Embodying Design

Rethinking design through the lens of embodied cognition provides a novel way of understanding human interaction with technology. In this book, Christopher Baber uses embodied cognition as a lens through which to view both how designers engage in creative practices and how people use designed artifacts. This view of cognition as enactive, embedded, situated, or distributed, without recourse to internal representations, provides a theoretical grounding that makes possible a richer account of human interaction with technology. This understanding of everyday interactions with things in the world reveals opportunities for design to intervene. Moreover, Baber argues, design is an embodied activity in which the continual engagement between designers and their materials is at the heart of design practice. Baber proposes that design and creativity should be considered in dynamic, rather than discrete, terms and explores “task ecologies”—the concept of environment as it relates to embodied cognition. He uses a theory of affordance as an essential premise for design practice, arguing that affordances are neither form nor function but arise from the dynamics within the human-artifact-environment system. Baber explores agency and intent of smart devices and implications of tangible user interfaces and activity recognition for human-computer interaction. He proposes a systems view of human-artifact-environment interactions—to focus on any one component or pairing misses the subtleties of these interactions. The boundaries between components remain, but the borders that allow exchange of information and action are permeable, which gives rise to synergies and interactions

Embodied Choice:How Action Influences Perceptual Decision Making

Embodied Choice considers action performance as a proper part of the decision making process rather than merely as a means to report the decision. The central statement of embodied choice is the existence of bidirectional influences between action and decisions. This implies that for a decision expressed by an action, the action dynamics and its constraints (e.g. current trajectory and kinematics) influence the decision making process. Here we use a perceptual decision making task to compare three types of model: a serial decision-then-action model, a parallel decision-and-action model, and an embodied choice model where the action feeds back into the decision making. The embodied model incorporates two key mechanisms that together are lacking in the other models: action preparation and commitment. First, action preparation strategies alleviate delays in enacting a choice but also modify decision termination. Second, action dynamics change the prospects and create a commitment effect to the initially preferred choice. Our results show that these two mechanisms make embodied choice models better suited to combine decision and action appropriately to achieve suitably fast and accurate responses, as usually required in ecologically valid situations. Moreover, embodied choice models with these mechanisms give a better account of trajectory tracking experiments during decision making. In conclusion, the embodied choice framework offers a combined theory of decision and action that gives a clear case that embodied phenomena such as the dynamics of actions can have a causal influence on central cognition

Demanding followers, empowered leaders : dance as an “embodied metaphor” for leader-follower-ship

In this paper, we explore how leadership and followership are relational, mutually constructed and mutually enabled. Using dancesport as metaphor and medium, we focus on the embodied, corporeal aspects and dynamics of leading and following, relating them to lead/follow roles and tasks of people in organizations. In a mainly autoethnographic exploration of the lived experiences of people in leader-follower-relationships, we use the concept of embodied cognition as a basis and argue that dance can provide a vehicle for immediate, implicit “insights” and even “aha effects” through sensory, bodily experiences

Action, Enaction, Inter(en)action

Leman and Maes offer a comprehensive review of the main theoretical and empirical themes covered by the research on music and embodied cognition. Their article provides an insight into the work being carried at the Institute for Psychoacoustic and Electronic Music (IPEM) of Ghent University, Belgium - in which they work - and presents a theory of the main implications of embodiment for music perception. The present paper is divided into three parts. In the first one, I will explore the conceptual topography of embodied music cognition as maintained by the authors, to see whether the empirical research proposed fits the aims of this standpoint. In the second I will argue that while Leman and Maes are right to move towards a more dynamically implemented stance, the arguments used to justify this shift seem to be inconsistent with the framework they account for. In the third and final part of this commentary I will claim that if the authors wish to dedicate their work to develop a truly embodied, sensorimotor, and dynamic account to music cognition, they would need to abandon some of the assumptions defended in their work, searching for further empirical corroboration in the concrete dynamics of interactive, or participatory, musical sense-making

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

A Commentary Reflection of Moral Psychology Based on Embodied Cognition

 The rise of embodied cognition in recent ten years has brought about significant influence on the research of moral psychology. On the one hand, the development of neuro-cognitive science has facilitated the research of morality deeply into the mirror neurons of brain, no longer being limited simply on the philosophical speculation; and on the other hand the experimental research of embodied cognition has provided new evidence for some traditional and philosophical moral issues and even made some new recognition of the issues which are different from the traditional interpretations. Tracing back to the research of the Western moral psychology, we find that cognitive rationality and virtual ethics are the two main research lines for moral psychology.（1）J. Piaget and L. Kohlberg opened a way for the research of cognitive development of morality, and their successors have formed new Kohlbergian School, such as the moral judgment theory based on DIT proposed by J. Rest and his colleagues, G. Lind’s dual-aspect theory based on his MCT and KMDD®; the social cognitive domain theory proposed by E. Turiel and his colleagues; the feminine caring ethics advocated by C. Gilligan and N. Noddings; the Social Intuitionist Theory proposed by J. Haidt based on evolutionary psychology, cultural psychology and neuro-cognitive science and so on. (2) The traditional moral philosophy and ethics have opened another way to the research of character education and virtues, such as the American movement of character education facilitated by W, Bennett and T. Lickona and others; the argument between J. Rawls and R. Nozick on moral problems; A. C. MacIntyre’s moral critique to the Western societies and his virtue ethics and so on. Since 21st century the research of embodied cognition has broken through the limitation of the traditional research on moral psychology, attempting to realize the new synthesis of intellect, human body and its environment, and therefore started the embodied research of moral judgment which is unfolded around the three dimensions of physical cleanliness, disgust, body temperature and body movements. I has also assimilated Piaget and Vygotsky’s ideas of psychological development, the theory of conceptual metaphor in cognitive semantics and the theory of evolutionary psychology, and made its theoretical interpretation and exploration for the embodied effect of moral judgment. Since the variable of physical body could have its influence on individual moral judgment by means of one’s emotion and cognitive elements, the moral judgment based on embodied cognition should be integrated with the theories of moral judgment, especially with moral competencies that are the core of moral judgment, and meanwhile the relationship between the embodied cognition and moral intuition should be deeply explored, and the issues such as chronergy, that is, time efficiency, and dynamics taken place when there is the embodied effect should be further examined, the regulated variables of embodied effects while making moral judgment and the individual differences should also be found out through detailed research. And finally we should check out the embodied effects of moral judgment through the cross-cultural comparison

The Mechanics of Embodiment: A Dialogue on Embodiment and Computational Modeling

Embodied theories are increasingly challenging traditional views of cognition by arguing that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge are grounded in sensory and motor experiences, and processed at this sensorimotor level, rather than being represented and processed abstractly in an amodal conceptual system. Given the established empirical foundation, and the relatively underspecified theories to date, many researchers are extremely interested in embodied cognition but are clamouring for more mechanistic implementations. What is needed at this stage is a push toward explicit computational models that implement sensory-motor grounding as intrinsic to cognitive processes. In this article, six authors from varying backgrounds and approaches address issues concerning the construction of embodied computational models, and illustrate what they view as the critical current and next steps toward mechanistic theories of embodiment. The first part has the form of a dialogue between two fictional characters: Ernest, the �experimenter�, and Mary, the �computational modeller�. The dialogue consists of an interactive sequence of questions, requests for clarification, challenges, and (tentative) answers, and touches the most important aspects of grounded theories that should inform computational modeling and, conversely, the impact that computational modeling could have on embodied theories. The second part of the article discusses the most important open challenges for embodied computational modelling

Causal cognition, force dynamics and early hunting technologies

Abstract: With this contribution we analyze ancient hunting technologies as one way to explore the development of causal cognition in the hominin lineage. Building on earlier work, we separate seven grades of causal thinking. By looking at variations in force dynamics as a central element in causal cognition, we analyze the thinking required for different hunting technologies such as stabbing spears, throwing spears, launching atlatl darts, shooting arrows with a bow, and the use of poisoned arrows. Our interpretation demonstrates that there is an interplay between the extension of human body through technology and expanding our cognitive abilities to reason about causes. It adds content and dimension to the trend of including embodied cognition in evolutionary studies and in the interpretation of the archeological record. Our method could explain variation in technology sets between archaic and modern human groups