I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical knowledge precisely in terms of rich primitives of interpretation. Primitives of interpretation can be correctly viewed intentionally, as explanations of our choices of linguistic actions; the model therefore fits our (...) intuitions about meaning in conversation. Nevertheless, interpretations for complex utterances can be built from these primitives by simple operations of grammatical derivation. In bridging analyses of meaning at semantic and symbol‐processing levels, this account underscores the fundamental place for computation in the cognitive science of language use. (shrink)

Conventional behaviors develop from practice for regularly occurring problems of coordination within a community of actors. Reusing and extending conventional methods for coordinating behavior is the task of everyday reasoning.The computational model presented in the paper details the emergence of convention in circumstances where there is no ruling body of knowledge developed by prior generations of actors within the community to guide behavior. The framework we assume combines social theories of cognition with human information processing models that have been developed (...) within Cognitive Science. The model presented reflects both elements of the framework. Conventional behaviors are partially coded in the predisposition of participants in a joint activity to expect certain points of coordination to develop during the course of the activity. The expected points of coordination that are commonly assumed form a design for an activity. Because of uncertainty, interruptions, and numerous other opportunities to get off‐track and out‐of‐synch, the participants must work jointly and continuously to achieve conventional coordination.One feature of the model is that the community improves its performance despite the fact that individual actors reason independently about their experiences. Another important feature of the model is that the mechanisms for improving behavior are tied to the memory function of individual actors. A third important feature is that the social interaction among the participants simplifies and drives the everyday reasoning processes. An analysis of a large set of computational experiments supports the theoretical position that is developed regarding everyday reasoning and convention. (shrink)

Embodied cognition has attracted significant attention within cognitive science and related fields in recent years. It is most noteworthy for its emphasis on the inextricable connection between mental functioning and embodied activity and thus for its departure from standard cognitive science's implicit commitment to the unembodied mind. This article offers a review of embodied cognition's recent empirical and theoretical contributions and suggests how this movement has moved beyond standard cognitive science. The article then clarifies important respects in which embodied cognition (...) has not departed fundamentally from the standard view. A shared commitment to representationalism, and ultimately, mechanism, suggest that the standard and embodied cognition movements are more closely related than is commonly acknowledged. Arguments against representationalism and mechanism are reviewed and an alternative position that does not entail these conceptual undergirdings is offered. (shrink)

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied (...) are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. (shrink)

The Phenomenal Self (PS) is widely considered to be dependent on body representations, whereas the Narrative Self (NS) is generally thought to rely on abstract cognitive representations. The concept of the Bodily Social Self (BSS) might play an important role in explaining how the high level cognitive self-representations enabling the NS might emerge from the bodily basis of the PS. First, the phenomenal self (PS) and narrative self (NS), are briefly examined. Next, the BSS is defined and its potential for (...) explaining aspects of social cognition is explored. The minimal requirements for a BSS are considered, before reviewing empirical evidence regarding the development of the BSS over the first year of life. Finally, evidence on the involvement of the body in social distinctions between self and other is reviewed to illustrate how the BSS is affected by both the bottom up effects of multisensory stimulation and the top down effects of social identification. (shrink)

This paper considers the past and future of Psychology within Cognitive Science. In the history section, I focus on three questions: (a) how has the position of Psychology evolved within Cognitive Science, relative to the other disciplines that make up Cognitive Science; (b) how have particular Cognitive Science areas within Psychology waxed or waned; and (c) what have we gained and lost. After discussing what’s happened since the late 1970s, when the Society and the journal began, I speculate about where (...) the field is going. (shrink)

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson’s ecological psychology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units (...) of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science. (shrink)

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] The article examines the modern computer-based educational environment and the requirements of the possible cognitive interface that enables the learner’s cognitive grounding by incorporating abductive reasoning into the educational process. Although the main emphasis is on cognitive and physiological aspects, the practical tools for enabling computational thinking in a modern constructionist educational environment are discussed. The presented analytical material and developed solutions are aimed at education with computers. However, the proposed solutions can (...) be generalized in order to create a computer-free educational environment. The generalized paradigm here is pragmatism, considered as a philosophical assumption. By designing and creating a pragmatist educational environment, a common way of organizing computational thinking that enables constructionist educational solutions can be found. (shrink)

Human behavior unfolds primarily in built environments, where the arrangement of objects is a result of ongoing human decisions and actions, yet these organizational decisions have received limited experimental study. In two experiments, we introduce a novel paradigm designed to explore how individuals organize task-relevant objects in space. Participants completed goals by locating and accessing sequences of objects in a computer-based task, and they were free to rearrange the positions of objects at any time. We measure a variety of organization (...) changes and evaluate how these measures relate to individual differences in performance. In Experiment 1, we show that with weak structure in task demands, changes in object positions that arise through performance of the task lead to improved order, characterized predominantly by a centralization of frequently used items and a peripheralization of infrequently used objects. In Experiment 2, with increased task structure, we observe more refined organizational tendencies, with selective contraction and clustering of interrelated task-relevant objects. We further demonstrate that these more selective organization behaviors are reliably associated with individual differences in task performance. Collectively, these two studies reveal properties of space and of task demands that support and facilitate effective organization of the environment in support of ongoing behavior. (shrink)

It has been argued that the approximate number system (ANS) constitutes a problem for the grounded approach to cognition because it implies that some conceptual tasks are performed by non-perceptual systems. The ANS is considered non-perceptual mainly because it processes stimuli from different modalities. Jones (2015) has recently argued that this system has many features (such as being modular) which are characteristic of sensory systems. Additionally, he affirms that traditional sensory systems also process inputs from different modalities. This suggests that (...) the ANS is a perceptual system and therefore it is not problematic for the grounded view. In this paper, I defend the amodal approach to the ANS against these two arguments. In the first place, perceptual systems do not possess the properties attributed to the ANS and therefore these properties do not imply that the ANS is perceptual. In the second place, I will propose that a sensory system only needs to be dedicated to process modality-specific information, which is consistent with responding to inputs from different modalities. I argue that the cross-modal responses exhibited by traditional sensory systems are consistent with modality-specific information whereas some responses exhibited by the ANS are not. (shrink)

A great deal of research has focused on the question of whether or not concepts are embodied as a rule. Supporters of embodiment have pointed to studies that implicate affective and sensorimotor systems in cognitive tasks, while critics of embodiment have offered nonembodied explanations of these results and pointed to studies that implicate amodal systems. Abstract concepts have tended to be viewed as an important test case in this polemical debate. This essay argues that we need to move beyond a (...) pretheoretical notion of abstraction. Against the background of current research and theory, abstract concepts do not pose a single, unified problem for embodied cognition but, instead, three distinct problems: the problem of generalization, the problem of flexibility, and the problem of disembodiment. Identifying these problems provides a conceptual framework for critically evaluating, and perhaps improving upon, recent theoretical proposals. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We build from a recent integrative framework unifying these divergent perspectives through the use of dual-process theory and supporting social neuroscience research. Our elaboration considers two complementary notions of direct perception: one (...) primarily stemming from ecological psychology and the other from enactive cognition theory. We use this as the foundation from which to offer an account of the informational basis for social information and assert a set of research propositions to further the science of social cognition. In doing so, we point out how perception of the minds of others can be supported in some cases by lawful information, supporting direct perception of social affordances and perhaps, mental states, and in other cases by cues that support indirect perceptual inference. Our goal is to extend accounts of social cognition by integrating advances across disciplines to provide a multi-level and multi-theoretic description that can advance this field and offer a means through which to reconcile radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

How many words—and which ones—are sufficient to define all other words? When dictionaries are analyzed as directed graphs with links from defining words to defined words, they reveal a latent structure. Recursively removing all words that are reachable by definition but that do not define any further words reduces the dictionary to a Kernel of about 10% of its size. This is still not the smallest number of words that can define all the rest. About 75% of the Kernel turns (...) out to be its Core, a “Strongly Connected Subset” of words with a definitional path to and from any pair of its words and no word's definition depending on a word outside the set. But the Core cannot define all the rest of the dictionary. The 25% of the Kernel surrounding the Core consists of small strongly connected subsets of words: the Satellites. The size of the smallest set of words that can define all the rest—the graph's “minimum feedback vertex set” or MinSet—is about 1% of the dictionary, about 15% of the Kernel, and part-Core/part-Satellite. But every dictionary has a huge number of MinSets. The Core words are learned earlier, more frequent, and less concrete than the Satellites, which are in turn learned earlier, more frequent, but more concrete than the rest of the Dictionary. In principle, only one MinSet's words would need to be grounded through the sensorimotor capacity to recognize and categorize their referents. In a dual-code sensorimotor/symbolic model of the mental lexicon, the symbolic code could do all the rest through recombinatory definition. (shrink)

Drawing on empirical material from social psychology, ‘situationism’ argues that the astonishing susceptibility of moral behaviour to situational influences undermines certain conceptions of character. The related, albeit more limited, thesis proposed in this paper, ‘embodied situationism’, engages a larger number of empirical sources from different fields of study and sheds light on the mechanisms responsible for particular, seemingly puzzling, situational judgments and behaviours. It is demonstrated that the empirical material supports the claims of ES and that ES is immune to (...) some important objections against situationism. (shrink)

Centuries ago, Descartes and Locke initiated a foundational debate in epistemology over the relationship between knowledge, on the one hand, and practical factors, on the other. Descartes claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally separate. Locke claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally united. After a period of dormancy, their disagreement has reignited on the contemporary scene. Latter-day Lockeans claim that knowledge itself is essentially connected to, and perhaps even constituted by, practical factors such as how much is at stake, (...) how important the situation is, or how one should act. Latter-day Cartesians claim, by contrast, that knowledge is entirely constituted by truth-related factors such as truth, belief, and evidence. Each side has supported its case with claims about patterns in ordinary behavior and knowledge judgments. Lockeans argue that these patterns are best explained by positing a fundamental and direct link between knowledge and practical factors. Cartesians argue that the patterns can be equally well explained by positing an indirect link, entirely mediated by the traditional factors of truth, belief, and evidence, thereby rendering the Lockean hypothesis unnecessary. We argue that Cartesians are right about some practical factors, in particular stakes and how important a situation is, which have, at best, a modest indirect relationship to knowledge. However, Lockeans are right about actionability: whether a person should pursue a course of action is unquestionably very powerfully and directly connected to knowledge. (shrink)

The Internet is an important focus of attention for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science communities. This is partly because the Internet serves as an important part of the material environment in which a broad array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated. The Internet can thus be seen as an important part of the ‘cognitive ecology’ that helps to shape, support and realize aspects of human cognizing. Much of the previous philosophical work in this area has sought (...) to analyze the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of human cognition. There has, as such, been little effort to assess the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of ‘machine cognition’. This is unfortunate, because the Internet is likely to exert a significant influence on the shape of machine intelligence. The present paper attempts to evaluate the extent to which the Internet serves as a form of cognitive ecology for synthetic forms of intelligence. In particular, the phenomenon of Internet-situated machine intelligence is analyzed from the perspective of a number of approaches that are typically subsumed under the heading of situated cognition. These include extended, embedded, scaffolded and embodied approaches to cognition. For each of these approaches, the Internet is shown to be of potential relevance to the development and operation of machine-based cognitive capabilities. Such insights help us to appreciate the role of the Internet in advancing the current state-of-the-art in machine intelligence. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy introduces an intriguing combination of so-called ‘drives’, seemingly biologically inspired forces behind humanity’s cultural ways of relating to what is, and extensive distrust of science. Despite the Greek mythological context, the insight and the arguments provided by Nietzsche seem relevant to contemporary biologically inspired approaches to cognition found within biosemiotics, as well as the embodied cognition paradigm. Here, I discuss how Nietzsche’s biological conception of our relation to what is, incessantly emphasises a critical approach to (...) our predilections and mindless conventionalist beliefs. (shrink)

Tenenbaum and Griffiths (2001) have proposed that their Bayesian model of generalisation unifies Shepard’s (1987) and Tversky’s (1977) similarity-based explanations of two distinct patterns of generalisation behaviours by reconciling them under a single coherent task analysis. I argue that this proposal needs refinement: instead of unifying the heterogeneous notion of psychological similarity, the Bayesian approach unifies generalisation by rendering the distinct patterns of behaviours informationally relevant. I suggest that generalisation as a Bayesian inference should be seen as a complement to, (...) instead of a replacement of, similarity-based explanations. Furthermore, I show that the unificatory powers of the Bayesian model of generalisation can contribute to the selection of one of these models of psychological similarity. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 14 One common problem with anti-skepticism and skepticism alike is their failure to account for our sometimes conflicting epistemic intuitions. In order to address this problem and provide a new direction for solving the skeptical puzzle, I consider a modified version of the puzzle that is based on knowledge claims about appearances and does not result in a paradox. I conclude that combining the elements of both the original and modified puzzle can potentially guide us towards (...) solutions that can fully explain the conflict of epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 14 One common problem with anti-skepticism and skepticism alike is their failure to account for our sometimes conflicting epistemic intuitions. In order to address this problem and provide a new direction for solving the skeptical puzzle, I consider a modified version of the puzzle that is based on knowledge claims about appearances and does not result in a paradox. I conclude that combining the elements of both the original and modified puzzle can potentially guide us towards (...) solutions that can fully explain the conflict of epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

Each of our theories of mental representation provides some insight into how the mind works. However, these insights often seem incompatible, as the debates between symbolic, dynamical, emergentist, sub-symbolic, and grounded approaches to cognition attest. Mental representations—whatever they are—must share many features with each of our theories of representation, and yet there are few hypotheses about how a synthesis could be possible. Here, I develop a theory of the underpinnings of symbolic cognition that shows how sub-symbolic dynamics may give rise (...) to higher-level cognitive representations of structures, systems of knowledge, and algorithmic processes. This theory implements a version of conceptual role semantics by positing an internal universal representation language in which learners may create mental models to capture dynamics they observe in the world. The theory formalizes one account of how truly novel conceptual content may arise, allowing us to explain how even elementary logical and computational operations may be learned from a more primitive basis. I provide an implementation that learns to represent a variety of structures, including logic, number, kinship trees, regular languages, context-free languages, domains of theories like magnetism, dominance hierarchies, list structures, quantification, and computational primitives like repetition, reversal, and recursion. This account is based on simple discrete dynamical processes that could be implemented in a variety of different physical or biological systems. In particular, I describe how the required dynamics can be directly implemented in a connectionist framework. The resulting theory provides an “assembly language” for cognition, where high-level theories of symbolic computation can be implemented in simple dynamics that themselves could be encoded in biologically plausible systems. (shrink)

Barsalou has recently argued against the strategy of identifying amodal neural representations by using their cross-modal responses (i.e., their responses to stimuli from different modalities). I agree that there are indeed modal structures that satisfy this “cross-modal response” criterion (CM), such as distributed and conjunctive modal representations. However, I argue that we can distinguish between modal and amodal structures by looking into differences in their cross-modal responses. A component of a distributed cell assembly can be considered unimodal because its responses (...) to stimuli from a given modality are stable, whereas its responses to stimuli from any other modality are not (i.e., these are lost within a short time, plausibly as a result of cell assembly dynamics). In turn, conjunctive modal representations, such as superior colliculus cells in charge of sensory integration, are multimodal because they have a stable response to stimuli from different modalities. Finally, some prefrontal cells constitute amodal representations because they exhibit what has been called ‘adaptive coding’. This implies that their responses to stimuli from any given modality can be lost when the context and task conditions are modified. We cannot assign them a modality because they have no stable relation with any input type. (shrink)

This paper proposes a model for implementation of intrinsic natural language sentence meaning in a physical language understanding system, where 'intrinsic' is understood as 'independent of meaning ascription by system-external observers'. The proposal is that intrinsic meaning can be implemented as a point attractor in the state space of a nonlinear dynamical system with feedback which is generated by temporally sequenced inputs. It is motivated by John Searle's well known (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3: 417–57, 1980) critique of the then-standard (...) and currently still influential computational theory of mind (CTM), the essence of which was that CTM representations lack intrinsic meaning because that meaning is dependent on ascription by an observer_._ The proposed dynamical model comprises a collection of interacting artificial neural networks, and constitutes a radical simplification of the principle of compositional phrase structure which is at the heart of the current standard view of sentence semantics because it is computationally interpretable as a finite state machine. (shrink)

In an evolutionary perspective Louwerse elaborates the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis (Louwerse, 2011), arguing that language has evolved such that it maps onto the perceptual system, allowing to bootstrap meaning also when grounding is limited. The author concludes that in principle the processing of abstract and concrete words is the same and that in both cases language users tend to rely anyway on indexical relationships that words entertain with other words.

The American psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist Daniel Stern’s idea of vitality forms might suggest a new solution to explain how other minds are intensely expressed in their actions. Vitality forms characterize the expressive style of actions. The effective perception of vitality forms allows people to recognize the affective states and intentions of others in their actions, and could even open the possibility of properties of objects that are indicated by the given actions. Currently, neurophysiological studies present that there might be (...) a neural mirror mechanism in the dorso-central insula, middle cingulate cortex, and other related cerebral areas, which serve to preferably perceive and deliver vitality forms of actions. In this article, possible types of vitality forms related to other minds, which have been brought to particular attention in recent years, have been collected and discussed in the following four areas: Vitality forms on understanding non-verbal intention, on understanding verbal intention, vitality forms as grounding social cognition, and as grounding social emotion. These four areas, however, might refer to an entirety of a binary actor-observer communicative landscape. In this review, we try to simplify the analysis by relying on two fundamental dimensions of criteria: first, the idea of vitality forms is conceived as the most basic way of observing subsequent higher-order dimensions of action, that is, understanding intention in the style of action. Thus, in the first two subsections, the relationships between vitality forms and their roles in understanding non-verbal and verbal intention have been discussed. Second, vitality forms could also be conceived as background conditions of all the other mental categories, that is, vitality forms can ground cognition and emotion in a social context. In the second dimension, the existence of social cognition or emotion depends on the existence of the stylistic kinematics of action. A grounding relation is used to distinguish a ground, that is, vitality forms, and its grounded mental categories. As relating with the domain of social perception, in this review, it has been discussed vitality forms possibly could ground social cognition and social emotion, respectively. (shrink)

Introduction: The effect of promoting a physical reaction by the described action is called the action-sentence compatibility effect. It has been verified that physical motion changes depending on the time phase and grammatical expression. However, it is unclear how adverbs and onomatopoeia change motion simulations and subsequent movements.Methods: The subjects were 35 healthy adults. We prepared 20 sentences each, expressing actions related to hands and feet. These were converted into 80 sentences, with the words “Slow” or “Quick” added to the (...) words related to the speed of movement, and 80 sentences with the words “Fast” and onomatopoeia “Satto” added. Additionally, 20 unnatural sentences were prepared for each stimulus set as pseudo sentences. Choice reaction time was adopted; subjects pressed the button with their right hand only when the presented text was correctly understood. The reaction time and the number of errors were recorded and compared.Results: As a result of a two-way repeated ANOVA, an interaction effect was observed in RTs and NoE in set A. “Hand and Fast” had significantly faster RTs than “Hand and Slow” and “Foot and Fast.” Furthermore, “Hand and Fast” had a significantly higher NoE than others. In set B, the main effects were observed in both RTs and NoE. “Hand” and “Satto” had significantly faster RTs than “Foot” and “Quick,” respectively. Additionally, an interaction effect was observed in NoE, wherein “Foot and Satto” was significantly higher than “Hand and Satto” and “Foot and Quick.”Conclusion: In this study, the word “Fast” promoted hand response, reaffirming ACE. The onomatopoeia “Satto” was a word that conveys the speed of movement, but it was suggested that the degree of understanding may be influenced by the body part and the attributes of the subject. (shrink)

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns (...) and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun‐based location‐cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location‐cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement‐verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic‐embodied integrated language processing; location‐cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the strategic control involved in skilled action. When I discuss strategic control, I have in mind the practical goals, plans, and strategies that skilled agents use in order to specify, structure, and organize their skilled actions, which they have learned through practice. The idea is that skilled agents are better than novices not only at implementing the intentions that they have but also at forming the right intentions. More specifically, skilled agents are able formulate (...) and modify, adjust and adapt their practical intentions in ways that are appropriate, effective, and flexible given their overall goals. Further, to specify the kind of action plans that are involved in strategic control, I’ll rely on empirical evidence concerning mental practice and mental imagery from sports psychology as well as evidence highlighting the systematic differences in the cognitive representations of skills between experts and non-experts. I’ll claim that, together, this evidence suggests that the intentions that structure skilled actions are practical and not theoretical, that is, that they are perceptual and motor and not abstract, amodal, or linguistic. Importantly, despite their grounded nature, these plans are still personal-level, deliberate, rational states. That is, the practical intentions used to specify and structure skilled actions are best conceived of as higher-order, motor-modal structures, which can be manipulated and used by the agent for the purpose of reasoning, deliberation, decision-making and, of course, the actual online structuring and organizing of action. (shrink)