Last week in class the topic of grounded cognition was brought up.
Before then, I had never heard of the subject and it peaked my curiosity. So, I
did some research and wanted to let you all know what I have found.
Cognition, it it's plainest definition given by Google, is "the mental action or
process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience,
and the senses". Over the years, scientists
and psychologists alike have delved into the question of how exactly
the brain processes, and comes to grasp, this knowledge and understanding.
Still wanting to find a less broad definition of cognition in itself, I found
one more clearly given by the US National Library of Medicine in a comparison
of cognition and the concept of grounded cognition. Referencing Lawrence W.
Barsalou's work on grounded cognition, the USNLM website states that cognition
in itself is computation in a modular system of the brain, "independent of
the brain's modal systems for perception, action, and introspection". The
argument for grounded cognition rejects
that cognition is independent of these systems.
Barsalou argues “the environment, situations,
body, and simulations in the brain’s modal systems ground the central
representations in cognition”. With this, he implies that in grounding, a
person’s cognition can be influenced by how the perceive their environment. In
addition to each person having a very different, very modal system of the
brain, how much then, does perception play a role in knowledge and understanding?
Through out my years of schooling I have long understood that each person has a
different learning style –there for the most part being listening, writing,
speaking, and doing. Different people have different methods of retaining
information depending on where their strengths lie. Are these different methods
then, catered to varying strength in modal systems of the brain, or various
modes of perception?
In my research on the subject, I also stumbled
upon a blog arguing that there is a third type of cognition, which has too long
(in the author’s opinion) been incorporated into the concept of grounded
cognition – that of “embodied cognition”.
In his post to Psychsciencenotes, Andrew Wilson argues the following in
rebuttal to Barsalou’s argument for grounded cognition:
· Grounded cognition is still about mental representations,
just ones that are shaped by the body…
· Embodied cognition replaces representations with our activity
in a richly perceived world…
In this argument, Wilson argues that the
cognition developed by the perception and representation of the environment,
and that developed by physical interaction with the environment are completely
separate. I am curious to know what you all have to think? Do you think the
cognition is developed from perception of the environment, interaction with it,
or is completely independent of either?
The websites I used for my research on the
subject are listed below if you wish to read up on the subject yourselves!
Barsalou, Lawrence W. “Grounded Cognition: Past, Present,
and Future”. Department of Psychology,
Emory University. Cognitive Science Society, Inc. 2010
US National Library of Medicine
Wilson, Andrew. “Grounded vs. embodied cognition: a (hopefully
contentious) note on terminology”. Psychsciencenotes.blogpot.com. Monday, 1
July 2013. (Accessed Wednesday, 20 September 2014).
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2013/07/grounded-vs-embodied-cognition.html
There has been a trend in the last 4-5 years to utilize functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to detect a difference between what happens when we read the manual to our Blu-ray player or, let’s say a novel such as Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. What occurs to neuroactivity when we encounter metaphors, or more complex, analogous thinking? This area of “neurohumanities” (a term coined by serious practitioners and skeptics alike) takes its genesis in theories that contest the traditional views that cognition is computation on amodal symbols in a modular system, independent of the brain's modal systems for perception, action, and introspection. In the last fifteen years, the "embodied" and "grounded" cognition approach has become widespread in fields related to cognitive science, such as cognitive and social psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, computational modelling and robotics. According to this approach, our cognitive activity is grounded in sensory-motor processes and situated in specific contexts and situations. In this view, concepts consist of the reactivation of the same neural pattern that is present when we perceive and/or interact with the objects they refer to. In the same way, understanding language would imply forming a mental simulation of what is linguistically described. This simulation would entail the recruitment of the same neurons that are activated when actually acting or perceiving the situation, action, emotion, object or entity described by language. “Grounded” and/or “embodied” cognition is a radical claim because it changes the job description for the brain; instead of having to represent knowledge about the world and using that knowledge to simply output commands, the brain is now a part of a broader system that critically involves perception and action as well.
ReplyDeleteMy interest with “neurohumanities” was as you might expect, first triggered by scholarship in comparative literature and the intersection of science. Plus, come on, it all sounded pretty cool. But when I was invited to the University of Florida College of Medicine as a poet in residence my interest became personal—they were going to measure my neuroactivity using fMRI scans. First-year medical students joined me for a week long writing workshop. We wrote elegiac verse, dramatic monologues, and terza rimas on the lawn outside the library. Over coffee we wrote vignettes, flash fiction; at dinner we contemplated the lives of our characters. The overriding theme was to explore the “theory of mind,” sympathy, empathy, and the way language is shaped by the environments we created in our texts and how it was perceived. It was a rather evocative approach for this emerging neuroscience program as we explored creative narratives that considered a person more completely—both body and soul (soul being defined as the nonphysical aspects of a person). Brain scans revealed what happened in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories and poems stimulated the brain—lit it up like a switchboard.
Literature — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions— offers an especially rich replica of reality. Indeed, in one respect fiction and poetry go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings. Fiction and poetry is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. The traditional definition of cognition Alex provided: “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses” would for me, have to include my perception and interaction of the environment, whether real or residing in that indelible place of literary imagination.