Wilson: Six Views of Embodied Cognition

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Wilson Six Views of Embodied Cognition

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

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Wilsons Reaction

• --Insofar as this rests on an evolutionary
  hypothesis, its not clear that the hypothesis is
  true.
• --It ignores many of the species-defining
  features of human cognition (planning, imagining,
  hypothetical reasoning, etc.all of whats known
  as off-line cognition).

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2. Cognition Is Time-Pressured

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

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3. We Off-Load Cognitive Work onto the Environment

• --Leave information in the world to be accessed
  as needed. The world is its own best model
  (Rodney Brooks).
• --Act on the external world to produce new and
  useful information (Kirsh and Maglios epistemic
  actions).
• --Actively use the external world to represent
  further problem spaces.

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Wilsons Reaction

• Mostly supportive, although
• --Some of these cases are not situated.
• --Some of these cases do not introduce anything
  new into cognitive science.

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4. The Environment Is Part of the Cognitive System

• --Analogous to the extended mind hypothesis of
  Clark and Chalmers.
• Wilson is mostly critical
• --Distinguish between distributed causality and
  distributed cognition. The former is trivially
  true. How do you get from causal contribution to
  the constitutive claim?

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Facultative v. Obligate

• Facultative short-lived, organized on the fly
• Obligate persisting, integrated
• Consideration of the former systems is most
  useful when explaining particular events.
• Science works most effectively by uncovering
  fundamental principles of organization and
  functionby studying obligate systems.

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5. Cognition Is for Action

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

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Digression

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

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6. Off-Line Cognition Is Body-Based

• Wilsons favored view. Cognitive processing is
  tied in some special way to bodily processes of
  immediate sensation and motor control.
• Internal cognitive processing involves
• --Mental imagery
• --Articulatory encoding of memories
• --Body-based implicit memory

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

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The Three Situated Hypotheses My Preferred
Terminology

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

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Epistemic-dependence argument for extended
cognition

• In order to understand cognitive processing, we
  need to understand the causal contribution of the
  environment.
• ????????????
• Therefore, the environment is part of the
  cognitive system.