Wilson: Six Views of Embodied Cognition

1. Wilson: Six Views of Embodied Cognition 1. Cognition is situated. Cognition takes place in the context of a real-world environment. Cognitive processing occurs in the presence of task-relevant interactions with the environment.

2. Wilson’s Reaction --Insofar as this rests on an evolutionary hypothesis, it’s not clear that the hypothesis is true. --It ignores many of the “species-defining” features of human cognition (planning, imagining, hypothetical reasoning, etc.—all of what’s known as off-line cognition).

3. 2. Cognition Is Time-Pressured Humans must solve problems in real-time. Leads to a kind of representational minimalism. Wilson: --Sometimes humans don’t perform well in time-pressured environments. --Some of humans’ most impressive (as well as most mundane) achievements are not time-pressured in any substantial way. --The radical principles used to model real-time behavior have not been shown to scale up. (minimal representationalism, for example).

4. 3. We Off-Load Cognitive Work onto the Environment --Leave information in the world to be accessed as needed. “The world is its own best model” (Rodney Brooks). --Act on the external world to produce new and useful information (Kirsh and Maglio’s epistemic actions). --Actively use the external world to represent further problem spaces.

5. Wilson’s Reaction Mostly supportive, although --Some of these cases are not situated. --Some of these cases do not introduce anything new into cognitive science.

6. 4. The Environment Is Part of the Cognitive System --Analogous to the extended mind hypothesis of Clark and Chalmers. Wilson is mostly critical: --Distinguish between distributed causality and distributed cognition. The former is trivially true. How do you get from causal contribution to the constitutive claim?

7. Facultative v. Obligate Facultative: short-lived, organized on the fly Obligate: persisting, integrated Consideration of the former systems is most useful when explaining particular events. Science works most effectively by uncovering “fundamental principles of organization and function”—by studying obligate systems.

8. 5. Cognition Is for Action Cognitive processes should be understood and characterized in terms of their role in the control of action. Wilson is mostly critical: -Ventral stream categorization -Categorization used later for a variety of unanticipated purposes. -Reading; piano example

9. Digression In the background of much of this discussion is a claim often made by fans of situated-embodied cognition: that the human does not construct detailed internal representations of the world. Connection to present discussion: the human constructs representation only of what’s linked to immediate action.

10. 6. Off-Line Cognition Is Body-Based Wilson’s favored view. Cognitive processing is tied in some special way to bodily processes of immediate sensation and motor control. Internal cognitive processing involves: --Mental imagery --Articulatory encoding of memories --Body-based implicit memory

11. --Body-based linguistic processing, including a. motor and sensory priming b. metaphorical grounding of abstract domains in concrete ones c. sensory/imagistic symbols and processing d. derivation of syntactic structure from bodily experience

12. The Three Situated Hypotheses: My Preferred Terminology Extended cognition: Parts of the environment beyond the boundary of the human organism are literally cognitive. Embedded cognition: Cognition involves ongoing interaction with the environment. Embodied cognition: Cognitive processing bears some intimate relation to bodily experience (e.g., to the resources used in perception and action).

13. Epistemic-dependence argument for extended cognition In order to understand cognitive processing, we need to understand the causal contribution of the environment. ???????????? Therefore, the environment is part of the cognitive system.