuroimaging  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23514423 

Summarizing, I think we are living in amazing time that would be revolutionized in the next years by the synergies of basic science (neuroscience, materials, energy, quantum) + information technology + engineering + market³.

Best,

References

1.Fox, P.T., Raichle, M.E., Mintun, M.A. & Dence, C. (1988). Nonoxidative glucose

consumption during focal physiologic neural activity. Science, Vol. 241, No. 4864,

(July 1988), pp. 462-4, ISSN 1095-9203.

2. Lin, A.L., Fox, P. T., Yang, Y., Lu, H., Tan, L.H. & Gao, J.H. (2008). Evaluation of MRI models in the measurement of CMRO2 and its relationship with CBF. Magnetic resonance in medical sciences, Vol. 60, No. 2, (August 2008), pp. 380-9, ISSN 1880-2206.

3. Alivisatos et al., Nanotools for neuroscience and brain activity mapping. (2013). ACS Nano, 7(3), 1850-66. doi: 10.1021/nn4012847.

Dear Brandon,

            Yours is perhaps the most important question in the neurobiology of behavior.  I have dealt with it extensively in my research and in numerous writings; it is at the very center of the cognitive neuroscience of the cerebral cortex.  Here I will answer it as succinctly and critically as I possibly can, trying not to sound simplistic or sententious.  Almost all your tentative assumptions are basically correct and compatible with one another and with my answer below. Let me attempt to qualify them a bit and to support them with a few brain facts.

            Indeed, Helmholtz was right.  We remember what we perceive, and we perceive—intuitively or unconsciously--what we remember.  This is increasingly apparent to cognitive neuroscientists if we adhere to the empirical facts and put consciousness in its proper place, that is, by accepting that it is not essential to neural mechanisms but an epiphenomenon of them.  Most cognition is totally unconscious.  In any case, my argument here is centered precisely on a conjecture that you almost inconspicuously pose as a question: actions and cognition are interdependent cyclically.

1.  In the course of goal-directed behavior, the neural mechanisms that adapt the organism to its world in pursuit of the goal are cyclic, embedded in what I call the “perception-action (PA) cycle.” This is the biocybernetic cycle--with sensors, effectors, feed-forward and feedback--that from moment to moment adjusts the organism to the environment in pursuit of the goal.  Briefly, in the course of that pursuit, a given sensory stimulus comes through the senses, is analyzed in posterior (perceptual) cortex, and informs a new or corrective action in frontal (executive) cortex; that action will produce sensory changes in the environment, which will inform new or corrective action, and so on and so forth until the goal is reached.  In essence, therefore the PA cycle runs successively through the environment, through perceptual cortex, through frontal executive cortex, and back to the environment.

2.  The processing through posterior and frontal cortex will be carried out by neuronal networks (“cognits”) representing memory or knowledge (semantic memory) acquired by prior experience. Thus the actions will be informed, every step of the way, by updating or correcting prior assumptions about the world in a probabilistic—Bayesian—manner. That internal information (knowledge and memory) is hierarchically organized, from sensory and motor cortex at the bottom, for specific sensory and motor representation, to association cortex at the top, for representation and processing of sensory input information in the context of the past experience of the individual. Both large sectors of cortex, perceptual and executive, are structurally and dynamically interconnected.  The same is true for the cortices of both hemispheres.

3.  Most important in the human, where PA cycles are long, is that the frontal—executive—cortex possesses mechanisms that anticipate, and prepare for, actions and percepts.  Before a cycle is completed, these mechanisms pre-adapt the organism for anticipated change.  Thus the prefrontal cortex, which is the “vanguard” of evolution and of individual development (ontogeny), has both predictive and preadaptive properties that are unique to the human.  The human prefrontal cortex is eminently endowed for prediction and preadaptation, thus priming and to some extent “short-cutting” the PA cycle.  That cortex does this in cooperation with other brain structures, by engaging them in several prospective cognitive functions, prominently among them:  planning, attentive set, working memory and decision-making.  All suffer, to one degree or another, from injuries of the dorsal and lateral prefrontal cortex.

            I think this, although heavily abstracted, is plenty for this post.  I hope you will find it helpful.

Cheers, Joaquín

 References:

 JM Fuster - Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. Oxford, 2003.

   JM Fuster and SL Bressler – Past makes future: Role of pFC in prediction.  J. Cognit. Neuroscience, 27: 639-654, 2015.

Try this 

or this  

You should check out the book "The Embodied Mind" (1992) by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The second chapter provides a historical revision of phenomenology and how it relates to cognitive science in general and to embodied cognition in particular. Also, check out Alva Nöe´s work, in particular his book "Out of our Heads"(2010) for an interesting and easy read on the subject. 

I BELIEVE DR. ELKONON GOLDBERG, A WELL RENOWNED PERSON IN THE AREA OF THE HISTORY OF FRONTAL LOBE FUNCTIONING AND RESEARCH, HAS A USEFUL OPINION ON THIS; HE CAN BE REACHED AT EGNEUROCOG@AOL.COM, AND IF POSSIBLE, I WOULD LIKE TO INVITE HIM TO RESEARCH GATE. LK - CAPS FOR ME - NOT YOU!

I have used a task of right-left orientation clinically for many years that I developed based on a British test using schematic human figures in four different orientations, half inverted, half upright, facing either forward or backward and holding a "large blue ball" in one hand only.  This task requires mental rotation and is described in my article in Developmental Neuropsychology, which I've attached in case it may prove of interest to you and your work.  Tom Snyder. 

Dear Louis Brassard:

1) I think there is a great deal of truth to the view that embodied cognition isn’t a theory, namely because of the disparate origins for the disparate ways in which different scientists believe cognition to be embodied. That said, I wouldn’t really call it a sub-movement, because I don’t think there is any movement that it is subordinate to. Within cognitive linguistics, research on and development of the ways in which cognition is embodied date back to the 80s and in particular with the groundbreaking book by Lakoff Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (which, despite being published 7 years after his co-authored Metaphors We Live by, was far more influential, specific, and clearly situated within an embodied view of cognition). Around that time another linguist, Ronald Langacker, was also developing a theory of language that incorporated embodiment, as were other “founders” of the umbrella framework of cognitive linguistics.  Meanwhile, psychologists like Eleanor Rosch were looking at cognition more generally and in terms of dissatisfaction with the reigning paradigm within cognitive science. Perhaps THE groundbreaking publication from psychology on embodiment is Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991).  A few years later two other important works from other fields emerged: Thelen & Smith’s 1994 The Development of Cognition in Action (which, in addition to being an early work on embodied cognition from developmental psychology was also one of the earliest uses of a dynamical systems approach within psychology) & Hutchins’ 1995 Cognition in the Wild (a cognitive anthropology perspective). Finally, just before the 21st century, yet another line of inquiry, this time from robotics and AI, contributed to the development of the now disparate but large body of evidence supporting embodied cognition: Brooks’ Cambrian Intelligence. This is not by any means intended to be an exhaustive list of the fields or researchers who independently contributed to EC, but rather to emphasize that there was no movement that this research can be seen as a sub-movement of.

2) Although there is no single, cohesive EC theory that would satisfy all those who consider EC to be true, there are a number of widely shared core components. While I think your first description (if I am interpreting it aright) is fair, I am not sure about the second. EC proponents can and do believe that the world is understood through representations in the brain, and the nervous system is largely irrelevant to EC theories excepting in the ways already covered in your first characterization.

3) “There is nothing new under the sun.” It’s true that EC was not some wholly new paradigm (or set of paradigms) nor that the general idea was new. However, there was a great deal of novelty to the work and findings of the early developers of EC. In fact, Lackoff’s book mentioned above spends a fair amount of time on how traditional philosophy led to an understanding of categorization mostly rooted in Platonic philosophy. He cites Rosch’s work on prototype theory among other evidence that categorization is both fundamental to cognition, is not at all some modern cognitive science version of Plato’s Forms, and is embodied. Additionally, much of early EC research could not have existed except as a response to more mainstream theories/approaches. Had early cognitive scientists not posited that the brain is just another symbol processing machine and the symbols arbitrary, meaningless, and amodal, and had Chomskyan linguistics not provided the best ways in which to show this to be true only to fail repeatedly, we would likely not have seen linguists seeking better theories that led to cognitive linguistics, the re-introduction of neural networks in the connectionist program  that allowed cognitive psychologists to abandon the algorithms along with the “mind as computer” metaphor and look for other ways in which the brain might work. Of extreme importance was the idea that cognition wasn’t amodal but grounded in sensory modalities. Whatever parallels between EC and older philosophy exist, the idea that cognition is modal-specific or multimodal isn’t one of them.

4) Kant utterly rejected key components of EC. The fact that he distinguished between knowledge that required sensory experience or justification vs. that which didn’t is nothing like EC. It was Husserl, not Kant, who first tied conceptualization, categorization, and cognition all to perception. As for Piaget, one of the most important developments in developmental cognition was when Baillargeon thought to question Piaget’s mostly anecdotal evidence for object permanence. She demonstrated that infants did understand object permanence by developing a way to test whether or not Piaget’s conclusion was based upon his failure to take into account the limited motor skills infants had. Just because earlier philosophers and scientists connected bodily experience to cognition doesn’t mean they were fore-runners to modern EC. Piaget’s theories were largely wrong because he had used motor and perceptual capabilities as metrics to test what were very abstract, non-embodied stages of cognitive development. EC proponents do the reverse: they start with the abstract and test whether and how it may be rooted in sensorimotor experience/perception.

A marginal, peripheric aspect of the question ////  Focusing exclusively on the new, complex motor patterns.

In complex new motor patterns, it is impossible any overlap between overt action and covert (imitated) action. In any complex motor pattern (or, in Luria's  terminology, 'cinetic melody'), movement n must be modulated by the movement n+1. But when the pattern is new for the imitator, this modulation is impossible, since the learner/imitator does not know the following movement. Thus, the premotor planning of the entire pattern must be made with some degree of delay (i.e., without overlapping)

Alessandro I can give you one surprisingly concrete example of this. It dates from about ten years ago when I was doing some research, later published in my book design in mind, on famous architects. In this case Santiago Calatrava. I visited him over several days in his office in Zurich and one day as I went into his room he was standing on tip toe and leaning forward until he started to fall with hands and arms stretched out in front of him. He was designing a diving board for a swimming pool and wanted to feel how the forces were distributed through his body. He told me that he often imagined how the human body would be configured to withstand forces in a structure. If you look in my book you can see examples of him drawing this particularly in the design of his New York cathedral scheme.

do give my regards to Alice and Fernando Pereira.

Dear Tom, I quote autopiesis and cognition (intro, pg. VX): 

"try to correlate the activity of the retina with the color experience of the world"....

"the new approach required us to treat seriously the activity of the nervous system as determined by the nervous system itself, and not by the external world; thus the external world would only have a triggering role in the release of the internally-determined activity of the nervous system".  

the ominiuos thing is that they not even quote them, the empiriocriticists!

I didn't have time to read fully this manysided thread, but perhaps I may add my argument whý there are no "inner" representations (from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226206085_The_theory_of_the_organism-environment_system_II._Significance_of_nervous_activity_in_the_organism-environment_system?ev=prf_pub): 

According to the theory of the organism-environment system, the basic principle of nervous functioning is not that of information processing, but creation of such constellations of neurons which - joined to the other parts of the body and environment - may achieve behavioral results which are useful for the metabolism of neurons and through this for the whole organism. The neurons are in many ways the most sensitive cells in the body and their large-scale destruction leads necessarily to the restriction of the action possibilities of the whole organism.

From this point of view it is clear that neurons do not create maps of the environment, inner models or representations which would somehow correspond to homuncular perceptions. Such reproduction of the properties of the environment in the nervous system is simply not important from the point of view of appropriate behavior, and must be assumed only if the starting point of the theory of nervous functioning is based on the absolute separation of the organism and the environment.

The necessary condition for forming systems leading to useful results is not from the systemic point of view that nervous organization should reproduce the organization of the environment as some sort of representation or model. The only essential is that a system may be formed in which elements belonging both to the body and to the environment are fitted together. The structure of the body, of course, "reflects" the structure of the environment in the sense that by inspection of the bodily structure we may also conclude something about the possible structure of the environment. When looking at the body of an organism we may speculate on what kind of environment would be appropriate. The study of the organism is simultaneously the study of the environment.

Let’s make our point clear with one further example. The system for cutting wood consists of a saw and a tree. In order to have a well-functioning system the properties of the saw and those of the tree should not be the same, but rather different in the way which makes a result possible. In a system consisting of two sets of elements one set need not to reproduce the properties of the other in order to create, as a whole, a functioning system. On the contrary, to have a good system for cutting the saw must be hard and the tree soft, otherwise the system will not function properly. The structure of the saw reflects in some sense the structure of the wood, but only from the point of view of the result (cutting).

If we think that the nervous system must somehow reproduce or represent the organization of the environment this would mean that the representations in the nervous system would always lag behind the events in the environment. However, if we think that the essential feature in nervous functioning is its fit with the environment this means that the environment and the nervous system have the same time. Perception, for example, is simultaneous with the object of perception in the environment. This means also that a stimulus does not precede perception, but perception is a process in which the fit of neural elements with the environmental events defines the stimulus. Therefore, reaction time is not the time for the processing of the stimulus, but the time for organizing the result

Dear Jenn,

IMO these kinds of findings definitely belong to the EC literature.

Perhaps more interesting however is to see how different EC 'strands' judge this finding. Sorry for my long answer I always try to be short.. and fail.

EC people with a background in 'standard', naturalistic, empirical science (cognitive neuroscience, mostly) would probably think this to be a nice illustration of how the physical properties of the *physical body* (physical-mechanical constraints) directly impact 'the way we think' (in a non-trivial way). Hence, cognition is embodied. It could help to argue against 'functionalism', the classic idea that the *implementation* of a cognitive process in a physical machine (the brain) is in some way 'trivial', one can always design another physical machine that does the same cognitive thing, and so the 'embodiment' of cognition (the fact that it is realized by a body and brain) is not what really matters to cognition. Rizzollati could counter functionalism saying that  the physical embodiment directly impacts cognitive content. There are 'in between' arguments within this group of people: Andy Clark is a strong proponent of the idea that physical constraints of the body can become part of the cognitive system (see his Being There book) but at the same time still holds on to functionalism (See a paper called "Pressing the Flesh..  ..")

Another strand in EC literature has roots in phenomenology. Phenomenologists, I guess, would be less enthousiastic about this finding as such: what does it really say? In their view talking about embodiment has nothing directly to do with the "physical machine that is our body", embodiment concerns our 'lived body', the sphere of interactivity that is defined by our action-perception couplings. Mistaking the lived body for the physical body is precisely what science (including cognitive science) did wrong. Even 'the world' is 'enacted' through our 'being in the world' and this entanglement of mind-body-world is what embodiment is all about. I guess when it comes to analysing the embodiment of our 'being' they are generally indifferent to empirical findings from the sciences. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty does continously refer to neurological cases to guide his analysis.

Then there's a group of modern philosophers who explicitly try to reconcile naturalism/science with phenomenology. I guess Noe and Evan Thompson are part of that group. I am curious to know how they can account for the strategy of taking empirical facts on brains to be a proof for a phenomenological insight, or the reverse. If you have ideas on this let me know thanks!

Then there is the ecological psychologists, followers of James Gibson. Gibson had no interest in phenomenology, to my knowledge, but his ideas on affordances and perception-action couplings are often used to explain or make concrete ideas put forward in phenomenological analysis (I just did so myself I realize, see also the work of Rietveld). Their theories however are in some way more 'physics' than 'psychology', and in any case strongly anti-cognitivistic/anti-mentalistic and often very mathemetical, and in that sense I should think that the Rizzolati findings could be of interest to the ecological psychologists. The point is just that they would need to understand the finding more specifically in terms of what it means for their theories of perception-action coupling in order to make the finding interesting. They would regard the superficial and less informative claim that 'because' there is a correlation between eye-mechanics and attention, therefore cognition 'is embodied', with the same kind of indifference as the phenomenologists.

What do you think?

> I wonder if there are different approaches that at least come closer to our everyday perception

As Tonto said "who's 'we', white man?" (Its a joke about the Lone Ranger - may be culturally specific:) 

Its culturally determined.There are numerous popular examples. In Chinese there is no word for brown.'Brown' cows are red' The famous river is 'yellow'.  The ancient Greeks had no concept of 'blue'. Homer referred to a 'wine dark sea'. There is a story of Vygotsky doing research in Uzbekistan where his subjects adamantly argued that two browns were completely different because one was the color of pigshit and the other was the color of bread.

Dear Adam, there is no evidence for somatic states directly influencing appraisal. The influence should be by means of brain systems. The problem is that functional anatomical hypotheses as the involvement of ventromedial PFC in appraisal do not distinguish between a brain system that instantiates the somatic feeling and a brain system that makes the cognitive appraisal. This kind of distinction is made in the attached paper that proposes that the neuronal network makes the cognitive job and the astroglial network instantiates feelings.

Take a look at my colleague/friend Ho Ming's recent paper:

Good! :)

looking forward...

Renata

Jakub,

"To what extent is attention (either conscious or unconscious) shaped and influenced by the embodied nature of our minds?

What is the role of gut feelings, nervous system, or the body in attention? Is it connected with bodily loops between the brain and the non-neural body? What does phenomenology say about it?"

These are interesting questions, and like so many in this territory, they query the concepts they deploy: ie what do you mean by 'attention'? Whose disciplinary vocabulary are you subscribing to? To foreground attention seems to imply that the 'brain events' are served by 'body events'. This, in my mind, is dubious reasoning charateristic of an internalist notion of mind - as if the body exists for the use of the brain. This seem backwards to me. If you take an autopoietic/evolutionary perspective, brain-body separation - in terms of control or heirarchy - seems silly. Its like asking why an octopus has tentacles.

I would suggest that the issue is a bit more complex. A closer examination of construal level theory (CLT) indicates that the issues are not as discrete as they may seem initially. Langacker (2012) and several scholars (e.g., Alony, 2006; Fauconnier & Turner (2008); Liberman et al., 2007) have recognized the cognitive interrelation of space, time, social distance, and degree of probability. Indeed, we see discussions of this interrelation as early as Lakoff & Johnson (1980). In these accounts, there is no difference with regard to cognitive processing across the four dimensions. Bar-Anan, Liberman, Trope, & Algom (2007) used a modified Stroop test as a way of confirmation.

The embodied cognitive perspective came about partly in response to the "brain as a computer" metaphor. One way to think of the distinction concerns what mental representations represent. The brain as a computer thinks of mental representations as abstract symbols, much like how a computer operates on binary representations that can, if complex enough, encode virtually anything. These abstract symbols are completely divorced from what it is that they represent, in the same way that there is nothing tying together words, like "DOG" from what it is that they represent (i.e., actual dogs) -- there is nothing about the visual symbols that constitute the English word for dog that suggests what it represents, and consequently, other languages have their own, equally valid word for 'dog'.

The embodied perspective, on the other hand, argues (depending how far you want to take it) that our mental representations are tied to what it is that they represent by virtue of how these representations entered the mind (i.e., through whatever apparatus our bodies provide). Thus, a mental representation of 'dog', at whatever level of abstraction, is rooted in the fact that we see, hear and touch dogs. Thus an embodied representation of 'dog' is tied to how we have experienced dogs via our bodies.

See early debates between Pylyshyn (non-embodied) and Paivio (embodied: dual-coding) and more recent work by Markman (non-embodied) and Barsalou (embodied: perceptual symbol system). I also have a recent paper (McNorgan, 2012) that discusses the plausibility of assumptions underlying the embodied perspective.

Dear Afaq Ahmad,

Basically we could rephrase the question in the following way:

What contribution can give pedagogical reflection in the light of its experience in educational context, to further developments in scientific research, and vice versa, which methodological aid or which new perspective of formative design it can come from the neuroscience studies?

What are the actual margins of interaction between fields of study and research so apparently distant among them?

The mind (or brain) models the external world in some sense. This includes ontological models of the physical world, as well as the linguistic, social, ethical and cultural environment.

In fact, children do not in general know whether what they are learning is universal physical law, natural science fact, linguistic convention or cultural norm (see the writings of Piaget and work in Psycholinguistics). Learning about gravity, solid objects and hard knocks, the (positive and negative) information for learning comes from the physical world. Learning about fruit is a mix about learning about properties that mix the physical (Galileo and Newton could use apples as solid objects to learn about gravity), with the chemical and biological (what an apple or orange tastes like, that it is good to eat, that it is juicy), with the cultural (that we eat them in specific ways, that we can juice them in specific ways, that we eat them differently from each other or a grapefruit), with the linguistic (what words and grammar we use in association with them). A famous anecdote has a teacher showing a class of children a grapefruit which they recognize from colour and size and other physical characteristics as a grapefruit. But then she starts peeling, segmenting and eating it like an orange, and they change their minds and say it must be an orange.

Can we measure the effect of social context on a cognitive computer (whether an Artificial Intelligence or a Human Intelligence)? Yes, indeed we can... and it is an important source of information about how intelligence/cognition works. In fact, we always do, even though we may not realize it!! Every time we hear a sentence we interpret it in the physical, cultural, social and linguistic context. Here are some sentences that I have deliberately pseudophoneticized slightly to make more like hearing the speech - but in fact there will be prosodic context as well as (prior, current and/or subsequent or consequent) physical, social, cultural and linguistic context to help disambiguate the meanings.

Imgonnaworknow.

Timeflieslikeanarrow.

Imgonnarekanispeech.

Thehorseracedpastthebarnfell.

Thegreenscombinedwiththelibsvotedno.

The first one is understood differently depending on whether your wife knows its Saturday and you are not going in to work, or Friday and your are, or it is your teacher you are talking to, who is saying you are failing and you should drop out of the course.

The second is a famous artificial sentence, and could be about a particular kind of fly, timing flies, or time.

The third is also a famous artificial example that is understood differently depending on whether you are speech scientists talking about speech recognition, or hooligans talking about wrecking a nice beach.

The last two have the same grammatical forms and garden path - the second of the pair will give clues for understanding the first - it hinges on whether we interpret the -ed word as an active verb or a passive participle. The final verb phrase might be better replaced with a prepositional phrase (at the event on Friday, on the issue of abortion) so it can revert from participle to verb (but it still seems to require context to be a good sentence).

So these examples also tell you how. You test for the effect of any kind of context by devising experiments where the default or alternate understanding, or lack of understanding, is modified if the context is taken into account.

HI Mäeva,

I Remember I attended a conference in 2010 in Granada (I send you the proceedings attached) and there was a speaker that made an experiment trying to replicate the ACE in bilingual participants' second language. They did not found significant results. They even could not replicate the original ACE effect, therefore, I suppose they cannot publish their data. But the procedure seemed to be consistent.

If you want to dive on the proceedings, I am sure that you will find this. And maybe you can contact the author.

Best,

Juanjo

Thanks so much Mounia for your reply and the additional video link. It is greatly helpful to see InGrid in use like this. Your mention of the pericutaneous space being composed of tools that have become proprioceptively mapped as limb extensions (spatially predicted and affecting "reach velocity") reminded me of some links I enjoyed exploring. Here they are in case you too might find them interesting (unless you have already). The one missing dimension of limb extension via tools seems to be the tactile confirmation along the entire span (even if the kinesthetic is there) which seems apparent in Flor et al. -- perhaps ranged by the skin cells themselves? What do you think? I would much appreciate your thoughts on this, and/or how you might be adding touch to the InGrid design as well. Again, thank you for your kind replies.

Flor, H., Denke, C., Schaefer, M., Grüsser, S. (2001). Effect of sensory discrimination training on cortical reorganisation and phantom limb pain. The Lancet, 357(9270), 1763-1764. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(00)04890-X.

Franz, E. A., & Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). Bimanual coupling in amputees with phantom limbs. Nature Neuroscience, 1(6), 443-444. doi:10.1038/2161.

Schmalzl, L., Thomke, E., Ragnö, C., Nilseryd, M., Stockselius, A., & Ehrsson, H. (2011). Pulling telescoped phantoms out of the stump: Manipulating the perceived position of phantom limbs using a full-body illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5(121), 1-12. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2011.00121.

I agree with the above comments that this is indeed a rich and interesting area of study. How does the body form one's ability to perceive, learn and control simple and complex patterns of timing? I think the answer will necessarily be fairly complex, especially with regards to music.

There is some evidence that synchronising movement with a beat improves ones ability to anticipate upcoming beats and detect deviation in the tempo:

However, this needs to be tested for more complex movements/timing sequences.

I also think that there are different levels at which movement and musical timing might be meaningfully related to one and other. There is the induction of rhythm, and maintaining a constant tempo of repeated actions, which is undoubtedly important for percussive playing. There is also the dimension of expressive timing in music, which incorporates the temporal envelope of sequences of musical events. This level might more meaningfully be related to larger, more temporally-extended actions, such as ancillary gesture, dance, etc. Audiences seem sensitive to expressive gestures in perceiving music, and such movements vary with musicians' expressive intention and skill level. What form(s) the relationship between expressive movement and expressive musical timing can take is still a fairly open question, as is the nature of how the relationship is acquired. I am currently involved in doing some work to see if students can pick up and learn movement kinematics in playing from observation of gesture and if so how, but this is just the start of getting to answer these questions.

Embodied cognition is definitely an additional asset that human's enjoy. It serves as another channel through which information can pass between the more instinctual (automatic) and intuitive (associative) areas of the unconscious mid-brain and cerebellum, and the more deliberate—and conscious—activity of areas of the prefrontal cortex.

The pattern recognition theory of mind would posit that this is an example of a priming of the brain by the recognition of "instability": the effect that the perception of actual instability has on the sensitivity thresholds of pattern recognition networks in the brain (i.e. those associated with "instability" as a gestalt contextual element).

Priming involves "implicit memory," which is a sort of intuition—created by overlaying perviously observed associations on top of current perceptions. This process enhances the function of visual pattern recognition by augmenting it with the probabilities of past observations.

So, in answer to the question of whether "human like intelligence requires a physical body that physiologically responds to changes in its external environment?": it is not so much that it needs a "body that physiologically responds to changes in its external environment"—for these physiological changes are simply reflections of implicit memory, they are information relays between the unconscious memory and the conscious experience. I would say that this relay is of high importance, but the physiological nature of this information relay is not a necessary factor. (It is, however, an efficient function, because physiological changes often simultaneously prime the behavior of the organism (by priming pattern recognition networks in the brain) and prepare for the behaviors that are in the repertoire of the primed behavioral state. For example, a rapid heart rate during fear not only relays the feeling of fear to the conscious brain, it also prepares the cardiovascular system for "fight or flight" behaviors.)

So it's not "necessary" for the information relay to be physiological in an AI system. In the case of the human organism, however, it certainly is convenient and efficient because of the dual role played by the physiological response in both priming behavior and preparing for the support of such behavior. This could be a useful application in a robotic system that needed to adjust physical operation dynamics for different behaviors, but is not an absolutely necessary component of "human like intelligence" (this information relay could theoretically be simulated or entirely disembodied).