Leaning to the left makes you believe odd things about embodied cognition

Embodied cognition is not what you think it is. But I do understand why people think differently; it's because of the depressingly endless stream of papers published in Psychological Science that claim to have found that body posture somehow influences the contents of some cognition about the world. The latest "exciting" new finding claims that estimates of magnitude (size, amount, etc) are affected by your posture. The paper is well summarised at the Guardian for those without access to the paper (UPDATE: I am also talking to Rolf Zwaan, lead author of this paper, in the comments section there.)

It's a terrible paper, so it's apparently time for another in what might have to become a more frequent series, In which I am a bit rude about a rubbish paper and worry about how to kill papers like it. At the end, I've also talked a little about the role science journalism plays in maintaining the momentum for papers like this, via their own version of the file drawer problem. I'd be interested in people's thoughts.

Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Psychology has a problem. We have no core theory to guide our research; no analogue to the theories of evolution or relativity. When particle physicists recently found that some neutrinos had apparently travelled faster than light, it never actually occurred to them that this is what had happened. On the basis of the extraordinarily well supported theory of relativity, everyone went 'huh, that's weird - I wonder what we did wrong?', and proceeded to use that theory to generate hypotheses they could then test. It would take a lot of fast neutrinos to disprove relativity.

Psychology, though, when faced with an empirical result that violates the laws of physics, can't find any principled reason to reject the result and instead spends a lot of time squabbling about whether Bem's result might possibly be true because 'quantum'. Worse, when people do replicate the experiment and fail to support the original result, they can't get their 'null result' published. It's a bit embarrassing, really.

One of the problems of having no core theory is that you can't simply rule things out as options. Psychologists almost all consider this a strength: we can pick and choose from a variety of mechanisms which enables us to cope with our messy and erratic subject matter. Can't imagine how perception can explain a result? Just hypothesise a mental representation to fill the gap. After all, no single theory is going to account for the opportunistic and idiosyncratic behaviour of people, so why limit ourselves? We tried that with behaviourism, and it got us nowhere. Let's stay flexible.

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.

Failing to Replicate Bem's Ability to Get Published in a Major Journal

I think Daryl Bem has done psychology an enormous favour. Possibly even two.

As you probably  know, Bem is the author of 'Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect', a paper with claims to have found evidence for precognition by running standard psychological experiments in reverse and demonstrating small but statistically reliable effects on behaviour of stimuli which came after the response was made. I posted briefly about it here, and otherwise it's been all over all of the internet for months.

It's back on my radar because several psychologists, including Richard Wiseman, recently submitted a failure to replicate the studies to the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology (JPSP), which is where Bem published his work. As reported here, Eliot Smith, the editor, refused to even send this (and another, successful replication as well) out for review. The reason Smith gives is that JPSP is not in the business of publishing mere replications - it prioritises novel results, and he suggests the authors take their work to other (presumably lesser) journals. This is nothing new - flagship journals like JPSP all have policies in place like this. But it's not a good look, and it got me thinking.

Chemero (2009) - A Brief Pause to See Where I'm At

There are still a couple of chapters left for me to go over in Chemero, but the last two were the crux of the book for me, and I want to try and summarise where my analysis has left me before I go on holiday for Easter.

First, I'd like to separate out a couple of themes. First, there's the overall 'radical embodied cognitive science' programme, and second is the specific form of the 'shored up ecological psychology' that Chemero advocates as a basis for this programme. I am entirely on board with the basic idea of RECS; specifically, I think that cognition, whatever that is, is non-representational and that we can make great progress by making our science non-representational. I think Chemero has written a clear exposition of what such a radical science might look like, and why we might want to bother, and I think this makes RECS a must read for the field. 

Second, I think that Chemero is right to go to ecological psychology for a theoretical basis. The more I look, the more I have come to believe that James Gibson is about the only psychologist to have actually proposed a genuine scientific theory in psychology. A true theory provides you with tools to empirically attack novel problems in your domain, and provides you with a clear basis to interpret the results of your tests and to begin to tell a coherent story. Psychology has been chasing phenomena for most of it's scientific life, with no clear framework emerging to tell us a story about why things are the way they are. Ecological psychology is a genuine theory, and it's about a critical feature of our psychological lives: how we maintain contact with our world and move through it successfully. Regardless of what topic you're specifically interested in, you need to understand how we come to have knowledge about our environments.

Finally, though, I have problems with the proposals Chemero makes about the two pillars of an ecological psychology, affordances and information. It's these problems I want to try and sum up here, to focus the conversation a little.

F*cking affordances - how do they work?

Over on Bounds of Cognition, Ken has been doggedly pursuing what he thinks is a critical problem with the concept of affordances as described by Gibson (1979) and expanded on by Turvey, Shaw, Reed & Mace (1981; hence TSRM). I feel the need to spend some time consolidating my responses and some ideas in one place; every time I try to lay out why the problem is ill-posed or a potential route out, Ken just says I'm clouding or avoiding the issue or throwing out red herrings.

I actually think Ken has identified one very useful critique of the affordance concept: the lack of care with which we attach '-able' to words. But Ken isn't just making a methodological point; he thinks he's shown that affordances cannot structure light in a way that can specify the affordance, and that's the argument that needs to be tackled.

Saddle up: this is going to take some time, and I'm not going to solve everything. But to get a little ahead of myself, the answer to the problem is that it's complicated.

What Does Coordinated Rhythmic Movement Have To Do With Anything?

In which I provide an answer to a question I get asked by everyone, including grant reviewers, students and random people who make the mistake of asking what I do for a living.

I've spent numerous recent posts talking about coordinated rhythmic movement. This is my bread-and-butter experimental task, my go-to example for studying all aspects of perception, action and learning. I'm branching out, now I have my own faculty position, but coordination is where it's at. 

The single most common question I get is "why study this? Surely it's just some fake movement task; I mean finger-wiggling, who ever even does that?" I wouldn't mind so much, but I even get this question from grant reviewers, scientists who should know the answer. Doing science properly is important, but communicating that my methods achieve this matters too, not least because today's funding climate demands it.

So, coordinated rhythmic movement: what the hell?

On why fMRI is bullshit

If you want to really confuse a psychologist, tell them you don't think there are mental representations mediating behaviour. Try it - they will simply assume you must be joking, because it has never occurred to them that it might be true. This, unfortunately, is the single biggest stumbling block in talking about Gibson to cognitive psychologists, because one of the radical ideas in ecological psychology is that there isn't any need to invoke representations.

The most common counter argument comes from modern neuroscience (specifically, neuro-imaging, and in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)). There must be representations, your cognitive friend will cry - we've seen them via fMRI! If I present a stimulus to a person in a magnet, you can literally see the brain light up. Clearly, the triumphant cognitive type will claim, Gibson is wrong when he says there are no representations because the brain is obviously up to something.