Much recent work on empathy in philosophy of mind and cognitive science has been guided by the assumption that minds are composed of intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible and thus unobservable to everyone but their owners. I challenge this claim. I defend the view that at least some mental states and processes—or at least some parts of some mental states and processes—are at times visible, capable of being directly perceived by others. I further argue that, despite its initial implausibility, this view (...) receives robust support from several strands of empirical research. (shrink)

The problem of other minds has a distinguished philosophical history stretching back more than two hundred years. Taken at face value, it is an epistemological question: it concerns how we can have knowledge of, or at least justified belief in, the existence of minds other than our own. In recent decades, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and primatologists have debated a related question: how we actually go about attributing mental states to others (regardless of whether we ever achieve knowledge or rational (...) justification in this domain). Until the mid-nineties, the latter debate – which sometimes goes under the name of the “mindreading” debate – was characterized by a fairly clear-cut opposition between two theoretical outlooks: “theory-theory” (TT) and “simulation theory” (ST). Theory-theorists typically argued that we attribute mental states to others on the basis of a “theory of mind” that is either constructed in early infancy and subsequently revised and modified (Gopnik 1996), or else is the result of maturation of innate mindreading “modules” (Baron-Cohen 1995). (shrink)

The extended mind thesis (EM) asserts that some cognitive processes are (partially) composed of actions consisting of the manipulation and exploitation of environmental structures. Might some processes at the root of social cognition have a similarly extended structure? In this paper, I argue that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management—the negotiation and management of ‘‘we-space”—and that some of the expressive actions involved in the negotiation and management of we-space (gesture, touch, facial and whole-body expressions) drive basic (...) processes of interpersonal understanding and thus do genuine social-cognitive work. Social interaction is a kind of extended social cognition, driven and at least partially constituted by environmental (non-neural) scaffolding. Challenging the Theory of Mind paradigm, I draw upon research from gesture studies, developmental psychology, and work on Moebius Syndrome to support this thesis. (shrink)

In this article, we propose that gestures play an important role in the connection between sensorimotor experience and language. Gestures may be the link between bodily experience and verbal expression that advocates of embodied cognition have postulated. In a developmental sequence of communicative action, gestures, which are initially similar to action sequences, substantially shorten and represent actions in metonymic form. In another process, action sequences are based on kinesthetic schemata that themselves find their metaphoric expression in language. Again, gestures enact (...) kinesthetic schemata that are correlated with verbal expressions. Examples from a large database are used to illustrate the various processes by means of which language arises when students conduct school science investigations. (shrink)

The implicit-explicit distinction is applied to knowledge representations. Knowledge is taken to be an attitude towards a proposition which is true. The proposition itself predicates a property to some entity. A number of ways in which knowledge can be implicit or explicit emerge. If a higher aspect is known explicitly then each lower one must also be known explicitly. This partial hierarchy reduces the number of ways in which knowledge can be explicit. In the most important type of implicit knowledge, (...) representations merely reflect the property of objects or events without predicating them of any particular entity The dearest cases of explicit knowledge of a fact are representations of one's own attitude of knowing that fact. These distinctions are discussed in their relationship to similar distinctions such as procedural-declarative, conscious unconscious, verbalizable-nonverbalizable, direct-indirect tests, and automatic voluntary control. This is followed by an outline of how these distinctions can be used to integrate and relate the often divergent uses of the implicit-explicit distinction in different research areas. We illustrate this for visual perception, memory, cognitive development, and artificial grammar learning. (shrink)

Iconic gesture-speech integration is a relatively recent field of investigation with numerous researchers studying its various aspects. The results obtained are just as diverse. The definition of iconic gestures is often overlooked in the interpretations of results. Furthermore, while most behavioral studies have demonstrated an advantage of bimodal presentation, brain activity studies show a diversity of results regarding the brain regions involved in the processing of this integration. Clinical studies also yield mixed results, some suggesting parallel processing channels, others a (...) unique and integrated channel. This review aims to draw attention to the methodological variations in research on iconic gesture-speech integration and how they impact conclusions regarding the underlying phenomena. It will also attempt to draw together the findings from other relevant research and suggest potential areas for further investigation in order to better understand processes at play during speech integration process. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on conceptual change by engaging in direct theoretical and empirical comparison of contrasting views. We take up the question of whether naïve physical ideas are coherent or fragmented, building specifically on recent work supporting claims of coherence with respect to the concept of force by Ioannides and Vosniadou [Ioannides, C., & Vosniadou, C. (2002). The changing meanings of force. Cognitive Science Quarterly 2, 5–61]. We first engage in a theoretical inquiry on the (...) nature of coherence and fragmentation, concluding that these terms are not well‐defined, and proposing a set of issues that may be better specified. The issues have to do with contextuality, which concerns the range of contexts in which a concept (meaning, model, theory) applies, and relational structure, which is how elements of a concept (meaning, model, or theory) relate to one another. We further propose an enhanced theoretical and empirical accountability for what and how much one needs to say in order to have specified a concept. Vague specification of the meaning of a concept can lead to many kinds of difficulties.Empirically, we conducted two studies. A study patterned closely on Ioannides and Vosniadou's work (which we call a quasi‐replication) failed to confirm their operationalizations of “coherent.” An extension study, based on a more encompassing specification of the concept of force, showed three kinds of results: (1) Subjects attend to more features than mentioned by Ioannides and Vosniadou, and they changed answers systematically based on these features; (2)We found substantial differences in the way subjects thought about the new contexts we asked about, which undermined claims for homogeneity within even the category of subjects (having one particular meaning associated with “force”) that best survived our quasi‐replication; (3) We found much reasoning of subjects about forces that cannot be accounted for by the meanings specified by Ioannides and Vosniadou. All in all, we argue that, with a greater attention to contextuality and with an appropriately broad specification of the meaning of a concept like force, Ioannides and Vosniadou's claims to have demonstrated coherence seem strongly undermined. Students' ideas are not random and chaotic; but neither are they simply described and strongly systematic. (shrink)

Theories of grounded and embodied cognition offer a range of accounts of how reasoning and body‐based processes are related to each other. To advance theories of grounded and embodied cognition, we explore the cognitive relevance of particular body states to associated math concepts. We test competing models of action‐cognition transduction to investigate the cognitive relevance of directed actions to students’ mathematical reasoning in the area of geometry. The hypotheses we test include (1) that cognitively relevant directed actions have a direct (...) effect on performance (direct cognitive relevance hypothesis), (2) that cognitively relevant directed actions lead to more frequent production of gestures during explanations, which leads to improved performance (mediated cognitive relevance hypothesis), and (3) that performance effects of directed actions are influenced by the presence or absence of gesture production during mathematical explanations (moderated cognitive relevance hypothesis). We explore these hypotheses in an experiment where high school students (N = 85) evaluated the truth of geometry conjectures after performing cognitively relevant or cognitively irrelevant directed actions while playing a movement‐based video game. Contrary to the direct and mediated cognitive relevance hypotheses, we found no overall differences in performance or gesture production between relevant and irrelevant conditions. Consistent with the moderated cognitive relevance hypothesis, cognitive relevance influenced mathematical performance, as measured by the accuracy of students’ intuitions, insights, and the validity of their proofs, provided that students produced certain kinds of gestures during mathematical explanations (i.e., with explanatory gestures as the moderator). Implications for theories of grounded and embodied cognition and the design of embodied forms of educational interventions are discussed. (shrink)

Our earliest tools are our bodies. Our hands raise and turn and toss and carry and push and pull, our legs walk and climb and kick allowing us to move and act in the world and to create the multitude of artifacts that improve our lives. The list of actions made by our hands and feet and other parts of our bodies is long. What is more remarkable is we turn those actions in the world into actions on thought through (...) gestures, language, and graphics, thereby creating cognitive tools that expand the mind. The focus here is gesture; gestures transform actions on perceptible objects to actions on imagined thoughts, carrying meaning with them rapidly, precisely, and directly. We review evidence showing that gestures enhance our own thinking and change the thought of others. We illustrate the power of gestures in studies showing that gestures uniquely change conceptions of time, from sequential to simultaneous, from sequential to cyclical, and from a perspective embedded in a timeline to an external perspective looking on a timeline, and by so doing obviate the ambiguities of an embedded perspective. We draw parallels between representations in gesture and in graphics; both use marks or actions arrayed in space to communicate more immediately than symbolic language. (shrink)

We focus on Karmiloff-Smith's Representational redescription model, arguing that it poses some problems concerning the architecture of a redescribing system. To discuss the topic, we consider the implicit/explicit dichotomy and the relations between natur al language and the language of thought. We argue that the model regards how knowledge is employed rather than how it is represented in the system.

The gesture-as-simulated-action framework explains the occurrence of iconic gestures. Accordingly, simulated visual imagery gives rise to observer-viewpoint, whereas simulated motor imagery gives rise to character-viewpoint gestures. Because little is known about whether this relationship is either the product of becoming a competent speaker in different communicative tasks or exists from an early age, we investigated 4-year-olds. In the first session, 55 children performed three different communicative tasks. In the second session, we administered a SON-R non-verbal intelligence test to assess children’s (...) cognitive abilities. Results revealed a strong association between the frequency with which children used observer-viewpoints gestures and their scores in visual processing abilities. Because the association between gestures and visuospatial cognitive abilities was found across three communicative tasks, we can propose that it is a general ability rather than a phenomenon of task-specific discourse competence. We discuss these findings in terms of gestural threshold and cognitive offloading. (shrink)

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and (...) complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular. (shrink)

People frequently gesture when problem-solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus, a technique in which users not only imagine moving beads on an abacus to compute sums, but also produce movements in gestures that accompany the calculations. Because the content of MA is transparent and readily manipulated, the task (...) offers a unique window onto how gestures interface with mental representations. We find that the size and number of MA gestures reflect the length and difficulty of math problems. Also, by selectively interfering with aspects of gesture, we find that participants perform significantly worse on MA under motor interference, but that perceptual feedback is not critical for success on the task. We conclude that premotor processes involved in the planning of gestures are critical to mental representation in MA. (shrink)

The deep comprehension of a text is tantamount to the construction of an articulated mental model of that text. The number of correct recollections is an index of a learner's mental model of a text. We assume that another index of comprehension is the timing of the gestures produced during text recall; gestures are simultaneous with speech when the learner has built an articulated mental model of the text, whereas they anticipate the speech when the learner has built a less (...) articulated mental model. The results of four experiments confirm the predictions deriving from our assumptions for both children and adults. Provided that the recollections are correct, the timing of gestures can differ and can be considered a further measure of the quality of the mental model, beyond the number of correct recollections. (shrink)

How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language, with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate the (...) relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the past 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We conclude that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because at present it is difficult to tell where sign stops and gesture begins, we suggest that sign should not be compared with speech alone but should be compared with speech-plus-gesture. Although it might be easier (and, in some cases, preferable) to blur the distinction between sign and gesture, we argue that distinguishing between sign (or speech) and gesture is essential to predict certain types of learning and allows us to understand the conditions under which gesture takes on properties of sign, and speech takes on properties of gesture. We end by calling for new technology that may help us better calibrate the borders between sign and gesture. (shrink)

Beyond modularityattempts a synthesis of Fodor's anticonstructivist nativism and Piaget's antinativist constructivism. Contra Fodor, I argue that: (1) the study of cognitive development is essential to cognitive science, (2) the module/central processing dichotomy is too rigid, and (3) the mind does not begin with prespecified modules; rather, development involves a gradual process of “modularization.” Contra Piaget, I argue that: (1) development rarely involves stagelike domain-general change and (2) domainspecific predispositions give development a small but significant kickstart by focusing the infant's (...) attention on proprietary inputs. Development does not stop at efficient learning. A fundamental aspect of human development (“representational redescription”) is the hypothesized process by which information that isina cognitive system becomes progressively explicit knowledgetothat system. Development thus involves two complementary processes of progressive modularization and progressive “explicitation.” Empirical findings on the child as linguist, physicist, mathematician, psychologist, and notator are discussed in support of the theoretical framework. Each chapter concentrates first on the initial state of the infant mind/brain and on subsequent domain-specific learning in infancy and early childhood. It then goes on to explore data on older children's problem solving and theory building, with particular focus on evolving cognitive flexibility. Emphasis is placed throughout on the status of representations underlying different capacities and on the multiple levels at which knowledge is stored and accessible. Finally, consideration is given to the need for more formal developmental models, and a comparison is made between representational redescription and connectionist simulations of development. In conclusion, I consider what is special about human cognition by speculating on the status of representations underlying the structure of behavior in other species. (shrink)

Understanding the day/night cycle requires integrating observations of the sky (an Earth-based perspective) with scientific models of the solar system (a space-based perspective). Yet children often fail to make the right connections and resort to non-scientific intuitions – for example, the Sun moving up and down – to explain what they observe. The present research explored whether children’s gestures indicate their conceptual integration of Earth- and space-based perspectives. We coded the spontaneous gestures of 85 third-grade children in U.S. public schools (...) (Mage = 8.87 years) as they verbally explained the overall cause of the day/night cycle, the cause of sunrise, and the cause of sunset after receiving science instruction as part of a prior study. We focused on two kinds of gestures: those reflecting the Sun’s motion across the sky and those reflecting the Earth’s axial rotation. We found that participants were more likely to produce Earth rotation gestures for a topic they explained more accurately (the overall cause of the day/night cycle), whereas Sun motion gestures were more common for topics they explained less accurately (the causes of sunrise and sunset). Further, participants who produced rotation gestures tended to provide more accurate verbal explanations of the overall cause. We discuss how gestures could be used to measure – and possibly improve – children’s conceptual understanding and why sunrise and sunset may be particularly difficult topics to learn. (shrink)

Five studies examined how interacting with the physical environment can support the development of fraction concepts. Nine‐ and 10‐year‐old children worked on fraction problems they could not complete mentally. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that manipulating physical pieces facilitated children's ability to develop an interpretation of fractions. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when children understood a content area well, they used their interpretations to repurpose many environments to support problem solving, whereas when they needed to learn, they were prone to the (...) structure of the environment. Experiments 4 and 5 examined transfer after children had learned by manipulating physical pieces. Children who learned by adapting relatively unstructured environments transferred to new materials better than children who learned with “well‐structured” environments that did not require equivalent adaptation. Together, the findings reveal that during physically distributed learning, the opportunity to adapt an environment permits the development of new interpretations that can advance learning. (shrink)