When I go to a conference like CSBBCS, I am interested in
seeing the kinds of topics that are ‘hot’, and I enjoy watching students
present their posters and their talks.
This conference is a particularly good one for students to work on such skills. I saw many excellent student presentations at
the (nicely organized) poster sessions.
I enjoyed a particularly enthusiastic account of different types of
cuing presented by Shelby Siroski from the University of Regina. I watched some fine student oral
presentations as well. I was very impressed by a talk on the bouba/kiki
effect delivered by David Michael Sidhu of the University of Calgary.
Of course, I also enjoyed bumping into former students
and mentors whose professional lives have intersected mine throughout my
career!
In terms of ‘hot’ topics, what surprised me about CSBBCS
2013? Several talks and posters expressed sympathy with embodied cognitive
science. This included the Donald O.
Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award Address delivered by James Enns of UBC. His address, “Human Perception: A science of
synergy”, made calls to increase the ecological validity of experimental
cognitive psychology, to consider the role of action and interaction, and to
take seriously the notion of ‘cognition in the wild’. There was also a full symposium on embodied
cognition, which included an excellent talk by my former graduate student Paul
Siakaluk who has established his own productive lab at UNBC. References to action and to
ecological validity were sprinkled liberally throughout all of the poster
sessions.
However, what struck me about most of the CSBBCS nod to
embodied cognitive science was that it was so … classical … in nature. Much of the research aimed to provide
representational accounts of phenomena that involved actions or bodies. A popular citation that situated this
approach (pardon the pun) was Barsalou’s (2009) approach to simulation theory.
What I did not see was any recognition of the fact that a
key implication of embodied cognitive science involves removing mental representation.
I have been grappling with the tension between embodied and classical
cognitive science over the last few years (Dawson, 2013; Dawson, Dupuis &
Wilson, 2010). What happens to classical
cognitive science when notions like the extended mind and stigmergy assail
it? Representationalists might be
surprised at the implications, discussed for instance by Clark (2008). When Hutchins (1995) studies cognition in the
wild, he discovers cognitive scaffolds in the world that externalize both
representation and computation, and support group cognition. Hutchings notes that we do less (cognition) because the world does more. At the extreme, Chemero (2009) argues that cognitive
science’s big mistake was to appeal to representations.
This radical critique of representationalism
has not yet received any traction at CSBBCS. Intrigued by the apparent lack of concern about the tension
between representational and embodied cognitive science at this conference, I
tried to explore it in more detail. At
the Hebb address, I asked Enns about what he thought about the future of
representation in cognitive science. He
seemed to respond (once he parsed my question, which apparently puzzled him)
that introspection indicates that we have representations, so there will always
be a place for them in cognitive theory.
I had a more fruitful exchange with Michael Masson from the University
of Victoria, who pointed out that it was a reasonable research strategy to
explore representations of action, and that it was interesting to consider the
cognitive neuroscience of such representations.
Of course, others – like myself – find it equally interesting to
consider how much cognition can be accomplished in the absence of
representation! What happens when you find inspiration in Chemero instead of Barsalou? Perhaps we will find out at future meetings of this society!
References
-
Barsalou, L. W. (2009). Simulation, situated conceptualization, and prediction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1281-1289.
- Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing The Mind: Embodiment, Action, And Cognitive Extension. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
- Dawson, M. R. W. (2013). Mind, Body, World: Foundations Of Cognitive Science. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press.
- Dawson, M. R. W., Dupuis, B., & Wilson, M. (2010). From Bricks To Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science Of LEGO Robots. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press.
- Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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