* ‘Embodied Cognition Around 1800’, special issue of German Life and Letters, 70.4 (October 2017)

A couple of years ago I mentioned the conference on which this collection of essays, edited by Katharina Engler-Coldren, Lore Knapp, and my friend and colleague Charlotte Lee, is based. That was a very good event, and there are excellent essays here. The collection aims to bring some recent trends in cognitive science into the orbit of German literary scholarship, but it also aims to identify those trends in historical thought that were already pointing the way. While ‘4E’ cognition (embodied, extended, embedded, enacted) is often embraced as a game-changing way of uniting body and mind, the editors point out in their introduction that in the centuries since Descartes plenty of writers questioned the mind-body split (Herder, for example). The years around 1800 in Germany, the authors say, offer a particular concentration.

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Now everyone can benefit from Nadja Tschentscher’s introduction to embodied cognition. It was a great success on the day, and the written version (Embodied Semantics: Embodied Cognition in Neuroscience’, pp. 423-9) is more than just a brilliant reading list. It’s a careful evaluation of a key trend in the field, towards thinking that many aspects of our thought and language derive fundamentally from bodily sensations, postures, and movement. Tschentscher concludes that ‘no evidence has yet been found for a causal effect of perceptual and motor systems on the processing of abstract words, numbers, and arithmetic facts in the adult brain’. It is, however, a ‘powerful proposition’.

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The essays that connect most with the interests of this blog are…
* Charlotte Lee on ‘Movement and Embodiment in Klopstock and Goethe’, pp. 506-15. Klopstock’s poetry has a strongly physical dimension, its sounds and the physical objects they conjure interacting dynamically. His poem about a skater, ‘Der Eislauf’, includes a particularly rich ‘Schwung’, the ‘thrust’ of the skater phonetically captured, and Lee shows this is typical of Klopstock’s embodied style. One twist in the essay I particularly liked was the recognition that in this respect languages may be different: Klopstock certainly thought so. I’m not so sure – instinctively I think that other languages could find an equivalent of the tension and release you get in ‘Schwung’. It made me think also of Henry Raeburn’s famous painting ‘The Skating Minister’ (you can find it on Wikipedia), where (I think) the management of ‘Schwung’ is very interesting, and perhaps appropriately restrained given the skater in question.
* Terence Cave on ‘Dancing with Marionettes: Kleist and Cognition’, pp. 533-43. Cave sees Kleist’s dialogue on the marionette theatre both as an investigation into, and something illuminated by, ‘the critical borderline between the unreflective and the reflective’. The puppets cause some automatic reactions and associations in us, and they prompt reflections, and these may all inter-relate interestingly. They also operate on the boundary of life, lifelikeness, and liveliness: certain key, sometimes minimal signs, communicate vividly to us that something is alive. Cave discusses the work of modern puppeteer Stephen Mottram, whose work is well worth following up on his website, and via Youtube clips like this:

Karin Kukkonen, A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (Oxford, 2017)

I said in my recent post about Andy Clark and predictive processing that I’d mention a literary scholar who has pursued these themes to good effect. I’ve already mentioned Karin Kukkonen’s work drawing on Bayesian probability (here), and her recent book puts this in a more ambitious framework.
      She approaches the 18th-century novel by means of interfaces between the neoclassical poetics of the time and the cognitive poetics being developed today. Where the former has poetic justice, the unities of space and time (i.e. limitations on the scope of stories), and decorum (i.e. proper behaviour of characters and plots), the latter has social cognition, embodied cognition, and predictive cognition. So the question of poetic justice is related to the ways that characters cooperate with one another, and benefit as a result, as humans have evolved to do; the question of artistic unity is related to the construction of imaginary story worlds into which both mind and body fit.
      The link between the predictive mind, the actions of characters, and the workings of genre, is highly suggestive. I think it works very well as a way of revealing and exploring the liveliness of neoclassical theories. They can seem rather dry to modern readers — Romanticism really got to us — but actually (for example) a commitment to verisimilitude is a commitment to liveliness, not just to lifelikeness. It also works well as a way of understanding novels as they unfold and progress, twist and turn: there is constant exchange between informed expectations and emerging information.
      Karin is my friend and I try to declare my interests, but, whether by friend or stranger, this is a great example of what a historically aware, cognitively informed, critically imaginative approach to literature can do.

Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

This is another post looking back to the mind-reading event in Durham (the first follow-up being the previous post). One of the themes there was the predictive element in the way we draw inferences about others. Like many other activities of our brains, the argument goes, we are constantly predicting, receiving data from the world, and then modifying our predictions. Feedback between mind and world is part of any sensible model, but the stress put on prediction is a noteworthy and significant strand in contemporary cognitive science.
      I’ve mentioned that this can (partly) be traced back to Thomas Bayes in the 18th century, once or twice before. But Clark’s newish book, with a lot of verve, goes beyond the equations into a big picture. If you prefer to consume your psychology in article form, he sketches out the framework in essays such as these…

* ‘Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36 (2013), 181-204. In the journal you’ll find lots of commentary and a response.
* ‘Expecting the World: Perception, Prediction, and the Origins of Human Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy, 110 (2013), 469-96.

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Clark says he has ‘two stories on offer… One is an extremely broad vision of the brain as an engine of multilevel probabilistic prediction. The other is a more specific proposal (“hierarchical predictive coding” or Predictive Processing) concerning just how such a story might be told’ (p. 10). I won’t dwell on the detail here, but the key thing seems to be a continuous, energetic, dynamic flow between prediction and sensory data. So, in relation to ‘theory of mind’, for example, we’re always modifying and generating models of what should happen next. This has evolved as an efficient way of dealing with our overall predicament, but it manifests itself in biases and errors, such as when the predictions are based on false but habitual premises.
      Clark being the Extended Mind maestro that he is, the book focuses a lot on what he sees as his ‘crucial task… to locate the neural engines of prediction where they truly belong: nested within the larger organizational forms of the active body, and enmeshed in the transformative structures of our material, social, and technological worlds’ (p. 108). This seems to be the most characteristic and arresting emphasis of Clark’s work in the Predictive Processing field, putting the equations of probabilistic calculation into the meat and veg of the worldly stew.

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Some approaches to literature have already engaged with prediction: Reuven Tsur, in his work on cognitive poetics, for example, has seen metre as something that excites predictions (about rhythm and rhyme, for example). These may be rewarded or confounded, and the interaction between these two things offers a pleasurable experience. Clark’s book makes me think of this as something richly embodied and in-the-world: in different ways poetic forms may engage our embodied, situated minds, standing and singing, walking rhythms and heart-beats, clocks of all kinds ticking, drawing on our constant predicting and re-predicting skills.
      Prediction’s big, and the trick for any literary-critical application will be finding a particular focus to bring things to a point. In relation to genre, for example, it would be easy to say that we’re always drawing on things we know to predict what will happen next in a story, and how, but it would be less easy to identify a moment at which this is tangible and particular. Less easy, but surely possible. In a future post I will say something about a recent book that does just this.

* K.D. Williams, and B. Jarvis, ‘Cyberball: A Program for Use in Research on Interpersonal Ostracism and Acceptance’, Behavior Research Methods, 38 (2006), 174-80.
* C.H.J. Hartgerink, I. van Beest, J.M. Wicherts, and K.D. Williams, ‘The Ordinal Effects of Ostracism: A Meta-analysis of 120 Cyberball Studies’, PloSONE, 10 (2015): e0127002. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0127002

This at last is a follow-up to the conference on mind-reading in Durham, which I mentioned here. There I heard Hannah Wojciehowski of the University of Texas give a talk about rejection; her previous mention on this blog, noting her important conversations with neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, is worth a bump. She cited interesting work on ostracism, and in particular Kipling Williams’s use of the ‘Cyberball’ game to engineer the experience of exclusion in the lab. The game looks like this:

By clicking with the mouse, you throw the ball from person to person. The trick is that after a while the other players stop including you, and this gives the experimenters the chance to learn about ostracism. You can find a lot more information about the game on this website.
      The two articles at the top are, respectively, the paper in which the use of Cyberball was first discussed, and a reflection from a decade later, analyzing 120 studies making use of the game. There are many things of interest in the field and in the measuring of intense real-world experiences by means of an ingenious, apparently simple game. One thing in particular struck me, which is an instruction given to participants.
      Obviously it would be a bad idea to tell people that the point of Cyberball is to test their feelings about ostracism. Instead, they are told that the game is there to test their abilities at visualization: they are meant to flesh out the game in their minds, filling in shapes and colours, backgrounds and more. Here is the instruction:

Welcome to Cyberball, the Interactive Ball-Tossing Game Used for Mental Visualisation!
      In the upcoming experiment, we test the effects of practising mental visualisation on task performance. Thus, we need you to practise your mental visualisation skills. We have found that the best way to do this is to have you play an on-line ball tossing game with other participants who are logged on at the same time.
      In a few moments, you will be playing a ball tossing game with other students over our network. The game is very simple. When the ball is tossed to you, simply click on the name of the player you want to throw it to. When the game is over, the experimenter will give you additional instructions.
      What is important is not your ball tossing performance, but that you MENTALLY VISUALISE the entire experience. Imagine what the others look like. What sort of people are they? Where are you playing? Is it warm and sunny or cold and rainy? Create in your mind a complete mental picture of what might be going on if you were playing this game in real life.

This intrigues me. No particular significance is attributed to the visualization; in the paper it says that users of the program could design their own cover stories. And yet surely there is an interplay between effortful visualization and emotional effect: intuitively we might think that an attempt to imagine this as a realistic scene will make rejection more acute. Whether or not that’s true, I wonder whether this scene created in the mind necessarily replicates the real world. In imaginary fictions, settings and characters and emotions might satisfy some criteria of lifelikeness, but might, to interesting effect, elude others. Are these visualizations like fictions, in this respect or any other? I haven’t got far into the 120 studies but perhaps it’s covered there. Anyway, an interesting twist for those interested in the products of the imagination.

Caroline E. Spence, Magda Osman, and Alan G. McElligott, ‘Theory of Animal Mind: Human Nature or Experimental Artefact?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017), 333-43.

This has something in common with an earlier post about the use of the word ‘fear’? It’s about the terms used in psychology, and the care required to understand the question before heading for an answer. I’ve mentioned an interest in animal minds before (in this post a year ago). Spence et al. are interested in whether animals are ‘capable of empathy, problem-solving, or even self-recognition’. But here they consider the problem of understanding our own mechanisms for theorizing about the content of animal minds. Is this ‘a natural consequence of Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities’, i.e. do we just ‘mentalize’ them as if they were like humans? Much of the article is concerned with structural, methodological questions, about how to go through the steps required to establish a good conceptual framework. Frans de Waal, whose work featured in the post mentioned above, used the term ‘anthropodenial’ as an alternative to ‘anthropomorphism’ (in an essay called ‘‘). How do we steer a sure course between what may be a slack habit of mind, and what may be an over-scrupulous avoidance of what might be rather significant evolved resources? The thing that caught my eye was the ethical dimension of the process by which we do, or don’t, attribute certain kinds of mental life to animals. Being really rigorous about not getting into anthropomorphic fallacies might make it less likely that it will seem that animals should have rights (which seems like a bad thing to me), but there are many complexities and subtleties.