35 research outputs found
Proper embodiment: the role of the body in affect and cognition
Embodied cognitive science has argued that cognition is embodied principally in virtue of gross
morphological and sensorimotor features. This thesis argues that cognition is also internally embodied
in affective and fine-grained physiological features whose transformative roles remain mostly
unnoticed in contemporary cognitive science. I call this âproper embodimentâ. I approach this larger
subject by examining various emotion theories in philosophy and psychology. These tend to emphasise
one of the many gross components of emotional processes, such as âfeelingâ or âjudgementâ to the
detriment of the others, often leading to an artificial emotion-cognition distinction even within emotion
science itself. Attempts to reconcile this by putting the gross components back together, such as Jesse
Prinzâs âembodied appraisal theoryâ, are, I argue, destined to failure because the vernacular concept of
emotion which is used as the explanandum is not a natural kind and is not amenable to scientific
explication.
I examine Antonio Damasioâs proposal that emotion is involved in paradigmatic âcognitiveâ processing
such as rational decision making, and argue (1) that the research he discusses does not warrant the
particular hypothesis he favours, and (2) that Damasioâs account, though in many ways a step in the
right direction, nonetheless continues to endorse a framework which sees affect and cognition as
separate (though now highly interacting) faculties. I further argue that the conflation of âaffectâ and
âemotionâ may be the source of some confusion in emotion theory and that affect needs to be properly
distinguished from âemotionâ. I examine some dissociations in the pain literature which give us further
empirical evidence that, as with the emotions, affect is a distinct component along with more cognitive
elements of pain. I then argue that affect is distinctive in being grounded in homeostatic regulative
activity in the body proper.
With the distinction between affect, emotion, and cognition in hand, and the associated grounding of
affect in bodily activity, I then survey evidence that bodily affect is also involved in perception and in
paradigmatic cognitive processes such as attention and executive function. I argue that this relation is
not âmerelyâ casual. Instead, affect (grounded in fine-grained details of internal bodily activity) is
partially constitutive of cognition, participating in cognitive processing and contributing to perceptual
and cognitive phenomenology. Finally I review some work in evolutionary robotics which reaches a
similar conclusion, suggesting that the particular fine details of embodiment, such as molecular
signalling between both neural and somatic cells matters to cognition. I conclude that cognition is
âproperly embodiedâ in that it is partially constituted by the many fine-grained bodily processes
involved in affect (as demonstrated in the thesis) and plausibly by a wide variety of other fine-grained
bodily processes that likewise tend to escape the net of contemporary cognitive science
Questioning, exploring, narrating and playing in the control room to maintain system safety
Systems whose design is primarily aimed at ensuring efficient, effective and safe working, such as control rooms, have traditionally been evaluated in terms of criteria that correspond directly to those values: functional correctness, time to complete tasks, etc. This paper reports on a study of control room working that identified other factors that contributed directly to overall system safety. These factors included the ability of staff to manage uncertainty, to learn in an exploratory way, to reflect on their actions, and to engage in problem-solving that has many of the hallmarks of playing puzzles which, in turn, supports exploratory learning. These factors, while currently difficult to measure or explicitly design for, must be recognized and valued in design
Enacting Environments: From Umwelts to Institutions
What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to generate a sense of the conceptual space in which this research is going on. I focus on the concepts of sense-making, Umwelts, affordances, cultural niches, epistemic actions, environmental scaffolding, and mental institutions. Despite differences in focus and detail these influences share an underlying world-view; that cognition is relational and world-involving. This way of thinking has clear resonances with dominant approaches in non-Western philosophy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to generate in the reader a sense of this shared extended-enactive world-view in order to open up a space for communication between approaches
Design Your Life: User-Initiated Design of Technology to Support Independent Living of Young Autistic Adults
This paper describes the development of and first experiences with 'Design
Your Life': a novel method aimed at user-initiated design of technologies
supporting young autistic adults in independent living. A conceptual,
phenomenological background resulting in four core principles is described.
Taking a practice-oriented Research-through-Design approach, three co-design
case studies were conducted, in which promising methods from the co-design
literature with the lived experiences and practical contexts of autistic young
adults and their caregivers is contrasted. This explorative inquiry provided
some first insights into several design directions of the Design Your
Life-process. In a series of new case studies that shall follow, the Design
Your Life-method will be iteratively developed, refined and ultimately
validated in practice
Pain as the Performative Body
Commentary on Smrdu M. (2022) Kaleidoscope of pain: What and how do you see through it. Constructivist Foundations 17(2): 136â147.
I unpack Smrduâs kaleidoscope metaphor, putting it into dialogue with enactive work on the performative body in order to cash out how it can capture the qualitative differences of the experience of chronic pain