An Ecological Approach to Language

Language is often held up as an example against the possibility of the radical (non-representational) psychology we advocate for. You might be able to explain perception-action without representations, people say, but we can't see how you'll ever be able to explain 'real cognition, like language' without them. It's finally time for us to begin chipping away at this criticism. In the next few posts I'll lay out a first draft of an embodied, ecological analysis of language use.

Psychologists usually assume that catching a fly ball and talking about catching fly balls are two different kinds of thing. I reject this assumption (it is just an assumption) and I am going to treat language use as the same kind of thing as other examples of embodied cognition. Treating language as just another instance of embodied cognition allows me to import the lessons learned from perception-action type tasks and apply these to language tasks. This will lead to very different questions about language use than are typical in the literature. The next post will describe what I mean by this in some detail.

Shared neural resources for throwing and language: a whacky idea for an experiment

For some time now, there has been an hypothesis floating around in evolutionary biology that the human capacity for language emerged, in part, from the development of our ability to throw long distances with high speed and accuracy. There are a few reasons to think this, mostly correlational, inferential kinds of reasons, but they are accumulating.

We were chatting one day about how to test this hypothesis a bit more directly, and we came up with a whacky experiment. We'd like advice from neuroscientists with experience in brain stimulation techniques about whether this sort of thing is feasible. We'd also like to brainstorm the logic of this experiment and see if we can come up with a practical design that stands a chance of finding something. We then need collaborators; I can handle the throwing side (analysis, measurement, etc) but we don't know anything about TMS and would need an expert on board.

There are many other reasons why this might fail, though - I still need to do a detailed lit review on the throwing/language references I have. Our main problem is that we don't know the kind of obvious difficulties in doing TMS in this kind of context. We'd like to assemble a) an experiment and b) a research team to do the experiment if we can get it to make sense, and if it works we will submit the hell out of this to Nature :)

Patient DF uses haptics, not intact visual perception-for-action to reach for objects

Before functional neuroimaging techniques like PET and fMRI became common, what we knew about which parts of the brain did what came from neuropsychology. This is the study of patients with specific injuries to the brain, and the basic logic of the field is that if you have a patient with a lesion in area A who can't do task 1, then area A is involved in performing task 1. It gets a little more complicated than this, as you search for double dissociations, etc, but this is essentially it.

A surprising amount of what we think we know about the brain comes from neuropsychology; famous case studies such as HM have informed theories of memory so that they include short and long term storage, which are separable, and so on. These case studies can have a profound effect on research; my favourite story, though, was about a memory researcher who had a skiing accident and temporarily developed retrograde amnesia - he couldn't remember anything except that there was this guy in Connecticut (HM) who couldn't remember things either!

I always enjoyed classes in neuropsychology; the case studies are always fascinating. But they are deeply limited in what they can actually tell us about the brain. First, they are typically single patient case studies, which restricts how general the conclusions are. Second, they are data from damaged brains; the fairly linear assumption that some localised function has been subtracted out is simply not true, and the damage will have had complex effects on distributed functional networks.Third, the damage is never straight-forward, because these almost all come from accidents or strokes (HM's surgery being a rare example of more detail being known). This has not stopped the field being very excited by these cases, though, and from basing a lot of theory on these patterns of deficits.

In movement research, the most famous neuropsychology case study is Patient DF She suffered bilateral damage along the ventral stream of visual processing (James et al, 2003). The effect was visual form agnosia: she is able to control her actions with respect to objects, but cannot describe or recognise these objects verbally. Crucially, her accident did not damage her parietal lobe; specifically, the dorsal stream of visual processing was left intact. These two streams are well defined anatomical pathways leading out of primary visual cortex, and were first described by Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982). DF's pattern of deficits led Mel Goodale and David Milner (Goodale & Milner, 1992) to suggest functional roles for these streams. The ventral stream, they suggested, was for perception - things like object and scene recognition. The dorsal stream, in contrast, was for perception-for-action, and used visual information for the online control of action. This perception-action hypothesis has been hugely dominant in the field, and the theory rests heavily on DF's shoulders.

Recently, Thomas Schenk (2012a) published some data which claims to show that DF's visually guided reaching is not normal if she doesn't have access to haptic feedback about the object. His data suggests that the only reason she succeeds at reaching while failing judgment tasks is that haptic information is only normally available in the former case. If correct, this is actually quite a shot across the bow of the perception vs perception-for-action work; naturally Goodale and Milner don't buy it, and have published a reply to which Schenk has then replied.

An invitation
I like seeing these arguments happen in the literature; but to be honest, the time scale is too slow. Schenk publishes, then Milner et al get to reply and Schenk gets right of reply to that. They may or may not iterate again and it's always left as 'we agree to disagree'. But these critiques have answers, and I think a blog comment feed might be the right place to work through the various cycles of suggestions and rebuttals until the obviously wrong things have been weeded out. It would also provide a place for other interested parties to weigh in. So if Schenk, Milner and Goodale (and anyone else!) feel like using the comments for this post or another made to purpose to bang around ideas until an obvious experiment or analysis pops out, please feel free!

Did language emerge from the neural systems supporting aimed throwing?

Aimed throwing is surprisingly uncommon in the animal kingdom. Humans do it par excellence, and otherwise it only shows up occasionally, even in our closest relatives. Chimpanzees will throw things (often faeces) but unlike humans don't throw things when hunting or trying to get food; when non-human animals throw things, it's usually part of a social encounter.

Throwing is a fascinating task for many reasons; I hope to blog some about the perception-action aspects of this task in the future as I prepare a couple of papers on the topic with my colleagues Qin Zhu and Geoff Bingham (who have previously done some excellent work on throwing to a maximum distance and the size-weight illusion; various papers available here). There are many fascinating questions about the perception of the affordances of throwing and distances to targets which we're starting to tackle empirically.

Biomechanically, throwing an object accurately over any distance requires the precise transmission of force from the large trunk muscles along a kinetic chain formed by the segments of the arm. The large trunk muscles generate forces the arm cannot, and this force is then transmitted by the motion of the arm; each segment weighs progressively less and so the force accelerates each one faster than the last. The end result is a hand moving at high speed. This requires careful timing; if the motion of the segments aren't coordinated carefully you will waste energy moving the limbs in ways that aren't helping the throw.

There has been some speculation for a while now that the neural mechanisms that help support this fine tuned coordination and control for throwing might also be just the kind of resources that could support the development of spoken language. Speech is a complex action that requires exquisite control over the coordination and timing of numerous elements, just like throwing. One hypothesis is that our ancestors began to develop the ability to throw long distances (this being favoured by natural selection processes because it enabled us to hunt and kill huge prey with much less physical risk to ourselves; e.g. Calvin, 1983). Evolution selected for neural resources that supported this activity, and this then opened the door to the possibility of complex spoken language. So do we speak the way we do because we throw the way we do?

A field spotter's guide to embodied cognition

I've spent quite a bit of time lately on the blog and Twitter talking about what embodied cognition is not. For example, it's not about moving through time (Miles et al, 2010), and it's not about leaning to the left (Eerland, Guadalupe & Zwaan, 2011). It is about finding new solutions to old problems by expanding the resources available to a perceiving-acting organism; for instance, allowing it to move so as to produce useful information, as in the outfielder problem (e.g. McBeath et al, 1995). Embodiment produces radically different solutions - for instance, instead of Asimo, you get Big Dog.

We still get asked about various new studies coming through; what about 'enclothed cognition' (Adam & Galinsky, 2012), is it embodied? (No). It occurred to me that it might be useful to lay out how I know when something isn't embodied cognition (the easy thing to spot) and when it is (a little harder).

Are babies super? Performance, competence and infant habituation

Are babies really more competent than we give them credit? (No.)

Developmental psychology is filled with studies that claim to show the hidden abilities of babies. The claim is that babies come pre-packaged with all kinds of knowledge and skills that provides them with the foot in the door they need to learn about the world. Babies are limited in their ability to demonstrate this knowledge, however, because of their immature bodies and inability to control these well. In the language of the field, there is hidden competence concealed by problems with performance, and researchers (such as Liz Spelke and Renee Baillargeon) are interested in finding ways to reveal this hidden competence.

At IU we referred to such studies as 'super baby' studies, because they purported to show that infants were remarkably competent and knowledgeable about the world. Besides the rampant dualism of 'mind' being concealed by 'body', these studies are good examples of a common problem (the psychologist's fallacy) in psychological research, one that a rigorous application of embodied cognition helps fix.

Newton International Fellowships

If you are looking for a post-doc opportunity in the UK, and are trained in perception, action or embodied cognition type research, then this is an excellent funding stream and we are both very interested in hearing from you to come and work in our labs. Please feel free to contact us if interested, and please spread the word to other interested parties!

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A new round of Newton International Fellowships - an initiative to fund research collaborations and improve links between UK and overseas researchers - has now opened.

The Newton International Fellowships are funded by the British Academy and the Royal Society and aim to attract the most promising early-career post-doctoral researchers from overseas in the fields of the humanities, the natural, physical and social sciences. The Fellowships enable researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution with the aim of fostering long-term international collaborations.

Newton Fellows will receive an allowance of £24,000 to cover subsistence and up to £8,000 to cover research expenses in each year of the Fellowship. A one-off relocation allowance of up to £2,000 is also available.

In addition, Newton Fellows may be eligible for follow-up funding of up to £6,000 per annum for up to 10 years following completion of the Fellowship to support activities which will help build long term links with the UK.

The scheme is open to post-doctoral (and equivalent) early-career researchers working outside the UK who do not hold UK citizenship.

Applications are to be made via the Royal Society’s online application system which is available at https://e-gap.royalsociety.org/ The closing date for applications is Monday 16 April 2012.

Further details are available from the Newton International Fellowships website: www.newtonfellowships.org