1. Moderate embodiment for educational design
Paul Leseman
Symposium Embodied Design
Utrecht University
30 October 2017

2. Embodiment is hot… Let’s prevent overboiling…
Quick and dirty applications in education:
Movement before or during instruction, but without conceptual connection (maybe promoting EFs, but…).
Experiential learning: concrete experiences are always needed first before (verbal) instruction can land.
Discovery learning: unguided trying-out and observing leads to discovery of concepts and principles.
Kirschner’s critique – exaggerated, yes, but…
Issues for embodiment in educational design:
Relation verbal-conceptual knowledge ↔ embodied understanding? Role of instruction and guidance?

3. Different approaches Weak embodiment: Radical embodiment:
Modality-specific ‘coloring’ or ‘dressing-up’ of, as such, a-modal abstract concepts that are part of a conceptual system with its own combinatorial rules and computational processes.
Radical embodiment:
All putatively mental phenomena (e.g., conceptual knowledge, reasoning) can be explained by perception-action on affordance structures in real environments.
Moderate embodiment.

4. Perception-action affordances
Environments are structured and contain rich, potentially relevant information for a person:
Information is specified in (optic, acoustic, olfactory, haptic…) information flows that impinge on the senses.
Moving around leads to the detection (=perceptual learning) of invariants in the varying information flows, specifying elementary perceptual properties.
The meaning of these perceptual properties is what they allow a person to do.
Affordance = the relation between information structures and the abilities or skills of a person.
Gibson (1987)
Chemero (2003)

5. Moderate embodiment
Perception-action in real environments provides a primary (referential-) meaning basis for words and concepts.
…. concrete, multimodal, goal-directed – the ‘stuff’ of reasoning is….
Compared to radical position, three additional mechanisms:
Sensorimotor abstraction.
Associations with disembodied, ‘a-modal’ concepts.
Sensorimotor simulation.
Anderson (2010)
Goldman (2012)
Pulvermüller (2013)
Lakoff (2012)

6. Three (brain) mechanisms (1)
Sensorimotor abstraction relies on the mirroring properties of the brain:
What do graspable objects have in common when we act upon them? → “graspability”.
What do acts of drinking using different cups, beakers, glasses have in common → “action goal of drinking”.
Prototypes – what makes the sameness of dogs?
Types of actions = goals, hierarchy of goals.
Gallese (2009)
Iacoboni (2006)

7. Three (brain) mechanisms (2)
Disembodied semantic-conceptual systems are acquired, e.g., with language, and have their own rules of defining concepts in terms of other concepts and of combining concepts.
Associations of abstract a-modal concepts with perception-action sensorimotor circuits are established by Hebbian learning or related brain mechanisms (spike-time-dependency).
Effortful (attention-based) construction.
Lakoff (2014)
Pulvermüller (2013)

8. Three (brain) mechanisms (3)
Sensorimotor simulation = activating sensorimotor circuits underlying particular actions without actually performing these actions.
Mirroring mechanisms: seeing someone perform an action activates sensorimotor circuits of the same (type of) action as if you perform this action yourself.
Understanding another person’s action = simulating the action (or type of action).
Understanding a concept = activating the sensorimotor circuits associated with that concept (without…).
Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia (2010)

9. What follows (among others).…
Abstract conceptual knowledge can - via associations with sensorimotor circuits - bias attention and, thus, what is perceived and acted upon.
Linguistic relativity: seeing and not-seeing colors, ….
Abstract concepts can be subjected to combinatorial processes that, via simulation, can create sensorimotor images of things and events that one has never experienced before or that even do not exist (while partly maintaining the rich inferential structure and multimodality of the original images).
Bylund & Athanasopoulos (2014)
Fischer & Zwaan (2008)

10. Thinking of ‘infinite cardinality’
Think of the n-angled polygon that has an end-state at n, and with n →∞, approximating a circle (cardinal) as end-state.
How can we understand ‘infinite cardinality’?
Imagine an ongoing process or repeated iterations without an end-state (e.g. water streaming through the river).
Imagine a clear end-state (like an object, a fixed set) or a process that ends in a clear end-state.
Blending two mutually exclusive images creates a conceptual space that selectively picks elements of the two: end state (ignoring that the process has to stop) + continuous process (ignoring that there is no end state).
n →∞
Núñez, 2005

11. Discovering novel tools requires…
Understanding of the task at hand, e.g., the instruction “find something to scoop rice with”:
Abstract sensorimotor action-goal scheme, with elements as ‘graspability’, ‘containment’, ….
Extensive trial-and-error exploration of the action possibilities of the set of objects in the situation.
Regulation of the exploratory behavior by:
Attentional biases (look for ‘graspable’, ‘container’).
Measuring how well current actions match the abstract goal.
Bongers et al. (2013)

12. Implications for design & interaction
Instructional guidance of exploration and experiential-discovery learning (setting goals, biasing attention) makes sense/is needed.
Students already have an extensive sensorimotor ‘vocabulary’ - grounded concepts – that they (can) use in understanding instruction.
Reasoning and understanding involves conceptual combinatory processes and sensorimotor simulation.