On "The poverty of embodied cognition" (Goldinger et al, in press)

A new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (Goldinger, Papesh, Barnhart, Hansen & Hout, 2015) has taken a swing at the field of embodied cognition, claiming that it is vague, trivial and unable to add anything scientific to the investigation of cognition.

...our goal is to zoom out from specific empirical debates, asking instead what EC offers to cognitive science in general. To preview, we argue that EC is theoretically vacuous with respect to nearly all cognitive phenomena. EC proponents selectively focus on a subset of domains that work, while ignoring nearly all the bedrock findings that define cognitive science. We also argue that the principles of EC are often (1) co-opted from other sources, such as evolution; (2) vague, such that model building is not feasible; (3) trivially true, offering little new insight; and, occasionally, (4) nonsensical. 

My basic take is a) I actually agree with a lot of the criticisms in the context of the kinds of 'embodied' cognition we critique for similar reasons, but b) there is nothing new to any of these critiques, none of them are compulsory failings of the field and nothing about them makes embodiment an intrinsically empty notion. 

Is embodied cognition a "no brainer"?

Brains, HUH, yeah, what are they good for?

When we say "there are no mental representations", people often hear 'the brain doesn't do anything'. Because this is obviously not true, people sometimes just assume we simply cannot be talking sense about cognition and stop listening. 

Of course, we aren't saying this at all. Of course the brain is up to something. I've sketched out a few ideas here and here (some of which is finding it's way into a book chapter we're writing with Eric Charles), and we're working on a Research Topic at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience about how to do radical embodied cognitive science (to which any interested parties are warmly invited to contribute!).

So we aren't denying that the brain is interesting and important. We just think it's doing something very different from what mainstream cognitive neuroscience thinks it is doing. Our embodied cognition (Wilson & Golonka, 2013) redefines the job description for the brain. Whatever it is that the brain is doing, it doesn't have to be representing anything (this is what the 'radical' part means). Instead, the brain is a key player in the system that interacts with information to produce behaviour, and that is a very different thing. 

This basic fact motivates Sabrina's proposed 'new direction for psychology' (which obviously I endorse too). Her argument is that psychologists are interested in explaining behaviour, and that the primary external cause of behaviour is the various kinds of information we are able to interact with. There are interesting contributions to behaviour made by internal factors, including the brain, but these, she argues, have their effects by modifying how and when we interact with different sources of information. Given this, psychology should get very interested in information as quickly as possible in order to really start explaining behaviour; it's paid off in spades in perception and action and there's no reason why it won't pay off everywhere else too (see Sabrina's post on language here and here, plus our handy dandy Frontiers paper).

Of course the brain is a major player in cognitive systems, but in order to really know what it's up to, we have to be sure to ask it the right questions, and this means doing things in the right order. So the argument that 'the behaviour I study clearly requires internal support, and that therefore there are representations doing that work and the brain is important' is not actually an argument against doing your work from an embodied perspective. Throw away your assumptions about representations (see the section of links 'Representations & Why We Should Abandon Them' on the Rough Guide for more reasons), get serious about the information present in your task to support behaviour and only then start speculating about the form of the internal support that is required. We think you'll be surprised where you end up when representations are not the default. 

And please tell us what you're up to - we'd love to help if we can!

References
Wilson A.D. & Golonka S. (2013). Embodied Cognition is Not What you Think It Is, Frontiers in Psychology, 4 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00058

Some Ground Rules for a Theory of Psychology

Add psychology to the list

A fairly common response to our theory post was 'here's my theory, which is designed to replace and fix all the others'. However, it's more a symptom of the problem I was discussing than a solution for everyone to have their own entirely separate theory which doesn't talk to any other work in the field (see above). One of my personal goals in science is to not be that guy. I want to see cognitive science become more integrated, not more fragmented. We have also been asked, however, and quite sensibly, what we think the solution to our problem is. The question then is how to propose a theoretical approach for psychology and cognitive science where we don't just reinvent the wheel.

Sabrina and I have been working on this for, well, the entire blog. It has been a place for our "brave attempt to think out loud about theories of psychology until we get some" since day one; we've been identifying problems but, just as importantly, solutions the whole time. The theory post identified the big picture problem we see in psychology; time to lay out some solutions.

Step one is to present a map of the blog, organised thematically to guide new readers to work we've already done here. This should also help map out the gaps in the approach, so we can focus on things to do next; feel free to point us to problems we can't yet address! (And yes, we know about episodic memory and language - we're working on it.) This post is not a comprehensive summary of past work - it's a map for you to use to find what we've done so far.

To summarise: in essence, and some minor details aside, we are advocating for Chemero's (2009) radical embodied cognitive science, with the addition of some elements he was missing (network science & task specific devices). Cognition is embodied, extended and held together by the direct perception of affordances and events; the result is a complex, nonlinear dynamical system that must be analysed as such. The brain is not the sole source of our behaviour, nor is it representing the world; it clearly plays a critical role in this system, though, and we propose that we'll need the tools of network science to describe what it's actually up to (Sporns, 2010). Methodologically, we must carefully characterise the task, the resources available to solve the task (which include brain, body and environment) and the information these resources create which can sustain the formation and control of an embodied solution. This method is Bingham's (1988) task specific device approach (the main piece Chemero was missing, I think).This approach applies to all and any behaviour you want to explain, including the hard stuff like episodic memory and language.

Critically, this approach, while new (and uncommon in insisting on a role for Gibson's ecological approach) isn't just something we invented: all these elements are active parts of modern cognitive science. The only new part is bringing it all under one roof, with the goal of getting on and getting some decent normal science under our belts.

Here's what we've covered so far. If you want more details on any point, click on the links!

Embodied cognition is not what you think it is

The most exciting thing in cognitive science right now is the theory that cognition is embodied. It is, in fact one of the things interested lay people know about cognitive science, thanks in part to a lot of high profile experiments that claim to show how cognition can be influenced and biased by states of the body, or that cognitive states can affect states of the body in ways that suggest abstract metaphors and concepts are grounded in the behaviour of the body. A recent blog post at Scientific American covers this ground quite nicely (although the large picture of Noam "not an embodied cognitive scientist" Chomsky hints that someone didn't actually read the piece).

The problem, however, is that this is not really what embodied cognition is about. Embodiment is not the weak claim that you can see small effects of the behaviour of the body in our mental representations of the world. Embodiment is the radical hypothesis that the brain is not the sole resource we have available to us to solve problems. Our bodies, and the meaning-filled perception of the world they allow, do much of the work required to achieve our goals, and this simple fact changes utterly what our theories of 'cognition' will look like.

Chemero (2009), Chapter 1: Hegelian Arguments in Cognitive Science

The basic thesis of RECS is that cognitive science should give up on representations (the radical bit) and focus on explaining the embodiment of cognition in a complex, perceiving-acting dynamical system. Chemero spends Chapter 1 heading off the likely initial line of resistance to this thesis; namely, the argument that 'your thesis got ruled out in the 80s by [insert name here]'. Chemero labels arguments of this type 'Hegelian' and makes a case that a) they're mostly a sign of the immaturity of modern cognitive science, but most importantly b) they don't really need to convince anyone to stop trying to develop a radical, embodied cognitive science (and that the rest of the book is therefore still worth a read). I basically agree with this analysis; in fact, we started this blog to try and address the immaturity issue in (a) (in favour of some form of (b)). So we're off to a good start!