Search

A common claim by advocates of embodied, dynamical approaches is that action and perception are “coupled.” On the face of it, this claim may not seem controversial, after all many researchers working in mainstream computationalist neuroscientific approaches also talk about the “coupling” of perception and action. Our goal here is to clarify the relation between these claims of perception-action coupling stemming from dynamical and from computational perspectives. Examining the empirical evidence that computationalists and dynamicists invoke to support their claims we conclude that, despite using similar terminology, they mean entirely different and incompatible things. Still, we propose that both approaches can, at least to some extent, accommodate the evidence invoked by the other. This suggests that the evidence should not, on its own, be used to argue in favor of one approach against the other, and that the disagreement is of a philosophical nature rather than an empirical one.

Reading comprehension is often conceptualized in terms of the internal processing of linguistic information and construction of accurate mental representations. In contrast, an ecological-enactive approach rejects this internalist focus and instead emphasizes the dynamic process of reader-text coupling in which eye movements play a constitutive role. In this study, we employed recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and eye movement dynamics, based on eye-tracking data from the Potsdam Textbook Corpus recorded from beginners and experts reading scientific texts, followed by comprehension questionnaires. Moreover, we compared the findings from RQA to classical eye movement measures (number of fixations, mean fixation duration, regression fixation proportion). The results indicated that classical eye movement measures did not predict reading comprehension reliably, whereas recurrences in gaze steps were reliably associated with reading comprehension proficiency. Contrary to our original hypothesis, experts showed more irregular, rather than more regular, eye movement dynamics, and these were linked to more proficient reading comprehension. In line with previous research on naturalistic reading using nonlinear methods, the present findings suggest that reading comprehension is best understood as emerging from interaction-dominant coordination processes.

Over the last decade, cognitive science and allied fields have been criticized for being excessively “WEIRD,” i.e., overly reliant on participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. The lack of diversity among research participants is now widely acknowledged, but it’s a rather superficial problem, symptomatic of other more fundamental ones. This poster outlines what we see as four overlapping problems. Cognitive science is WEIRD not only in terms of who makes up its participant pool, but also in terms of its theoretical commitments (e.g., individualism and universalism), methodological assumptions (e.g., measurement and analysis methods), and institutional structures (e.g., funding and publishing). Merely solving the problem of WEIRD participants by sampling more widely is insufficient to address cognitive science’s more fundamental WEIRD theoretical, methodological and institutional problems. Coming to terms with this is necessary if we wish to make cognitive science relevant for all humanity.

That cognition is embodied is a claim that virtually no cognitive scientist today will deny: after all, even the researcher who models cognition in terms of entirely abstract, “medium-independent” states and processes will concede that particular instances are always necessarily realized in some body (of some kind) or other. The same is true for the theme of this year’s CogSci meeting, “Cognition in Context”: even if you think that there are cases in which the context plays merely a peripheral role in cognitive processing, you cannot deny that cognition always occurs in some context or other. This symposium is motivated by the realization, on the one hand, that the concept of embodiment means different things to different researchers in different contexts (see, e.g., Wilson 2002; Wilson and Golonka 2013; Crippen and Schulkin 2020), just as, on the other hand, the concept of context means different things to different researchers with different views on body and mind (see, e.g., Clancey 1997; Mesquita, Barrett and Smith 2010; Ibáñez and García 2018).

The usual approach to studying affordances is in controlled laboratory situations. While recognizing the value of controlled experimentation, I argue for the benefits of additionally considering affordances “in the wild,” i.e., in the context of real-world activity. As an example, I describe ethnographic observation about the introduction of cellphones in rural Uganda in the early 2000s, highlighting the unexpected, innovative uses that emerged in that unique context. This case, I suggest, illustrates the constitutive role of material, sociocultural constraints in the perception and realization of affordances which often go unacknowledged in experimental laboratory research. Theoretically, the case raises questions about the definition of affordances, in particular how narrowly or broadly to conceptualize their spatiotemporal dimensionality. And methodologically, it poses the question of how anthropology can contribute to embodied cognitive science and, more broadly, how experimental and observational approaches can help one another to further our understanding of psychological phenomena.

Dotov, Nie and Chemero (2010) conducted a set of exper-iments to demonstrate how phenomenology, particularly thework of Martin Heidegger, interfaces with experimental re-search in embodied cognitive science. Specifically, they drew aparallel between Heidegger’s notion of readiness-to-hand andthe concept of an extended cognitive system (Clark 2008) bylooking for the presence or absence of interaction-dominantdynamics (Holden, van Orden, and Turvey 2009; Ihlen andVereijken 2010) in a hand/mouse system. We share Dotov,Nie and Chemero’s optimism about the potential for cross-pollination between phenomenology and cognitive science, butwe think that it can be better advanced through a shift in fo-cus. First, we argue in favor of using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’sphenomenological theory as the philosophical foundation forexperimental research in embodied cognitive science. Sec-ond, we describe an audio-visual tracking task in virtual realitythat we designed and used to empirically investigate human-environment coupling and interactivity. In addition to provid-ing further support for phenomenologically-inspired empiricalcognitive science, our research also offers a more generaliz-able scientific treatment of the interaction between humans andtheir environments.

Some commentators have recently argued that scientific psychology is overly reliant on artificial laboratory-based activities and that it undervalues field-based investigations. However, it remains unclear how a field-based programme of psychological research might be organized in a scalable way. We examine and compare two existing field-based approaches: Roger Barker's behaviour settings programme and Edwin Hutchins's distributed cognition programme. Both programmes prioritize observational work, and both reject the individual as the unit of analysis in favour of a community-scale unit. However, whereas the behaviour settings programme is concerned with structural properties of community life, distributed cognition is concerned more narrowly with the functional analysis of expert team performance. We discuss how these programmes can inform a future community-scale approach to studying psychology in the wild. We conclude that the two programmes are proof of concept of the possibility of a scientific psychology that rejects methodological individualism. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is ecological about Gibsonian Ecological Psychology?Well-known senses in which Gibson’s scientific program is‘ecological’ have to do with its theoretical, ontological andmethodological foundations. But, besides these, the Gibsonianframework is ‘ecological’ in an additional sense that has re-mained understudied and poorly understood—a sense of “eco-logical” that connects Gibson’s view to the environmentalismof environmental psychology and environmental ethics. Thispaper focuses on the latter sense of ‘ecological’, and exploresthe relevance of Gibson’s notion of “affordance” for thinkingabout environmental issues like deforestation, pollution andclimate change. One existing account is criticized and an al-ternative is proposed.

Two main views have informed the literature on the psy-chology of emotion in the past few decades. On one side,cognitivists identify emotions with processes such as judg-ments, evaluations and appraisals. On the other side, advo-cates of non-cognitive approaches leave the “intellectual” as-pects of emotional experience out of the emotion itself, in-stead identifying emotions with embodied processes involv-ing physiological changes. Virtually everyone on either sideof the cognitive/non-cognitive divide identify William James’view, also known as the James-Lange theory, fully on the non-cognitivist side. But this is a mistake. Re-interpreting James’writings in its scientific context, this paper argues that he actu-ally rejected the cognitive/non-cognitive divide, such that hisview of emotions did not fit either side—that is, James was nota “Jamesian” in the sense the term is used in the literature.

Affordances, the opportunities for action offered by the environment to an agent, are vital for meaningful behaviour and exist in every interaction with the environment. There is an ongoing debate in the field about whether the perception of affordances is an automated process. Some studies suggest that affordance perception is an automated process that is independent from the visual context and bodily interaction with the environment, whereas others argue that it is modulated by the visual and motor context in which affordances are perceived. The present paper aims to resolve this debate by examining affordance automaticity from the perspective of sensorimotor time windows. To investigate the impact of different forms of bodily interactions with an environment, that is, the movement context (physical vs. joystick movement), we replicated a previous study on affordance perception in which participants actively moved through differently wide doors in an immersive 3D virtual environment. In the present study, we displayed the same environment on a 2D screen with participants moving through doors of different widths using the keys on a standard keyboard. We compared components of the event‐related potential (ERP) from the continuously recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) that were previously reported to be related to affordance perception of architectural transitions (passable and impassable doors). Comparing early sensory and later motor‐related ERPs, our study replicated ERPs reflecting early affordance perception but found differences in later motor‐related components. These results indicate a shift from automated perception of affordances during early sensorimotor time windows to movement context dependence of affordance perception at later stages, suggesting that affordance perception is a dynamic and flexible process that changes over sensorimotor stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate about cognitive science explanations has been formulated in terms of identifying the proper level(s) of explanation. Views range from reductionist, favoring only neuroscience explanations, to mechanist, favoring the integration of multiple levels, to pluralist, favoring the preservation of even the most general, high‐level explanations, such as those provided by embodied or dynamical approaches. In this paper, we challenge this framing. We suggest that these are not different levels of explanation at all but, rather, different styles of explanation that capture different, cross‐cutting patterns in cognitive phenomena. Which pattern is explanatory depends on both the cognitive phenomenon under investigation and the research interests occasioning the explanation. This reframing changes how we should answer the basic questions of which cognitive science approaches explain and how these explanations relate to one another. On this view, we should expect different approaches to offer independent explanations in terms of their different focal patterns and the value of those explanations to partly derive from the broad patterns they feature. Patterns in cognitive phenomena and pluralism of explanatory styles This paper focuses on three general approaches to explanation in cognitive science, namely: reductionist, mechanist and pluralist approaches to explanation. On the basis of various case studies from cognitive psychology, Potochnik and Sanches De Oliveira argue that these three explanatory approaches are best understood as different styles of explanation. Each of these styles would be best suited to explain different, cross‐cutting patterns in cognitive phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]