The affect heuristic is a heuristic, a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently, in which current emotion—fear, pleasure, surprise, etc.—influences decisions. In other words, it is a type of heuristic in which emotional response, or "affect"
in psychological terms, plays a lead role. It is a subconscious
process that shortens the decision-making process and allows people to
function without having to complete an extensive search for information.
It is shorter in duration than a mood, occurring rapidly and involuntarily in response to a stimulus. Reading the words "lung cancer" usually generates an affect of dread, while reading the words "mother's love" usually generates a feeling of affection
and comfort. The affect heuristic is typically used while judging the
risks and benefits of something, depending on the positive or negative
feelings that people associate with a stimulus. It is the equivalent of
"going with your gut". If their feelings towards an activity are
positive, then people are more likely to judge the risks as low and the
benefits high. On the other hand, if their feelings towards an activity
are negative, they are more likely to perceive the risks as high and
benefits low.
Concept
The theory
of affect heuristic is that a human being's affect can influence how he
or she makes decisions. Research has shown that risk and benefits are
negatively correlated in people's minds. This was found after
researchers found that the inverse relationship between perceived risk
and perceived benefit of an activity was linked to the strength of
positive or negative affect associated with the activity as measured by
rating the activity on bipolar scales (e.g. good/bad). This implies that
people base their judgements of an activity or a technology not only on
what they think about it, but also on how they feel about it. The
affect heuristic gained early attention in 1980 when Robert B. Zajonc
argued that affective reactions to stimuli are often the first reaction
which occur automatically and subsequently influencing the way in which
we process and judge information.
The affect heuristic received more recent attention when it was used to
explain the unexpected negative correlation between benefit and risk perception.
Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic and Johnson theorized in 2000 that a good
feeling towards a situation (i.e., positive affect) would lead to a
lower risk perception and a higher benefit perception, even when this is
logically not warranted for that situation. This implies that a strong emotional response to a word or other stimulus might alter a person's judgment. He or she might make different decisions based on the same set of facts and might thus make an illogical decision. Overall, the affect heuristic is of influence in nearly every decision-making arena.
Theoretical accounts of affect
An alternative thought to the “gut feeling” response is Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis.
It is the opinion that thought is made largely from images which
include perceptual and symbolic representations. These images then
become “marked” by positive or negative feelings linked directly or
indirectly to somatic states. When a negative somatic marker is linked
to an image of a future outcome, it sounds an alarm in the brain. When a
positive marker is linked to an image, it becomes a signal of
incentive. He hypothesized that somatic markers increase the accuracy of
the decision process and the absence of these markers, mostly seen in
people with certain types of brain damage, degrades the ability to make
good decisions. This hypothesis arose when observing patients with
damage to their prefrontal cortex who had severe impairments in personal
and social decision-making despite their other abilities.
Thought and feeling
It
has been argued by researchers that people use affect heuristics as a
first response to an issue, they rely on spontaneous affective reactions
which make it more efficient than having to research and analyze
external information. Slovic, Finucane, Peters and MacGregor (2005)
contrast two modes of thinking: the analytic system and the experiential system.
The analytic system, also referred to as the rational system, is
thought that is considered to be slow and requires effort; it requires
consciousness, probabilities, logical reasoning, and substantial
evidence. The experiential system is the exact opposite. It is intuitive
and mostly automatic which makes it more convenient for people because
it does not require effort or consciousness. It relies on images,
metaphors, and narratives which are then used to estimate the
probability of a hazard.
This is due to the experience of affect, in other words, a “gut
feeling.” Multiple studies including the one done by Miller and Ireland
(2005) show how "gut feeling" or intuitive decisions affect various
executives and managers of many companies. Many of the individuals
studied use intuition as an effective approach to making important
decisions. The experimenters' goal is to evaluate the risk and benefits
of using intuition. Their results show that this is a troublesome
decision tool.
Affective reactions that accompany judgements are not necessarily
voluntary, but are automatic responses. Zajonc states that “one might be
able to control the expression of emotion, but not the experience of it
itself.” However, he also clarifies that feelings are not free of
thought and that thoughts are not free of feeling.
The experiential system also takes past experiences into account. In
other words, if a person has already experienced a certain issue, he or
she is more likely to take more precautions towards the issue.
Experimental findings
Many
studies have been done to further look into affect heuristics and many
have found that these heuristics shape our attitudes and opinions
towards our decisions, especially risk perception. These studies
demonstrate how affect is an important characteristic of the
decision-making process in many different domains and aspects as well as
how it can lead to a strong conditioner of preference. As demonstrated
below, affect is independent of cognition which indicate that there are
conditions where affect does not require cognition.
Subliminal affective response
The
cause of affect does not necessarily have to be consciously perceived. A
study conducted by Winkielman, Zajonc and Schwarz (1997) demonstrated
the speed at which an affective reaction can influence judgements. To do
this they used a subliminal priming paradigm where participants were
"primed" through exposure to either a smiling face, a frowning face, or a
neutral polygon presented at about 1⁄250
of a second. This was considered an amount of time where the nature of
the stimuli could not be recalled. Participants were then exposed to an
ideograph (e.g. a Chinese character) for two seconds and asked to rate
the ideograph on a scale of liking. Researchers found that participants
preferred the ideograph preceded with a smiling face as opposed to those
preceded by a frowning face or neutral polygon despite the fact that
the smiling face was only shown for 1⁄250 of a second.
The same experiment demonstrated the persistence of initial
affect. During a second session, participations were primed with the
same characters, but these characters were preceded by a different face
that they were not previously exposed to (e.g. those previously exposed
to the smiling face were now exposed to the neutral polygon).
Participants continued to show preference for the characters based on
the first association, even though the second exposure was preceded by a
different affective stimulus. In other words, the second priming was
ineffective because the effects of the first priming still remained. If
the participant liked a character following exposure to a smiling face,
they would continue to like the character even when it was preceded by a
frowning face during the second exposure. (The experimental outcome was
statistically significant and adjusted for variables such as
non-affective preference for certain characters).
Insensitivity to numbers
Sometimes
affective responses to certain stimuli are a result of a lack of
sensitivity to other factors, for example, numbers. Slovic and Peters
(2006) did a study on psychophysical numbing, the inability to
discriminate change in a physical stimulus as the magnitude of the
stimulus increases, and found that students more strongly supported an
airport-safety measure that was expected to save a high percentage of
150 lives at risk as opposed to a measure that was expected to save 150
lives. This is thought to have occurred because although saving 150
lives is good, it is somewhat harder to comprehend and thus the decision
comes from the positive feeling associated with the higher percentage.
The influence of time
Research
has been conducted in the influence that time plays in decision-making.
In two experiments, Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic and Johnson (2000)
studied the affect heuristic under time pressure and the influence that
providing risk and benefit information has on the affect heuristic. The
researchers compared individuals under no time pressure and those with
time pressure. They predicted that individuals under time pressure would
rely more heavily on their affect in order to be more efficient in
their responses whereas those under no time pressure would use more
logic in their decision-making. To do this, university students were
randomly assigned to one of the two conditions (time pressure or no time
pressure) and one of the two counterbalancing orders (risk judgements
followed by benefit judgements or vice versa). They were then given a
task in which they had to make judgements about the risk or benefit of
certain activities and technologies. As predicted, individuals in the
time-pressure condition took less time to make risk judgements than did
individuals in the no time pressure condition. In the second experiment,
students again had to make judgements about certain activities, but
this time were given additional information about the risk and benefits.
Information was framed as being high risk, low risk, high benefit or
low benefit. The researchers found that this additional information did
in fact influence their judgements.
Two similar studies were conducted by Wilson and Arvai in 2006,
in which they also looked at the affect heuristic affects high and low
risk options.
These experiments examine the affect heuristic and the “evaluability
hypothesis”, the joint evaluation when options are evaluated in a
side-by-side comparison and separate evaluation where options are
evaluated on their own. They take this concept and discuss how it
relates to the affect heuristic by specifically looking at making traits
of an option more or less meaningful in terms of the context of choice,
more specifically, affect. To examine this relationship more closely,
they conducted two experiments where participants received quantitative
information about the nature of risks and were placed in one of two
groups: affect-poor combined with high risks and affect-rich
combined with low risks. In their first study, they looked how the
influence of affect on evaluability in joint evaluations as compared to
separate evaluations. To this, participants were asked to make choices
about the affect-rich problem of crime and the affect-poor
problem of deer overpopulation. Participants were asked to rate how
they perceived crime and deer overpopulation by rating on a scale from
"very good" to "very bad." They found that participants ignored the quantitative information and focused on the affect characteristics.
Fear appeals
Health
campaigns often use “fear appeals” to grab the attention of their
audience. Fear appeals are a type of advertising that specifically uses
methods of creating anxiety in the consumer which results in the
consumer wanting to cure this fear by purchasing the product. In a study
by Averbeck, Jones, and Robertson (2011), researchers look at how prior
knowledge influences one's response to fear appeals. Surveys were
distributed which manipulated prior knowledge as low or high and two
different topics: sleep deprivation or spinal meningitis. Various scale
were used to test how prior knowledge affects certain health-related
issues. Researchers found that individuals who had prior knowledge in a
certain subject exhibited less fear and were least likely to fall prey
to the affect heuristic as opposed to individuals that did not have
prior knowledge who exhibited more fear and were more likely to fall
prey.
Another example of how fear appeals are used in marketing today
is through the findings presented in the experiment by Schmitt and Blass
(2008). They produced two versions of an anti-smoking film. One
contained high fear arousal and one did not. When exposed to these
films, the participants (46 non-smoking students and 5 smoking students)
expressed stronger anti-smoking behavioral intentions than when they
viewed the low fear-arousal version.
Climate change
Research
has shown that Americans are aware of climate change, but do not
consider it to be a serious problem due to the lack of an affective
response.
Many people report as not having experienced the consequences of
climate change or that it is a long-term consequence that will not
happen in the near future. Therefore, it is considered to be of lower
priority and not much is done as a solution to global climate change.
Risk communication
Research
on the affect heuristic had its origin in risk perception.
Communicating risk is meant to improve the correspondence between the
magnitude of the risk of an issue and the magnitude to which people
respond to that risk. Affect, specifically negative affect, is an
important method for increasing perceived risk considering its
influences on perceived risk and thus has been utilized as essential for
communicating risk to the public.
Raising risk awareness is thought to be increased when risk
information is presented in the form of frequences (e.g. “Within 40
years there is a 33% probability of flood”) or probabilities (e.g. “Each
year there is a 1% probability of flood). This method is thought to
evoke an affective response which then increases the availability of
risk which results in greater perceived risk.
This demonstrates how the way in which information is presented
influences the way in which people interpret the information, more
specifically, potential risks. Research also shows that people's
financial risk taking is affected by their emotional state.
The affect heuristic is certainly evident in product innovations
we see in the market. The processes consumers use to weigh the potential
risk and benefits associated with purchasing such innovations are in
constant motion. A study by Slovic and King (2014) tries to explain this
specific phenomenon. Their experiment addresses the extent to which
feelings dominate early perceptions of new products. Participants were
exposed to three innovations in pretest and posttest design. Through
this study, they concluded that risks and benefits associated with
innovations are related to the consumer's evaluations of the products.
Cancer
Researchers
have looked at the affective and experiential modes of thinking in
terms of cancer prevention. Research has shown that affect plays a
significant role in whether people choose to get screened for certain
types of cancer. Current research is now looking into how to communicate
the risks and benefits of cancer prevention and treatment options. So
far research has shown that the way in which information is framed does
play a role in the way in which the information is interpreted. Research
has also shown that treatment options may not have significant meaning
to patients unless it has an affective connection. It is for this reason
that researchers are looking into using affective coding such as icon
arrays to make numerical information easier to understand and process.
Air Pollution
An
experiment composed by Hine and Marks (2007) examines the role of
affect heuristics in maintaining wood-burning behavior. The individuals
analyzed in this study were 256 residents of a small Australian city
where high levels of wood smoke pollution are present. With the negative
effects of air pollution evident, their studies found that individuals
who used wood heaters exhibited less support for wood smoke control
policies. These individuals were aware that their wood heaters were part
of the problem. Even with that awareness, their positive affections and
emotions towards wood heating trumped all negative evidence for it.
Smiling
Research
has been done on how smiling can cause affective responses and thus
influence our opinions of others. An experiment by LaFrance and Hecht
(1995) investigated whether a smiling target would elicit more leniency
than those that do not. Participants judged a case of potential
academic misconduct and were asked to rate a list of subjects. Materials
included photos of a female target either showing a neutral expression,
felt smile, false smile, or miserable smile. Researchers found that the
student pictured as smiling received less punishment than did the
student who did not smile despite the fact that the smiling student was
not seen as less guilty. They did not find a significant difference
between the different smiles. Smiling students were also rated as more
trustworthy, honest, genuine, good, obedient, sincere, and admirable
compared to the student that did not smile.
To the previous studies evidence, there is further evidence on
the effect of smiling on a person’s perception. They contain it in the
experiment by Delevati and Cesar (1994). Brazilian undergraduates
perceived a slide of a male and female person. Smiling faces were
portrayed and non-smiling faces were portrayed. The participants used 12
different adjectives to judge the portraits. Results showed those
persons showing a smile received more favorable perceptions than those
who did not. Generally speaking, a smiling person can produce warmer
feelings in the perceiver than the non-smiling person.
Memory load
Researchers
have studied how one's memory load increases one's chances of using the
affect heuristic. In a study by Shiv and Fedorikhin (1999),
participants were asked to either memorize a two-digit number (low
cognitive demand) or a seven-digit number (high cognitive demand).
Participants were then asked to enter another room where they would
report their number. On the way there, they were asked for their
preference for two snacks: chocolate cake (more favorable affect, less
favorable cognition) or fruit salad (less favorable affect, more
favorable cognition). Researchers predicted that participants given the
seven-digits to remember (high cognitive load) would reduce their
deliberation process due to having to remember a large amount of
information. This would increase the chances of these participants
choosing the cake over the fruit salad due to it being the more
affectively favorable option. This hypothesis proved true with
participants choosing the chocolate cake 63% of the time when given a
high cognitive load and only 41% when given a low cognitive load. In the
same study they also tested the impulsiveness of the participants in
moderating the effects of processing-resources of choice and at the time
they were asked for their preference for the two snacks high cognitive
demand chose the chocolate cake 84.2%. This provides evidence that
people's decisions can be influenced by affect heuristic in a
relatively spontaneous manner from the stimulus, with little involvement
of higher-order cognitive demand.
Lasting effects
Another
common situation involving affect heuristic is where a strong,
emotional first impression can inform a decision, even if subsequent
evidence weight cognitively against the original decision made. In a
study by Sherman, Kim and Zajonc (1998), they investigated how long the
induced effects of an affective response could last. Participants were
asked to study Chinese characters and their English meanings. Half of
the meanings were positive (e.g. beauty) and the other half negative
(e.g. disease). Participants were then tested on these meanings, which
was followed by a task in which they were given pairs of characters and
asked to choose which character they preferred. Researchers found that
participants preferred the character with a positive meaning.
In the same experiment, participants were given a new task where
the characters were presented with a neutral meaning (e.g. linen) and
participants were told that these were the true meanings of the
character. The testing procedure was the same and despite exposing
participants with the new meanings, their preferences in characters
remained the same. Characters that were paired with positive meanings
continued to be preferred.
Disadvantages
While
heuristics can be helpful in many situations, it can also lead to
biases which can result in poor decision-making habits. Like other
heuristics, the affect heuristic can provide efficient and adaptive
responses, but relying on affect can also cause decisions to be
misleading.
Smoking
Studies
have looked at how the affect influences smoking behavior. Smokers tend
to act experientially in the sense that they give little conscious
thought to the risks before they start. It is usually as a result of
affective responses in the moment that occur when seeing others partake
in the behavior. Epstein (1995) found that there has been quite a bit of
manipulation of consumers when it comes to packaging and marketing
products. This is especially the case with tobacco companies. Research
has shown that cigarette advertisements were designed to increase the
positive affect associated with smoking and decrease the perceptions of
risk.
Therefore, seeing this advertisement could lead people astray to start
smoking because of its induced appeal. In a study by Slovic et al.
(2005), he released a survey to smokers in which he asked “If you had it
to do all over again, would you start smoking?” and more than 85% of
adult smokers and about 80% of young smokers (between the ages of 14-22)
answered “No.” He found that most smokers, especially those that start
at a younger age, do not take the time and think about how their future
selves will perceive the risks associated with smoking. Essentially,
smokers give little conscious thought to smoking before they start and
it is usually after they have started smoking and have become addicted
that they learn new information about health risk.
An idée fixe is a preoccupation of mind believed to be
firmly resistant to any attempt to modify it, a fixation. The name
originates from the Frenchidée[i.de], "idea" and fixe[fiks], "fixed."
Background
The initial introduction of the term idée fixe, according to intellectual historian Jan E. Goldstein, was as a medical term around 1812 in connection with monomania. As originally employed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, idée fixe was "a single pathology of the intellect", distinct from monomania, a broader term that included idée fixe, but also a wider range of pathologies that did not stem from "a single compelling idea or from an emotional excess". A second difference is that the victim of idée fixe was understood to be unaware of the unreality of their frame of mind, while the victim of monomania might be aware. At that time, idée fixe was discussed as a form of neurosis or monomania.
The meaning of monomania in
the technical medical sense in which it was first used, was very close
to the popular meaning it would soon acquire. It denoted an idée fixe, a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind.
— Jan E. Goldstein, Console and Classify, p. 155
The idea of monomania was developed by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol as a diagnostic category in his work Des Malades Mentales (1839) and related to the idée fixe by Wilhelm Griesinger (1845) who viewed "every single idée fixe [as] the expression of a deeply deranged psychic individuality and probably an indicator of an incipient form of mania".
The "pathologicalization" of political convictions was used to discredit political anarchists. The further historical evolution of idée fixe
was much entangled with the introduction of psychologists into legal
matters such as the insanity defense, and is found in a number of texts.
Legal implications
Possibly the best example of the role of idée fixe in an insanity defense today is its use in identifying the paranoid personality disorder.
A frequent manifestation of ...
paranoid personality is the presence of an overvalued idea ... a fixed
idea (idée fixe) ... which might seem reasonable both to the patient and
to other people. However, it comes to dominate completely the person's
thinking and life. ... It is quite distinct phenomenologically from both
delusion and obsessional idea.
— Femi Oyebode, The expression of disordered personality
The development of the notion
The concept of idées fixes has been expanded and refined by Emil Kraepelin (1904), Carl Wernicke (1906), and Karl Jaspers (1963), evolving into a concept of overvalued ideas. An overvalued idea is a false or exaggerated and sustained belief that is maintained with much less than delusional intensity (i.e., the individual is able to acknowledge the possibility that the ideas may not be true).
Don Quixote reveals his kinship to
the most commonly encountered of Cervantes's character types: the
head-in-clouds fantasist, obsessed by his idée fixe.
— Anthony J Close, Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Molière's more celebrated comic
characters, Arnolphe, Orgon, Alceste, Harpagon, Monsieur Jourdain,
Argan: each of them displays to the very end the obsession or idée fixe
which colors his outlook on life. It is a characteristic of Molière's
heroes that they are never ‘converted’: in every case the dénouement,
far from curing them of their folly, merely confirms them in it.
— William Driver Howarth, Molière, a playwright and his audience'
Although Melville's Captain Ahab may come to mind as another famous example of idée fixe, and it is sometimes referred to this way, more often Ahab's obsession is referred to as monomania (the more inclusive term), and Melville himself does that. It would seem from the description of Ahab's possession that idée fixe applies quite accurately, as the following description suggests:
"Not one jot of his great natural
intellect had perished." ... "Yielding up all his thoughts and fancies
to his one supreme purpose", Ahab has let his mind's guiding and
directing power be usurped by the "sheer inveteracy" of a will driven by
"one unachieved revengeful desire"
— Quotes from Moby-Dick, pp. 990, 1007, Thomas Cooley, The ivory leg in the ebony cabinet: madness, race, and gender in Victorian America
However, what makes monomania the better term is that "Captain
Ahab ... has an inkling of his true state of mind: 'my means are sane,
my motive and my object mad.'"
There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the 'idée fixe', which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way. A man might form such an idée fixe... and under its influence be capable of any fantastic outrage.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The return of Sherlock Holmes
and in Abraham B. Yehoshua's novel about the Mani family through six generations:
...I had begun to despair of his accursed idée fixe which devoured every other idée that it encountered...
Iraq was portrayed as the most
dangerous thing in national security. It was an idée fixe, a rigid
belief, received wisdom, a decision already made and one that no fact or
event could derail.
— Richard A Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
Today's usage
As an everyday term, idée fixe may indicate a mindset akin to prejudice or stereotyping:
However, idée fixe has also a pathological dimension, denoting serious psychological issues, as in this account of Japanese culture for a popular audience:
Although her husband did not
reproach her, she became like a woman possessed, continually begging
for his forgiveness. This he readily gave, but her guilt—and his
imagined umbrage—had become for her an idée fixe. Unable to stomach food, she went into a decline and died soon thereafter.
— Jack Seward, The Japanese
The pathology is what is denoted in psychology and in the law, as in this technical article about anorexia nervosa:
The idée fixe—staying thin—becomes
at its furthest extreme so powerful as to render any other ideas or life
projects meaningless. ... "I felt all inner development was ceasing,
that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea
was filling my entire soul"
— Susan Bordo, Toward a new psychology of gender
Idée fixe began as a parent category of obsession, and as a preoccupation of mind the idée fixe resembles today's obsessive-compulsive disorder:
although the afflicted person can think, reason and act like other
people, they are unable to stop a particular train of thought or action.
However, in obsessive-compulsive disorder, the victim recognizes the
absurdity of the obsession or compulsion, not necessarily the case with
an idée fixe, which normally is a delusion. Today, the term idée fixe does not denote a specific disorder in psychology, and does not appear as a technical designation in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Nonetheless, idée fixe is used still as a descriptive term,[10] and appears in dictionaries of psychology.
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition,
whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of
the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental
constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism.
In philosophy, embodied cognition holds that an agent's cognition is strongly influenced by aspects of an agent's body beyond the brain itself. In their proposal for an enactive approach to cognition Varela et al. defined "embodied" as:
"By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two
points: first that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that
come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and
second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves
embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural
context."
The Varela enactive definition is broad enough to overlap the views of extended cognition and situated cognition, and indeed, these ideas are not always carefully separated.
Some authors explain the dependence of cognition upon the body
and its environmental interactions by saying that cognition, in real
biological systems, is not an end in itself but is constrained by the
system's goals and capacities. However, they argue, such constraints do
not mean cognition is set by adaptive behavior (or autopoiesis) alone, but rather that cognition requires “some
kind of information processing...the transformation or communication of
incoming information”, the acquiring of which involves "exploration and
modification of the environment".
"It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that cognition
consists simply of building maximally accurate representations of input
information...the gaining of knowledge is a stepping stone to achieving
the more immediate goal of guiding behavior in response to the system's
changing surroundings."
— Marcin Miłkowski: Explaining the Computational Mind, p. 4
The separation of embodied cognition from extended cognition and situated cognition can be based upon the embodiment thesis, a narrower view of embodiment than that of Varela et al. or that of Dawson:
Embodiment thesis: Many features of cognition are
embodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of the
physical body of an agent, such that the agent's beyond-the-brain body
plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in
that agent's cognitive processing.
—RA Wilson and L Foglia, Embodied Cognition in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This thesis omits direct mention of some aspects of the "more
encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context" included by
Varela et al. The Extended mind thesis, in contrast with the Embodiment thesis, limits cognitive processing neither to the brain nor even to the body, but extends it outward into the agent's world. Situated
cognition emphasizes that this extension is not just a matter of
including resources outside the head, but stresses the role of probing
and modifying interaction with the agent's world.
Philosophical background
In his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755), philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated a view of the mind–body problem with parallels to the embodied view.
Some difficulties with this interpretation of Kant include (i) the
view that Kant holds the empirical, and specific knowledge of the body,
which cannot support a priori transcendental claims,
and (ii) the view that Kant holds that transcendental philosophy,
although charged with the responsibility of explaining how we can have
empirical knowledge, is not itself empirical.
The embodiment movement in artificial intelligence has fueled the embodiment argument in philosophy and a revised view of ethology:
"Species-typical activity patterns must be thought of as
emergent phenomena in three different senses of the word. They have
emerged...through natural selection, ....by a process of maturation
and/or learning, ...and from interactions between the creature's
low-level activities and its species-typical environment."
—Horst Hendriks-Jansen Catching Ourselves in the Act, p. 10
These developments have also given emotions a new status in philosophy of mind as an indispensable constituent, rather than a non-essential addition to rational intellectual thought.
In philosophy of mind, the idea that cognition is embodied is sympathetic with other views of cognition such as situated cognition or externalism. This is a radical move towards a total re-localization of mental processes out of the neural domain.
Connections with the sciences
Embodied cognition is a topic of research in social and cognitive psychology, covering issues such as social interaction and decision-making.
Embodied cognition reflects the argument that the motor system
influences our cognition, just as the mind influences bodily actions.
For example, when participants hold a pencil in their teeth and engaging
the muscles of a smile, they comprehend pleasant sentences faster than
unpleasant ones. On the other hand, holding a pencil between their nose
and upper lip to engage the muscles of a frown has the reverse effect.
Graph
of the visual search task results showing that participants made fewer
object orientation errors when grasping than pointing.
One embodied cognition study shows that action intention can affect processing in visual search, with more orientation errors for pointing than for grasping.
Participants either pointed to or grasped target objects of 2 colors
and 2 orientations (45° and 135°). There were randomized numbers of
distractors as well (0, 3, 6, or 9), which differed from the target in
color, orientation, or both. A tone sounded to inform participants
which target orientation to find. Participants kept their eyes on a
fixation point until it turned from red to the target color. The screen
then lit up and the participants searched for the target, either
pointing to it or grasping it (depending on the block). There were 2
blocks for pointing and 2 for grasping, with the order counterbalanced.
Each block had 64 trials.
Results from the experiment show that accuracy decreases with an increase in the number of distractors. Overall, participants made more orientation errors than color errors. There was no main effect of accuracy
between the pointing and grasping conditions, but participants made
significantly fewer orientation errors in the grasping condition than in
the pointing condition. Color errors were the same in both conditions.
Because orientation is important in grasping an object, these results
fit with the researchers' hypothesis that the plan to grasp an object
will aid in orientation accuracy.
This supports embodied cognition because action intention (planning to
grasp an object) can affect visual processing of task-relevant
information (orientation).
Distance perception
Internal states can affect distance perception, which relates to embodied cognition.
Researchers randomly assigned college student participants to
high-choice, low-choice, and control conditions. The high-choice
condition signed a “freedom of choice” consent form indicating their
decision to wear a Carmen Miranda
costume and walk across a busy area of campus. Low-choice participants
signed an “experimenter choice” consent form, indicating the
experimenter assigned the participant to wear the costume. A control
group walked across campus but did not wear a costume. At the
conclusion of the experiment, each participant completed a survey which
asked them to estimate the distance they walked.
The high-choice participants perceived the distance walked as
significantly shorter than participants in the low-choice and control
groups, even though they walked the same distance. The manipulation caused high-choice participants to feel responsible for the choice to walk in the embarrassing costume. This created cognitive dissonance, which refers to a discrepancy between attitudes and behaviors. High-choice participants reconciled their thoughts and actions by perceiving the distance as shorter.
These results show the ability of internal states to affect perception
of physical distance moved, which illustrates the reciprocal
relationship of the body and mind in embodied cognition.
Perspective
Graph depicting the percentage of responses by perspective for each photograph condition.
Researchers have found that when making judgements about objects in photographs, people will take the perspective of a person in the picture instead of their own.
They showed college undergraduate participants 1 of 3 photographs and
asked where 1 object in the picture was compared to the other object.
For example, if the 2 objects were an apple and a banana, the
participants would have to respond to a question about the location of
the apple compared to the banana. The photographs either had no person, a
person looking at the object, in this case the banana, or a person
reaching for the banana. The photograph and question appeared in a
larger set of questionnaires not related to the study.
Results show that participants who viewed photographs that
included a person were significantly more likely to respond from
another's perspective than those who saw photographs with no person. There were no differences in perspective of responses for the person looking versus reaching. Participants who saw the scene without a person were significantly more likely to respond from their own perspective.
This means that the presence of a person in the photograph affected
the perspective used even though the question focused solely on the two
objects. The researchers state that these results suggest disembodied cognition, in which the participants put themselves into the body of the person in the photograph.
Language comprehension
Some researchers extend embodied cognition to include language. They describe language as a tool that aids in broadening our sense of body. For instance, when asked to identify “this” object, participants most often choose an object near to them. Conversely, when asked to identify “that” object, participants choose an object further away from them.
Language allows us to distinguish between distances in more complex
ways than the simple perceptual difference between near and far objects.
The
change in "relative phase shift" for different conditions in the study.
Participants had a significantly larger change for "performable"
sentences than "inanimate" sentences and swinging only.
The motor system is involved in language
comprehension, in this case when sentences were performable by a human,
there was a change in participants' overall movement of a pendulum.
Researchers performed an experiment in which college undergraduate
participants swung a pendulum while completing a "sentence judgement
task." Participants would swing the pendulum with both hands for 10
seconds before a prompt and then a sentence would appear on the screen
until the participant responded. In the control condition, participants
swung the pendulum without performing the "sentence judgement task."
Each trial had half "plausible" and half "implausible" sentences. The
"plausible" sentences made sense semantically, while the "implausible"
ones did not. The "performable" sentences could be performed by a
human, while the "inanimate" sentences could not. Participants
responded by saying "yes" to the "plausible" sentences.
Results show a significant "relative phase shift," or overall
change in movement of the swinging pendulum, for the "performable"
sentences. This change did not occur for "inanimate" sentences or the control condition. The researchers did not expect an overall phase shift, instead they expected a change in the variability of movement, or the "standard deviation of relative phase shift."
Although not entirely expected, these results support embodied
cognition and show that the motor system is involved in the
understanding of language. The researchers suggest that the nature of this relationship needs to be further studied to determine the exact correlation this task has to bi-manual motor movements.
Embodiment effects emerge in the way in which people of different
sex and temperament perceive verbal material, such as common adjectives
and abstract and neutral nouns. Trofimova, who first described this
phenomenon in her experiments, called it "projection through
capacities". This phenomenon emerges when people's lexical perception
depends upon their capacities to handle the events; when their
information processing registers mostly those aspects of objects or of a
situation that they can properly react to and deal with according to
their inherent capacities.
For example, in these studies males with stronger motor-physical
endurance estimated abstractions describing people-, work/reality- and
time-related concepts in more positive terms than males with a weaker
endurance. Females with stronger social or physical endurance estimated
social attractors in more positive terms than weaker females. Both male
and female temperament groups with higher sociability showed a universal
positive bias in their estimations of neutral words, especially for
social and work/reality-related concepts, in comparison to participants
with lower sociability. Capacities related to the tempo of activities
also appeared to impact the perception of lexical material: men with
faster motor-physical tempo estimated neutral, abstract time-related
concepts significantly in more positive terms than men with slower
tempo.
Memory
A study examining memory and embodied cognition illustrates that people remember more of the gist of a story when they physically act it out.
Researchers divided female participants randomly into 5 groups, which
were "Read Only," "Writing," "Collaborative Discussion," "Independent
Discussion," and "Improvisation." All participants received a monologue
about teen addiction and were told to pay attention to details about
the character and action in the monologue. Participants were given 5
minutes to read the monologue twice, unaware of a future recall test.
In the "Read Only" condition participants filled out unrelated
questionnaires after reading the monologue. In the "Writing" condition
participants responded to 5 questions about the story from the
perspective of the character in the monologue. They had 6 minutes to
answer each question. In the "Collaborative Discussion" condition
participants responded from the character's perspective to the same
questions as the "Writing" group, but in groups of 4 or 5 women. They
were also given 6 minutes per question and everyone participated in
answering each question. The "Independent Discussion" condition was the
same as the "Collaborative Discussion," except 1 person answered each
question. In the "Improvisation" condition participants acted out 5
scenes from the monologue in groups of 5 women. The researchers suggest
that this condition involves embodied cognition and will produce better
memory for the monologue. Every participant played the main character
and a supporting character once. Participants were given short prompts
from lines in the monologue, which were excluded from the memory test.
Participants had 2 minutes to choose characters and 4 minutes for
improvisations. The recall test was the monologue with 96 words or
phrases missing. Participants had to fill in the blanks as accurately
as possible.
Researchers gave the recall test to a group who did not read the
monologue. They scored significantly lower than the other groups, which
indicated that guessing was not easy.
In coding the answers to the recall test, exact words were labeled
"Verbatim", and correct content but varied wording was labeled "Gist".
The combination of "Verbatim" and "Gist" was called "Total Memory." The
"Improvisational" group had more "Gist" memories than any other group
and had more "Total Memory" than both of the discussion groups.
The results fit the researchers' hypothesis that the "Improvisational"
group would remember more because they actively rehearsed the
information from the monologue.
Although other groups had also elaborately encoded the information,
the "Improvisation" group remembered significantly more than the
discussion groups and marginally more than the "Reading Only" and
"Writing" groups. Simply experiencing the monologue in an active way aids in remembering the "Gist."
There were no differences across groups for "Verbatim" memory, which
they suggest could take longer than the limited time during the
experiment to develop.
Learning
Ideas
stemming from embodied cognition research have been applied to the
field of learning. It has been shown that bodily activity can be used to
enhance learning in several studies.
Research on embodied learning often utilizes educational technology in
the form of virtual reality, mixed reality, or motion capture to
transform learning activities into immersive experiences.
There are theoretical approaches that define the level of embodiment of
these learning platforms based on factors such as their capabilities
for immersion and sensorimotor activity.
Other theoretical systems analyze embodied learning in terms of the
degree of bodily engagement and whether the embodiment is integrated
into a learning task.
Reasoning
A
series of experiments demonstrated the interrelation between motor
experience and high-level reasoning. For example, although most
individuals recruit visual processes when presented with spatial
problems such as mental rotation tasks motor experts favor motor processes to perform the same tasks, with higher overall performance.
A related study showed that motor experts use similar processes for the
mental rotation of body parts and polygons, whereas non-experts treated
these stimuli differently.
These results were not due to underlying confounds, as demonstrated by a
training study which showed mental rotation improvements after a
one-year motor training, compared with controls.
Similar patterns were also found in working memory tasks, with the
ability to remember movements being greatly disrupted by a secondary
verbal task in controls and by a motor task in motor experts, suggesting
the involvement of different processes to store movements depending on
motor experience, namely verbal for controls and motor for experts.
Approach and avoidance
Table
showing response times for the positive, negative, and neutral valence
conditions in the approach and avoidance experiment. Participants were
significantly faster for the "positive toward" condition regardless of
the central word's valence.
In research focused on the approach and avoidance effect, people showed an approach effect for positive words.
In the "positive toward condition," participants moved positive words
toward the center of the screen and negative words away. In the
"negative toward condition," participants moved negative words toward
the center and positive words away. Participants were given feedback
about their accuracy at the end of each of the 4 experimental blocks.
In the first experiment the word at the center of the screen had a
positive valence,
while in the second experiment the central word had a negative valence.
In the third experiment, the center of the screen had an empty box.
As predicted, in the first experiment participants in the
"positive toward condition" responded significantly faster than those in
the "negative toward condition."
This fits the approach/avoidance effect in embodied cognition, which
states that people are faster to approach positive things and avoid
negative ones.
In the second experiment, researchers expected participants in the
"negative toward condition" to be faster, yet those in the "positive
toward condition" responded significantly faster. Although effects were smaller in the third experiment, participants in the "positive toward condition" were still faster.
Overall, people were faster in the "positive toward condition,"
regardless of the valence of the central word. Despite mixed results
regarding the researchers' expectations, they maintain that the motor
system is important in processing higher level representations such as
the action goal.
In this study, participants showed strong approach effects in the
"positive toward condition," which supports embodied cognition.
As part of a larger study, researchers separated participants into 5 groups with different instructions.
In the "approach" condition, participants were instructed to imagine
physically moving the product toward them, but in the "avoid" condition,
participants had to imagine moving the product away from them. In the
"control" condition, participants were instructed to simply observe the
product. The "correction" condition involved the same instructions as
the approach condition, except participants were told that the body can
affect judgment. In the "approach information" condition, participants
had to list 5 reasons why they would obtain the product. After viewing a
picture of an aversive product, participants rated on a scale of 1 to 7
how desirable the product was and how much they approached of or
avoided the product. They also provided how much they would pay for the
product.
An approach/avoidance effect was found in relation to product evaluation.
Participants in the "approach" condition liked the aversive product
significantly more and would pay more for it. There were no differences
between the "avoidance," "control," "correction," and "approach
information" conditions. Simulation of approach can affect liking and
willingness to pay for a product, but the effect can be reversed if the
person knows about this influence. This supports embodied cognition.
Self-regulation
As part of a larger study, one experiment randomly assigned college undergraduates to 2 groups.
In the "muscle-firming" condition participants grasped a pen in their
hand, while in the "control" condition participants held the pen in
their fingers. The participants were then asked to fill out donations
to Haiti for the Red Cross
in sealed envelopes. They were told to return the envelope regardless
of whether they donated. They also filled out questionnaires about
their feelings about the Red Cross, their tendency to donate, their
feelings about Haiti, what they thought the purpose of the study was,
etc.
Significantly more participants in the "muscle-firming" condition than in the "control" condition donated money.
Condition did not affect the actual amount donated when participants
chose to donate. As the researchers predicted, the "muscle-firming"
condition helped participants get over their physical aversion to
viewing the devastation in Haiti and spend money. Muscle-firming in
this experiment may also be related to an increase in self-control,
suggesting embodied cognition can play a role in self-regulation.
Another set of studies was conducted by Shalev (2014), indicating
that exposure to physical or conceptual thirst or dryness-related cues
influence perceived energy and reduce self-regulation. In Study 1,
participants primed with dryness-related concepts reported greater
physical thirst and tiredness and lower subjective vitality. In Study 2,
participants who were physically thirsty were less persistent in
investing effort in an unsolvable anagram task. In Study 3, images of
arid land influenced time preference regarding when to begin preparation
to make a monetary investment. Finally, in Studies 4a and 4b, exposure
to the names of dryness-related products influenced impressions of the
vitality of a target person.
Some suggest that the embodied mind serves self-regulatory processes by combining movement and cognition to reach a goal.
Thus, the embodied mind has a facilitative effect. Some judgments,
such as the emotion of a face, are detected more quickly when a
participant mimics the facial expression that is being evaluated.
Individuals holding a pen in their mouths to freeze their facial
muscles and make them unable to mimic the expression were less able to
judge emotions. Goal-relevant actions may be encouraged by embodied
cognition, as evidenced by the automated approach and avoidance of
certain environmental cues.
Embodied cognition is also influenced by the situation. If one moves
in a way previously associated with danger, the body may require a
greater level of information processing than if the body moves in a way associated with a benign situation.
Social psychology
Results
from the social embodied cognition study that illustrate the
relationship between positive emotions, observed behavioral synchrony,
and embodied rapport.
Some social psychologists examined embodied cognition and
hypothesized that embodied cognition would be supported by embodied
rapport.
Embodied rapport would be demonstrated by pairs of same-sex strangers
using Aron’s paradigm, which instructs participants to alternate asking
certain questions and to progressively self-disclose. The researchers
predicted that participants would mimic each other’s movements,
reflecting embodied cognition. Half the participants completed a
control task of reading and editing a scientific article, while half the
participants completed a shortened version of Aron’s self-disclosure paradigm.
There is a significant correlation between self-disclosure and positive emotions towards the other participant. Participants randomly assigned to the self-disclosure task displayed more behavioral synchrony
(rated by independent judges watching the tapes of each condition on
mute) and reported more positive emotions than the control group.
Since bodily movements influence the psychological experience of the
task, the relationship between self-disclosure and positive feelings
towards one's partner may be an example of embodied cognition.
George Lakoff
and his collaborators have developed several lines of evidence that
suggest that people use their understanding of familiar physical
objects, actions and situations (such as containers, spaces,
trajectories) to understand other more complex domains (such as
mathematics, relationships or death). Lakoff argues that all
cognition is based on knowledge that comes from the body and that other
domains are mapped onto our embodied knowledge using a combination of conceptual metaphor, image schema and prototypes.
Conceptual metaphor
Lakoff and Mark Johnson
showed that humans use metaphor ubiquitously and that metaphors operate
at a conceptual level (i.e., they map one conceptual domain onto
another), they involve an unlimited number of individual expressions and
that the same metaphor is used conventionally throughout a culture.
Lakoff and his collaborators have collected thousands of examples of
conceptual metaphors in many domains.
For example, people will typically use language about journeys to
discuss the history and status of a love affair, a metaphor Lakoff and
Johnson call "LOVE IS A JOURNEY". It is used in such expression as: "we
arrived at a crossroads," "we parted ways", "we hit the rocks" (as in a
sea journey), "she's in the driver's seat", or, simply, "we're
together". These metaphors involving the concept of love are tied to the
physical embodied experience of traveling and the emotions associated
with a journey.
Prototypes
Prototypes are "typical" members of a category, e.g. a robin is a
prototypical bird, but a penguin is not. The role of prototypes in human
cognition was first identified and studied by Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s.
She was able to show that prototypical objects are more easily
categorized than non-prototypical objects, and that people answered
questions about a category as a whole by reasoning about a prototype.
She also identified basic level categories:
categories that have prototypes that are easily visualized (such as a
chair) and are associated with basic physical motions (such as
"sitting"). Prototypes of basic level categories are used to reason
about more general categories.
Prototype theory has been used to explain human performance on
many different cognitive tasks and in a large variety of domains. George
Lakoff argues that prototype theory shows that the categories that
people use are based on our experience of having a body and have no
resemblance to logical classes or types. For Lakoff, this shows that traditional objectivist accounts of truth cannot be correct.
A classic argument against embodiment in its strict form is based
on abstract meaning. Whereas the meanings of the words ‘eye’ and
‘grasp’ can be explained, to a degree, by pointing to objects and
actions, those of ‘beauty’ and ‘freedom’ cannot. It may be that some common sensorimotor knowledge is immanent in freeing actions or instantiations of beauty,
but it seems likely that additional semantic binding principles are
behind such concepts. So might it be necessary, after all, to place
abstract semantics in an amodal meaning system? A remarkable observation
has recently been offered that may be of the essence in this context:
abstract terms show an over-proportionally strong tendency to be
semantically linked to knowledge about emotions.
This additional embodied–semantic link accounts for advantages in
processing speed for abstract emotional terms over otherwise matched
control words. In addition, abstract words strongly activate anterior cingulate cortex, a site known to be relevant for emotion processing Thus, it appears that at least some abstract words are semantically grounded in emotion knowledge.
If abstract emotion words indeed receive their meaning through grounding in emotion it is of crucial relevance
Therefore, the link between an abstract emotion word and its abstract
concept is via manifestation of the latter in prototypical actions. The
child learns an abstract emotion word such as 'joy' because it shows
JOY-expressing action schemas, which language-teaching adults use as
criteria for correct application of the abstract emotion word
Thus, the manifestation of emotions in actions becomes the crucial link
between word use and internal state, and hence between sign and
meaning. Only after a stock of abstract emotion words has been grounded
in emotion-expressing action can further emotion terms be learnt from
context.
Artificial intelligence and robotics
History of artificial intelligence
The experience of AI research provides another line of evidence supporting the embodied mind thesis. In the early history of AI
successes in programming high-level reasoning tasks such as
chess-playing led to an unfounded optimism that all AI problems would be
relatively quickly solved. These programs simulated intelligence using
logic and high-level abstract symbols (an approach called Good old-fashioned AI).
This "disembodied" approach ran into serious difficulties in the 1970s
and 80s, as researchers discovered that abstract, disembodied reasoning
was highly inefficient and could not achieve human-levels of competence
on many simple tasks. Funding agencies (such as DARPA)
withdrew funding because the field of AI had failed to achieve its
stated objectives, leading to difficult period now known as the "AI winter".
Many AI researchers began to doubt that high level symbolic reasoning
could ever perform well enough to solve simple problems.
Rodney Brooks
argued in the mid-80s that these symbolic approaches were failing
because researchers did not appreciate the importance of sensorimotor
skills to intelligence in general, and applied these principals to
robotics (an approach he called "Nouvelle AI"). Another successful new direction was neural networks—programs based on the actual structures within human bodies that gave rise to intelligence and learning. In the 90s, statistical AI
achieved high levels of success in industry without using any symbolic
reasoning, but instead using probabilistic techniques to make "guesses"
and improve them incrementally. This process is similar to the way human
beings are able to make fast, intuitive choices without stopping to
reason symbolically.
Moravec's paradox
Moravec's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec (whence the name) and others in the 1980s.
Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the
human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the
world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning
is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only
because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though
usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious
olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the
difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps
less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not
all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.
Approach to artificial intelligence
Solving problems of perception and locomotion directly
Many artificial intelligence
researchers have argued that a machine may need a human-like body to
think and speak as well as a human being. As early as 1950, Alan Turing wrote:
It
can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the
best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand
and speak English. That process could follow the normal teaching of a
child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. (Turing, 1950).
Embodiment theory was brought into artificial intelligence most notably by Rodney Brooks who showed in the 1980s that robots could be more effective if they 'thought' (planned or processed) and perceived
as little as possible. The robot's intelligence is geared towards only
handling the minimal amount of information necessary to make its behavior be appropriate and/or as desired by its creator.
Others have argued for including the architecture of the human
brain, and embodiment: otherwise we cannot accurately replicate language
acquisition, comprehension, production, or non-linguistic actions.
They suggest that while robots are unlike humans, they could benefit
from strengthened associative connections in their optimization. Also
robots could improve through reactivity and sensitivity to environmental
stimuli, human-machine interaction, multisensory integration and
linguistic input.
The concept of embodiment theory has been inspired through research in cognitive neuroscience, such as the proposals of Gerald Edelman concerning how mathematical and computational models such as neuronal group selection and neural degeneracy result in emergent categorization.
Rohrer (2005) discusses how both our neural and developmental
embodiment shape both our mental and linguistic categorizations. The
degree of thought abstraction has been found to be associated with
physical distance which then affects associated ideas and perception of
risk.
Research
on embodied cognition is extremely broad, covering a wide range of
concepts. Methods to study how our cognition is embodied vary from
experiment to experiment based on the operational definition
used by researchers. There is much evidence for this embodiment,
although interpretation of results and their significance may be
disputed. Researchers continue to search for the best way to study and
interpret the theory of embodied cognition.
Infants as examples
Some criticize the notion that pre-verbal children provide an ideal channel for studying embodied cognition, especially embodied social cognition.
It may be impossible to know when a pre-verbal infant is a "pure model"
of embodied cognition, since infants experience dramatic changes in
social behavior throughout development.
A 9-month old has reached a different developmental stage than a
2-month old. Looking-time and reaching measures of embodied cognition
may not represent embodied cognition since infants develop object permanence of objects they can see before they develop object permanence with objects they can touch.
True embodied cognition suggests that children would have to first
physically engage with an object to understand object permanence.
The response to this critique is that infants are "ideal models" of embodied cognition. Infants are the best models because they utilize symbols less than adults do. Looking-time could likely be a better measure of embodied cognition than reaching because infants have not developed certain fine motor skills yet.
Infants may first develop a passive mode of embodied cognition before
they develop the active mode involving fine motor movements.
Overinterpretation?
Some criticize the conclusions made by researchers about embodied cognition.
The pencil-in-teeth study is frequently cited as an example of these
invalidly drawn conclusions. The researchers believed that the quicker
responses to positive sentences by participants engaging their smiling
muscles represented embodied cognition.
However, opponents argue that the effects of this exercise were primed
or facilitated by the engagement of certain facial muscles. Many cases of facilitative movements of the body may be incorrectly labeled as evidence of embodied cognition.
Six views of embodied cognition
The following "Six Views of Embodied Cognition" are taken from Margaret Wilson:
"Cognition is situated. Cognitive activity takes place in
the context of a real-world environment, and inherently involves
perception and action." One example of this is moving around a room
while, at the same time, trying to decide where the furniture should go.
"Cognition is time-pressured. We are 'mind on the hoof'
(Clark, 1997), and cognition must be understood in terms of how it
functions under the pressure of real-time interaction with the
environment." When you're under pressure to make a decision, the choice
that is made emerges from the confluence of pressures that you're under.
In the absence of pressure, a decision may be made differently.
"We off-load cognitive work onto the environment. Because of
limits on our information-processing abilities (e.g., limits on
attention and working memory), we exploit the environment to reduce the
cognitive workload. We make the environment hold or even manipulate
information for us, and we harvest that information only on a
need-to-know basis." This is seen when people have calendars, agendas,
PDAs, or anything to help them with everyday functions. We write things
down so we can use the information when we need it, instead of taking
the time to memorize or encode it into our minds.
"The environment is part of the cognitive system. The
information flow between mind and world is so dense and continuous that,
for scientists studying the nature of cognitive activity, the mind
alone is not a meaningful unit of analysis." This statement means that
the production of cognitive activity does not come from the mind alone,
but rather is a mixture of the mind and the environmental situation that
we are in. These interactions become part of our cognitive systems. Our
thinking, decision-making, and future are all impacted by our
environmental situations.
"Cognition is for action. The function of the mind is to
guide action and things such as perception and memory must be understood
in terms of their contribution to situation-appropriate behavior." This
claim has to do with the purpose of perception and cognition. For
example, visual information is processed to extract identity, location,
and affordances
(ways that we might interact with objects). A prominent anatomical
distinction is drawn between the "what" (ventral) and "where" (dorsal)
pathways in visual processing. However, the commonly labeled "where"
pathway is also the "how" pathway, at least partially dedicated to
action.
"Off-line cognition is body-based. Even when decoupled from
the environment, the activity of the mind is grounded in mechanisms that
evolved for interaction with the environment – that is, mechanisms of
sensory processing and motor control." This is shown with infants or
toddlers best. Children utilize skills and abilities they were born
with, such as sucking, grasping, and listening, to learn more about the
environment. The skills are broken down into five main categories that
combine sensory with motor skills, sensorimotor functions. The five main
skills are:
Mental Imagery:
Is visualizing something that is not currently present in your
environment. For example, imagining a future activity, or recalling how
many windows are on the first floor of a house you once lived in (even
though you did not count them explicitly while living there).
Implicit Memory:
means by which we learn certain skills until they become automatic for
us. An example of this would be an adult brushing his/her teeth, or an
expert race car driver putting the car in drive.
Reasoning and Problem-Solving: Having a mental model of something will increase problem-solving approaches.
Criticism of the six claims
Margaret
Wilson adds: "Some authors go so far as to complain that the phrase
'situated cognition' implies, falsely, that there also exists cognition
that is not situated (Greeno & Moore, 1993, p. 50)."
Of her six claims, she notes in her abstract, "the first three and the
fifth claim appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness
is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The
fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has
received the least attention, but it may in fact be the best documented
and most powerful of the six claims."
