This paper attempts to disentangle the messy notion of embodied cognition. Different authors tend to mean different things by the term, and the author analyzes it to six claims:
- Cognition is situated
- Cognition is time pressured
- We off-load cognitive work onto the environment
- The environment is part of the cognitive system
- Cognition is for action
- Off-line cognition is body based
There is an interesting and critical discussion as to which of these stand. I believe that I tend to believe that none of these stands in a strong form: i.e. Cognition is ALWAYS and ONLY situated. But all of them are true in a weak form and may or may not surface depending on the situation.
What the paper lacked was providing the historical context for the rise of such theories against the mainstream of cognitive science. So, while some of the claims are not true in their strong form, they can be seen as reactions against classical cognitive science’s fascination with abstract logic and (GOF)AI.
Some interesting notes regarding offloading:
It should be noted, too, that symbolic off-loading need not be deliberate and formalized, but can be seen in such universal and automatic behaviors as gesturing while speaking. It has been found that gesturing is not epiphenomenal, nor even strictly communicative, but seems to serve a cognitive function for the speaker, helping to grease the wheels of the thought process that the speaker is trying to express (see, e.g. Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1998; Krauss, 1998).
References
Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4).
Iverson, J. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1998). Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(228).
Krauss, R. M. (1998). Why do we gesture when we speak? Current directions in Psychological science, 7, 54-60.
technorati tags:embodiment, psychology, cognitive, ergonomics
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