Adventures in Cognitive Science 1: What Role the Body plays in Cognition

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The first paper I want to present is called “Six views of embodied cognition” and was published by Margaret Wilson, an associate professor for Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2002. In this paper she argues that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interaction with the world. In cognitive science this is called embodied cognition, embodiment or grounded cognition, opposed to traditional cognitivism, which sees cognition as computation on amodal symbols (symbols that are missing a sensory perception) in a modular system, so cognition is seen as manipulation of abstract symbols. This older view used to be the predominant one when cognitive science was established in the 1950ies, because around the same time period the first computational devices (aka. computers) found their way into universities and were also used to model “intelligence” computationally. Seeing how these new devices were able to show “signs of intelligence” by processing on abstract symbols influenced other fields like cognitive psychology or philosophy of the mind. In the last decades however, these views are in decline and the embodied paradigm is gaining more and more followers (at my university it is the predominating paradigm I'd say).

Since embodiment in cognitive science is a rather new concept (well, kind of: when the paper was published it was already around for a while, but just started to gain popularity), Wilson proposes to disentangle and evaluate 6 different claims about embodied cognition:

1. cognition is situated
2. cognition is time-pressured
3. we off-load cognitive work onto the environment
4. the environment is part of the cognitive system
5. cognition is for action
6. offline cognition is body based

Cognition is Situated

Situated cognition is cognition that takes place in the context of task-relevant inputs and outputs. So cognition is an activity that includes the environment, driving or moving around in a room while trying to imagine where the furniture should go are examples for situated cognition. These activities are called “on-line” cognition, “off-line” cognition on the other hand includes activities without direct task-relevant inputs and outputs. Making plans or remembering events are examples for such activities, which are cognitive, but not situated and therefore can not be analysed with situated cognition analysis. It is clearly a weak point of embodied cognition, that it is not able to deal with activities which are essential conditions for human thought and an issue that a lot of proponents of embodiment try to solve. Evolutionary speaking on-line cognition is the more important one, since it decided about life and death of our ancestors. Although also off-line cognition, like parents warning their children about dangerous situation, could decide about life and death. Even though Wilson is a proponent of embodiment, she acknowledges and highlights the importance of off-line cognition.

Cognition is Time Pressured

The claim that cognition is situated also implies another claim: cognition must handle the requirement of being in real-time. One reason why is simply, that in many real-world scenarios there is simply no time to sit down and build a full mental representation of the environment, instead a lot of shortcuts are tricks are used to keep cognition as fast as possible. But there are also scenarios, which are not time critical, like reading scientific papers: even if you are in a hurry to read a paper, the hurry is self-imposed and when you finish it, it is up to you. Here you can see a connection to on-line and off-line cognition: on-line cognition is time critical, while off-line cognition is not.

We Off-Load Cognitive Work Onto the Environment

Even though off-line cognition allows us to take our time before performing an action (although it is not the general case in cognitive science, Wilson is referring to humans when she writes “us”, although in cognitive science a cogniser can also be an animal or even a software agent) we do not always have the comfort of doing so. In such cases we can either go back to knowledge that we have learned before, or we “outsource” some of that cognitive workload into the environment. Playing Tetris is one example where humans tend to do this: a study shows that instead of performing the rotations “in the head”, players are just rotating the falling blocks and see how they are going to fit. Another example would be using your finger when counting something: it reduces the cognitive workload and makes the task easier.

The Environment is Part of the Cognitive System

Somehow similar to what was written above, there are some authors claiming that cognition is not just an activity of mind, but it is distributed across the environment and the body. This is because the “forces” that drive cognitive activity are not only inside the head, but are distributed across the individual and the situation in which the individual acts. Therefore to understand cognition, you have to study the situation in which the individual acts. Wilson says that the first part is true, but the connection of the first and the second part second is causing some problems, because (in her words) science is not about explaining causality, but about understanding the underlying principles. Instead of focusing on specific events, cognitive scientists should keep an eye on the “big picture”, it could be problematic to keep this view, when studying specific events.

Cognition is for Action

A very large part of what cognition does is related to actions, like the examples of playing Tetris or driving show. Vision for example is a good way how to improve motor control or memory helps us (and our perception) to navigate in a three-dimensional environment. Support for this claim comes from neuroscience, where certain motor neurons in monkeys which are involved when controlling a tool also respond if the monkey just sees the tool. Similar to this, some researchers claim that the function of memory is less for “for memorising”, but rather to encode patterns for possible interactions with the environment. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so how you perceive your environment is strongly influenced by how you are able to interact with it.

Off-Line Cognition is Body based

What Wilson is trying here (as far as I understood) is to tackle the problem of embodied cognition that I introduced in the first section: the embodied view has problems dealing with off-line cognition, since it does not require direct input. She (as well as other proponents of embodied cognition) claims that off-line cognition is basically running a simulation of on-line cognition. In order to plan and to remember, humans are “imagining being in the situation”, which they are planning or remembering. She is supporting her claim by giving some examples: mental imagery (“getting a picture in your head”) or episodic memory (“reliving” past episodes of your life). This claim has received the least attention in cognitive science, but according to Wilson it is probably the strongest and best documented one.

Conclusion

Wilson is pointing out, that rather than seeing embodied cognition as one single viewpoint, we have to treat all of its claims individually. One benefit of doing so is that now we are better able to distingiush between on-line and off-line cognition, where the first is time pressured and the latter is not time pressured and maybe the driving force of what makes us human.