Catching the Ghost: House Dance and Improvisational Mastery

This article received the 2020 Outstanding Student Paper Award from the American Society for Aesthetics. Contemporary Aesthetics recommends reading Renee Conroy’s article, “Reflections on ‘Catching the Ghost: House Dance and Improvisational Mastery,’” following this article. I interviewed seven expert house dancers regarding their improvisational practice and discovered several intriguing testimonial consistencies. House dancers articulated a feeling of simultaneously being in control and not in control of their movements. Furthermore, in peak moments of improvisation, interviewees were often surprised by their own capabilities. How do we award artistic credit to someone who is seemingly not aware of his or her own capabilities and reports not being in full executive control? I utilize the theoretical framework of 4E cognition (embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended) to address these philosophical puzzles. I argue that on a 4E reading of house dance improvisation, the standard distinction between control and non-control is not useful, because improvisational cognition is an ongoing enactive loop. Hence, we can credit house dancers on artistic grounds for becoming optimally coupled with the dance environment

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Dance

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Danc

Body Schema in Autonomous Agents

A body schema is an agent's model of its own body that enables it to act on affordances in the environment. This paper presents a body schema system for the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent (LIDA) cognitive architecture. LIDA is a conceptual and computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory, also integrating other theories from neuroscience and psychology. This paper contends that the ‘body schema' should be split into three separate functions based on the functional role of consciousness in Global Workspace Theory. There is (1) an online model of the agent's effectors and effector variables (Current Body Schema), (2) a long-term, recognitional storage of embodied capacities for action and affordances (Habitual Body Schema), and (3) "dorsal" stream information feeding directly from early perception to sensorimotor processes (Online Body Schema). This paper then discusses how the LIDA model of the body schema explains several experiments in psychology and ethology

Modeling Long-Term Intentions and Narratives in Autonomous Agents

Across various fields it is argued that the self in part consists of an autobiographical self-narrative and that the self-narrative has an impact on agential behavior. Similarly, within action theory, it is claimed that the intentional structure of coherent long-term action is divided into a hierarchy of distal, proximal, and motor intentions. However, the concrete mechanisms for how narratives and distal intentions are generated and impact action is rarely fleshed out concretely. We here demonstrate how narratives and distal intentions can be generated within cognitive agents and how they can impact agential behavior over long time scales. We integrate narratives and distal intentions into the LIDA model,and demonstrate how they can guide agential action in a manner that is consistent with the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. This paper serves both as an addition to the LIDA cognitive architecture and an elucidation of how narratives and distal intention emerge and play their role in cognition and action

Dances and affordances: The relationship between dance training and conceptual problem-solving

It is often argued by educators and researchers that access to the arts leads to increased academic performance. However, it is not clear why such access does so. We here use autopoietic enactive embodied cognition and ecological psychology to explain the relationship between dance training and conceptual problem-solving. We investigate four features of dance training that are beneficial for conceptual problem-solving and critical thinking: empathy, affordance exploration, attention change, and habit breaking. In each case, we will see that the embodied sensorimotor skills developed through dance practice are a form of affordance exploration that can carry over into the realm of conceptual problem-solving. Hence, since some of the skills needed in conceptual problem-solving are the same ones developed and trained through dancing, when we train dance, we also train some of the relevant skills for conceptual problem-solving and critical thinking

Grant Writing and the Hidden Curriculum: Mentoring and Collaborating Across Disciplines

Submitting grant proposals is becoming an increasingly common expectation - and, in some cases, a requirement - in the discipline of political science as well as other social sciences and the humanities. However, writing a grant with a good chance of success at getting funded is not part of standard mentorship or pedagogy in our discipline. It is a part of the hidden curriculum, where grant-writing skills often are taught informally in working with a principal investigator. This article describes the process and structure of writing a grant to provide a roadmap for scholars to follow in submitting externally funded projects. The article describes an Institutional Review Board-approved survey about mentorship and grant writing and discusses the importance of socialization, professionalization, and administration in supporting scholars in writing and obtaining grants

An enactivist account of the dynamics of lying

Enactivist accounts of communication have focused almost exclusively on honest, cooperative communication. However, much of human life involves deception and lies. Using the generally agreed upon definition of lying, we here develop an enactive account of the dynamics of lying. At face, lying poses a problem for enactive theories of cognition since lying seemingly requires the ability to represent counterfactual states of affairs and implant those representations in other agents\u27 belief systems. On our account, lying involves the active manipulation of the short- and long-term dynamics of social cognitive systems so that agents have access to different sets of affordances from the one’s they counterfactually would have had access to without the lie. Representing truths and falsehoods are replaced with competency within social-cultural and material practices

The language of wine reviews

Expert wine reviewers have a niche skill set, with a particular lexicon, that facilitates their evaluation of wines. Novice consumers may find wine reviews intimidating and confusing. In this paper, we use a dataset of nearly 130,000 reviews from expert reviewers at Wine Enthusiast to explore the lexical dimension of wine reviews and determine to what extent reviewers systematically use language differently across various wine price points. Trends reveal that the information needed to make informed wine purchases are provided through the language of wine reviews. Our analysis shows that wine selection does not require a technical understanding of the wine-specific vocabulary of wine experts. We present a review of the literature on wine reviews and form four hypotheses under the theoretical framework of Kahneman’s two systems of thought—suggesting the linguistic properties of wine reviews reveal the price of wine. We examine how the lexical categories; emotional and logical linguistic content; social; and somatic experiences used in wine reviews relate to price. We then suggest the applicability of this analysis to other commodity domains in future research