Embodied Cognition
The body has long been ignored in discussions of cognition. After all, there is a simple and intuitive division that the brain does the thinking and that the body simply carries the brain about. This chapter revisits this position and makes the case for t
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Embodied Cognition
We have to admit that the body is the organism whose states regulate our cognition of the world. (Whitehead 1925, p. 91)
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Introduction
This chapter offers a discussion of embodied cognition and its consequences for HCI. Embodied cognition is treated very differently from author to author and between disciplines but here we are concerned with how the body shapes our cognition. We should also be aware that embodiment as such is a feature of enactive cognition and of extended cognition which we consider in subsequent chapters. We should recognise that while situated action represented a challenge to classical cognition and its treatment of human-computer interaction, the very idea of embodiment is essentially post-cognitive. We should also note that there is not a whiff of the corporeal in classical cognition. So, how can the body contribute to thought when it is the brain which is the organ of thought? There is no “psychology” of the body, indeed any such proposal seems oxymoronic. Interestingly, a recent publication in Frontiers of Psychology describes embodiment as an “exciting hypothesis”. Wilson and Golonka (2013) write that it is the “radical hypothesis that the brain is not the sole cognitive resource we have available to us to solve problems. Our bodies and their perceptually guided motions through the world do much of the work required to achieve our goals, replacing the need for complex internal mental representations. This simple fact utterly changes our idea of what “cognition” involves …”. It is difficult to gauge whether this attitude is typical of the psychological community as a whole but it is, nonetheless, a little surprising given the work of, for example, Piaget and Vygotski. They, in their own very distinctive and different ways, recognised the importance of bodily interaction with the world and its consequences for our cognitive development. This they
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 P. Turner, HCI Redux, Human–Computer Interaction Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42235-0_4
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Embodied Cognition
described as “sensorimotor” and they both treat this as a stage which is either subsequently lost, internalised or becomes very much unimportant to adult cognition. However, embodied cognition as we currently understand has its roots in the Continental philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, more obscurely in the work of Heidegger, which he manages without mentioning the body, and in the phenomenology of Husserl. At its simplest, to recognise that cognition is embodied is to appreciate the body plays a significant and active role in how we think and with HCI in mind, this prompts us to consider tangible interaction. The goal of tangible computing, which first appeared in the 1990s, was to replace the “painted bits” of the graphical user interfaces (GUI) with “tangible bits”. The Media Lab at MIT, one of the early centres of this research, described the use of tangible bits as“giving physical form to digital information”. From this position they set about designi
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