Del amor y la muerte

Embodied cognition is a line of thought in cognitive science according to which, in the general sense, the mind cannot be understood without taking into account the body and its interactions with the outside world (A. Clark, 1998). One of the main arguments that can be put forward to support such a view is that the human brain shares a lot in common with the brains of lower animals, which are, for the most part,

devoted to sensorimotor processing. Since the cognitive functions of animals consist mostly of on-line interactions with their environment, it is sensible to assume that human cognition has its roots in such perceptual and motor processing and builds on top of it (M. Wilson, 2002). Although this idea is certainly not new, it has been gaining popularity especially during the past two decades.

M. Wilson (2002, p. 626) summarises the six most prominent views that can be distinguished under the broad term of embodied cognition as follows:

Cognition is situated, which means that the cognitive processes are accompanied by a constant stream of incoming task-relevant perceptual information and, at the same time, the executed actions affect the surrounding environment (Steels & Brooks, 1995). In other words, a constant interaction takes place between the cognitive agent and the things that are the subject of the cognitive activity;

Cognition is time pressured. The fact that cognitive agents live in a constantly-changing environment and have to deal with dynamic situations that happen in ‘real time’ imposes strong constraints on the computational aspects of the cognitive processes (Pfeifer & Scheier, 1999). It is sometimes stated that the time pressures create the ‘representational bottleneck’ in the sense that due to the little amount of time available, building a complete internal model of the environment and using it to construct a plan of action is not a feasible solution;

We off-load cognitive work onto the environment. In order to overcome the representational bottleneck mentioned above, instead of encoding and retain-ing information relevant to the situation in the workretain-ing memory, we use our environment in strategic ways that allow us to reduce the cognitive workload (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994). Brooks (1991, p. 139) referred to this famously as the world being ‘its own best model’;

The environment is part of the cognitive system, which in its strong form

means it is not sufficient to approach cognition solely as an activity of the mind, but the entire cognitive situation, including the cognitive agent and its environment, must be studied as one system (A. Clark, 1998). According to M. Wilson (2002, pp. 629–631) this is the most controversial of the six claims;

Cognition is for action. In other words, one has to approach the study of cognit-ive mechanisms, such as perception or memory, focusing on the ways they help to achieve adaptive behaviour (Glenberg, 1997). This is connected with the assumption that ‘we conceptualize objects and situations in terms of their func-tional relevance to us, rather than neutrally or “as they really are”’ (M. Wilson, 2002, p. 631);

Off-line cognition is body based. This states that the cognitive activities that have been often regarded as ‘abstract’ may actually be supported by the sen-sorimotor functions executed in a covert way. In order to achieve this, it must be possible to decouple somehow the capacities primarily devoted to dealing with perception and action from their ‘original’ inputs and outputs, so that they may assist the process of thought (Glenberg, 1997). Examples of cognit-ive processes that are likely based on such sensorimotor simulations include mental imagery, working, episodic, and implicit memory, as well as reasoning and problem-solving (M. Wilson, 2002, pp. 633–634);

Although these claims vary with respect to the strength and the degree of controversy they rise, such a decomposition is useful to underscore why is it appropriate to look at learning to count — around which the four research questions addressed in this thesis revolve — from the point of view of embodied cognition.

The ample evidence that human mathematical thinking in general, and count-ing in particular, is a prime example of embodied cognition, has been reviewed in chapter 2. On the most general level, the fact that the rules of arithmetic may be formulated as a conceptual metaphor of simple interactions with physical entities, such as collections or measuring units, is perfectly in line with the claim about

the situatedness of cognition. All four conceptual metaphors proposed by Lakoff and N´u˜nez (2000) refer to scenarios and activities that are encountered countless times throughout our early development (such as playing with a collection of toys) or are indeed fundamental to our existence (as is motor control). The theoret-ical considerations of Lakoff and N´u˜nez, supplemented by many lines of evidence for the link between ‘concrete’ spatial and ‘abstract’ numerical representations in the brain suggest the involvement of body-based representations as a substrate for forming abstract mathematical concepts. Thus is consistent with the statement that off-line (in other words, abstract) cognition is body based. Perhaps the most striking evidence in support of the latter claim is the study of Andres et al. (2007), where covert involvement of finger motor circuits in sequential enumeration tasks was demonstrated. The claim about off-loading cognitive work onto the environ-ment is directly relevant to the first group of the hypotheses about the contribution of gestures to learning to count reviewed in chapter 2, which focus on overcoming limitations in available cognitive resources (see section 2.2.2). Finally, the second group of the hypotheses, which emphasised the coordinative role of the gestures and the hypothetical transfer of a motor competence to a conceptual one, resonates with the claims about the relations between cognition and action. There is little doubt therefore that embodied cognition provides an appropriate theoretical frame-work within which learning to count and phenomena associated with it should be considered.