Adapting the Environment instead of Oneself

This paper examines some of the methods animals and humans have of adapting their environment. Because there are limits on how many different tasks a creature can be designed to do well in, creatures with the capacity to redesign their environments have an adaptive advantage over those who can only passively adapt to existing environmental structures. To clarify environmental redesign I rely on the formal notion of a task environment as a directed graph where the nodes are states and the links are actions. One natural form of redesign is to change the topology of this graph structure so as to increase the likelihood of task success or to reduce its expected cost, measured in physical terms. This may be done by eliminating initial states hence eliminating choice points; by changing the action repertoire; by changing the consequence function; and lastly, by adding choice points. Another major method for adapting the environment is to change its cognitive congeniality. Such changes leave the state space formally intact but reduce the number and cost of mental operations needed for task success; they reliably increase the speed, accuracy or robustness of performance. The last section of the paper describes several of these epistemic or complementary actions found in human performance

How marking in dance constitutes thinking with the body

In dance, there is a practice called ‘marking’. When dancers mark, they execute a dance phrase in a simplified, schematic or abstracted form. Based on our interviews with professional dancers in the classical, modern, and contemporary traditions, it is fair to assume that most dancers mark in the normal course of rehearsal and practice. When marking, dancers use their body-in-motion to represent some aspect of the full-out phrase they are thinking about. Their stated reason for marking is that it saves energy, avoids strenuous movement such as jumps, and sometimes it facilitates review of specific aspects of a phrase, such as tempo, movement sequence, or intention, all without the mental and physical complexity involved in creating a phrase full-out. It facilitates real-time reflection

Embodied Cognition and the Magical Future of Interaction Design

The theory of embodied cognition can provide HCI practitioners and theorists with new ideas about interac-tion and new principles for better designs. I support this claim with four ideas about cognition: (1) interacting with tools changes the way we think and perceive – tools, when manipulated, are soon absorbed into the body schema, and this absorption leads to fundamental changes in the way we perceive and conceive of our environments; (2) we think with our bodies not just with our brains; (3) we know more by doing than by seeing – there are times when physically performing an activity is better than watching someone else perform the activity, even though our motor resonance system fires strongly during other person observa-tion; (4) there are times when we literally think with things. These four ideas have major implications for interaction design, especially the design of tangible, physical, context aware, and telepresence systems

Myślenie za pomocą reprezentacji zewnętrznych

Dlaczego ludzie tworzą reprezentacje zewnętrzne, by pomóc sobie w zrozumieniu sytuacji, diagramów, ilustracji, poleceń czy problemów? Oczywisty powód jest taki, że reprezentacje zewnętrzne odciążają naszą wewnętrzną pamięć i obliczenia – to jednak tylko część wyjaśnienia. Omawiam tu siedem sposobów, za pomocą których reprezentacje zewnętrzne zwiększają nasze możliwości poznawcze: (1) zmieniają strukturę kosztów w procesie wnioskowania; (2) wyposażają nas w struktury, które mogą funkcjonować jako współdzielone z innymi przedmioty myśli; (3) tworzą trwałe desygnaty; (4) ułatwiają proces reprezentowania; (5) oddają struktury w sposób bardziej naturalny niż reprezentacje umysłowe; (6) umożliwiają bardziej przejrzyste sposoby kodowania informacji; (7) pozwalają na tworzenie struktur o dowolnej złożoności; (8) obniżają koszty kontroli procesów myślowych: ułatwiają koordynowanie myśli. Łącznie funkcje te sprawiają, że ludzie są w stanie lepiej myśleć za pomocą reprezentacji zewnętrznych niż bez nich. Pozwalają nam myśleć o rzeczach pierwotnie nie do pomyślenia

Strategie komplementarne: Dlaczego używamy rąk, kiedy myślimy

A complementary strategy can be defined as any organizing activity which recruits external elements to reduce cognitive loads. Typical organizing activities include pointing, arranging the position and orientation of nearby objects, writing things down, manipulating counters, rulers or other artifacts that can encode the state of a process or simplify perception. To illustrate the idea of a complementary strategy, a simple experiment was performed in which subjects were asked to determine the dollar value of collections of coins. In the no-hands condition, subjects were not allowed to touch the coin images or to move their hands in any way. In the hands condition, they were allowed to use their hands and fingers however they liked. Significant improvements in time and number of errors were observed when S's used their hands over when they did not. To explain these facts, a brief account of some commonly observed complementary strategies is presented, and an account of their potential benefits to perception, memory and attention