Embodied Cognition and Sport

Successful athletic performance requires precision in many respects. A batter stands behind home plate awaiting the arrival of a ball that is less than three inches in diameter and moving close to 100 mph. His goal is to hit it with a ba­­t that is also less than three inches in diameter. This impressive feat requires extraordinary temporal and spatial coordination. The sweet spot of the bat must be at the same place, at the same time, as the ball. A basketball player must keep a ball bouncing as she speeds from one end of the court to another, evading defensive players. She may never break pace as she lifts from the ground, throwing the ball fifteen feet toward a hoop that is eighteen inches in diameter. One task facing a psychologist involves explaining how the body does such things within the sometimes very demanding spatial and temporal constraints that a given task imposes. Part of the goal of this chapter is to sketch the commitments of an embodied approach to such an explanation. We shall see that an embodied account of motor skills draws concepts that depart radically from more traditional cognitivist theories of motor activity. Similarly, because an embodied approach to cognition introduces new ways to understand the human capacity for social interaction, it also promises to shed new light on how athletes coordinate their actions with each other

O que há de novo sobre cognição corporificada?

In the past twenty years, growing numbers of researchers have sought to steer cognitive science in a new direction. These researchers have emphasized the body’s role in cognition. Although the precise nature of this role often receives only vague description, perfectly clear is the idea that, whatever this role, the time has come for cognitive science to abandon old conceptions of the mind in favor of something new; and formerly trusted methods for its investigation must give way to novel techniques. This article will first present a brief description of the computational conception of mind against which embodied cognition typically positions itself. Following that will be a discussion of various research projects that embodied cognitivists take to challenge this computational conception. In conclusion, the chapter offers an assessment of the embodied challenge to computational cognitive science and considers its future prospects. Key words: cognition, embodied, computational, cognitive science.Nos últimos vinte anos, um número crescente de pesquisadores tem procurado direcionar as ciências cognitivas em uma nova direção. Estes pesquisadores tem enfatizado o papel da corporificação na cognição. Embora a natureza precisa deste papel seguidamente receba apenas uma descrição vaga, é perfeitamente clara a ideia de que, qualquer que seja o papel, chegou a hora de a ciência cognitiva abandonar velhas concepções da mente em favor de algo novo; e métodos de investigação anteriormente confiados devem dar lugar a novas técnicas. Este artigo irá primeiramente apresentar uma breve descrição da concepção computacional da mente contra a qual a cognição corporificada se posiciona. Seguindo isso haverá uma discussão de vários projetos de pesquisa que os cognitivistas da corporificação tomam para desafiar a concepção computacional. Em conclusão, o capítulo oferece um acesso ao desafio corporificado para a ciência cognitiva computacional e considera perspectivas futuras. Palavras-chave: cognição, corporifi cada, computacional, ciências cognitivas

Manipulações Mentais e o Problema da Exclusão Causal

Christian List and Peter Menzies [2009] have looked to interventionist theories of causation for an answer to Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion problem. Important to their response is the idea of realization-insensitivity. However, this idea becomes mired in issues concerning multiple realization, leaving it unable to ful?l its promise to block exclusion. After explaining why realization-insensitivity fails as a solution to Kim’s problem, I look to interventionism to describe a di?erent kind of solution.Christian List e Peter Menzies [2009] buscaram em teorias intervencionistas da causação por uma resposta ao problema da exclusão de Jeagwon Kim. Importante para suas respostas é a ideia de insensibilidade à realização. Entretanto, esta ideia envolve-se em problemas relacionados à múltipla realização, tornando-o incapaz de cumprir sua promessa de bloquear a exclusão. Depois de explicar porque a insensibilidade à realização falha como uma solução ao problema de Kim, eu examino o intervencionismo para descrever um tipo de solução diferente

Mental Manipulations and the Problem of Causal Exclusion

Christian List e Peter Menzies [2009] buscaram em teorias intervencionistas da causação por uma resposta ao problema da exclusão de Jeagwon Kim. Importante para suas respostas é a ideia de insensibilidade à realização. Entretanto, esta ideia envolve-se em problemas relacionados à múltipla realização, tornando-o incapaz de cumprir sua promessa de bloquear a exclusão. Depois de explicar porque a insensibilidade à realização falha como uma solução ao problema de Kim, eu examino o intervencionismo para descrever um tipo de solução diferente.Christian List and Peter Menzies [2009] have looked to interventionist theories of causation for an answer to Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion problem. Important to their response is the idea of realization-insensitivity. However, this idea becomes mired in issues concerning multiple realization, leaving it unable to ful?l its promise to block exclusion. After explaining why realization-insensitivity fails as a solution to Kim’s problem, I look to interventionism to describe a di?erent kind of solution

Induction of NF-κB by the Akt/PKB kinase

AbstractThe serine/threonine kinase Akt (also known as protein kinase B, PKB) is activated by numerous growth-factor and immune receptors through lipid products of phosphatidylinositol (PI) 3-kinase. Akt can couple to pathways that regulate glucose metabolism or cell survival [1]. Akt can also regulate several transcription factors, including E2F, CREB, and the Forkhead family member Daf-16 [2–4]. Here, we show that Akt can regulate signaling pathways that lead to induction of the NF-κB family of transcription factors in the Jurkat T-cell line. This induction occurs, at least in part, at the level of degradation of the NF-κB inhibitor IκB, and is specific for NF-κB, as other inducible transcription factors are not affected by Akt overexpression. Furthermore, the effect requires the kinase activity and pleckstrin homology (PH) domain of Akt. Also, Akt does not act alone to induce cytokine promoters and NF-κB reporters, because signals from other pathways are required to observe the effect. These studies uncover a previously unappreciated connection between Akt and NF-κB induction that could have implications for the control of T-cell growth and survival

A Hierarchical Approach to Protein Molecular Evolution

Biological diversity has evolved despite the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We present a hierarchical approach to the efficient searching of this space and quantify the evolutionary potential of our approach with Monte Carlo simulations. These simulations demonstrate that non-homologous juxtaposition of encoded structure is the rate-limiting step in the production of new tertiary protein folds. Non-homologous ``swapping'' of low energy secondary structures increased the binding constant of a simulated protein by $\approx10^7$ relative to base substitution alone. Applications of our approach include the generation of new protein folds and modeling the molecular evolution of disease.Comment: 15 pages. 2 figures. LaTeX styl