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Embodiment
Published in David Burden, Maggi Savin-Baden, Virtual Humans, 2019
David Burden, Maggi Savin-Baden
This chapter has examined how AI research has moved from purely symbolic approaches to cognition and development to approaches driven by the ideas of embodiment and enactivism. By embodying the virtual human, it gains the ability to ground the symbols it is manipulating, and its intelligence and cognitive capability are expressed and shaped through its ability to interact with, explore and shape the virtual world it operates in. Whilst early AI researchers were dismissive of digital ‘block-worlds’ and saw physical robotics as the way to embody AIs in a rich, chaotic and uncontrolled environment, this chapter has shown how virtual worlds, particularly social virtual worlds, offer, perhaps, the ideal environment in which to embody and develop virtual humans – offering all the richness of a human environment but without all the complexities of building and operating physical robots.
Socioenactive Interaction: Addressing Intersubjectivity in Ubiquitous Design Scenarios
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2023
Maria Cecilia Calani Baranauskas, Emanuel Felipe Duarte, José A. Valente
Cognitive Science was defined by Varela et al. (1991) more as the affiliation of some disciplines (Linguistics, Philosophy, Cognitive Psychology, Neuroscience) than a discipline per se, aiming at studying the mind. The computer model of the mind, which dominated the early works in the field, gave room to a diversity of visions within cognitive sciences at various periods of time. Cognitivism, inspired by digital computers, holds that (human) cognition is based on symbolic mental representation, i.e., the mind operates by processing representations of the world, which exists independently of the organism. Thus, its central proposition is the understanding that the world preexists to the subject, there is an objective reality capable of being captured, and knowledge occurs through representations of this objective world (Baum & Kroeff, 2018). In this model, information would reach the organism from exposure to stimuli (input) and return to the environment through behavioral responses (output), based on basic processing rules. Connectionism is thought of as an alternative to cognitivism, in which the symbolic processing is distributed over a network of simpler components, resulting in the emergence of a global behavior of the system. In contrast to cognitivism and connectionism, enactivism is a non-representationalist approach, in which cognition is understood as an embodied action, that is, it is intrinsically connected to the biological realization of an organism in its environment.
An examination of discourse analytic methods in the context of mathematical group work
Published in International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 2022
Research examining the construction of collective or common knowledge were framed through the following theories: situative theory (Elbers & Streefland, 20005; van de Sande & Greeno, 2012), distributed cognition (Evans et al., 2011), and enactivism (Towers & Martin, 2015). From a situative theory perspective, groups and the resources/materials they interact with form a cognitive system. In other words, cognitive processes are thought to be distributed between students and resources. Nearly identical to situative theory, distributed cognition places emphasis on the meaning making of a group of students, rather than individuals and is based on the premise that ‘[t]he intellectual partnership that results from the distribution of cognitions across individuals or between individuals and cultural articacts is a joint one; it cannot be attributed solely to one or another partner’ (Salomon, 1993, p. 112). Finally, enactivism suggests that ‘species and environment co-adapt to each other, meaning that each influences the other in the course of evolution’ (Towers & Martin, 2015, p. 249). Enactivism emphasizes the study of collective meaning as generated by individuals who are coupled together, rather than attempting to understand meaning from individuals. The three theories which guide research on collective understanding are similar and each of them privilege the meaning-making of groups, rather than individuals.
Guess, check and fix: a phenomenology of improvisation in ‘neural’ painting
Published in Digital Creativity, 2018
Embodied cognition and enactivism take perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of situated action in a local environment. This position prioritizes agent–environment dynamics over mental computation and representation (Chemero 2009, 47; Shapiro 2011, 158), a stance which I claim is an effective method of investigating creative practices such as art painting where tacit processes come into play. In embodied mind theory, the body–mind interacts directly with information rather than building up internal models of the world. Wilson and Golonka (2013) propose that four key steps must be considered when engaging with the implications of embodiment: The first step is to characterize the task from a first-person perspective, a stance based on the presumption that an enactive process ‘solves particular problems using heuristics made possible by stable features of the task at hand’ (2). Tasks are differentiated from each other in terms of their underlying dynamics. The second step is to identify the task-relevant resources the agent has access to in order to solve the task. Asking, ‘What are the resources that are available in this task?’ hones in on a heterophenomenological8 position, not the presumption of mental calculations. The resources available are inclusive of brain, body and environment. The third step is to identify how the agent can assemble these resources into a dynamic system capable of solving the task at hand as its behaviour unfolds over time. The last step is to test the agent’s performance to confirm that the agent is actually using the solution identified in the previous step. The authors note that systems respond to perturbations of resources in a manner that is specific to the role that a resource plays in the system.