Learning How Our Body Interacts With The World

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Complexity Digest 2000.15 - 03
http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2000.15#526
10-Apr-2000

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Learning How Our	 Body Interacts With The World, BBS
 









Abstract: The overall goal of this target article
is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The
particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated
phenomenon seen in 7-12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic
"A-not-B error," infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at
location "A" continue to reach to that location even after they
watch the toy hidden in a nearby location "B." 

Here we question the traditional explanations of the error
as indicator of infants' concepts of objects or other static
mental structures. Instead, we demonstrate that the A-not-B error
and its previously puzzling contextual variations can be
understood by the coupled dynamics of the ordinary processes of
goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and
remembering. We offer a formal dynamic theory and model based on
cognitive embodiment that both simulates the known A-not-B effects
and offers novel predictions that match new experimental results.


The demonstration supports an embodied view by casting the
mental events involved in perception, planning, deciding and
remembering in the same analogic dynamic language as that used to
describe bodily movement, so that they may be continuously meshed.
We maintain that this mesh is a pre-eminently cognitive act of
"knowing" not only in infancy but also in everyday activities
throughout the life span.



The
Dynamics of Embodiment: A Field Theory of Infant
Perseverative Reaching,
Thelen, E., Sch&ouml;ner, G., Scheier, C. & Smith,
L.B., Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2000)



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