- Psychology and associated theories have played a role in learning and education through the years. It's important to understand how embodied cognition which is one of the newest theories in psychology might impact learning theories. - Embodied cognition argues that there is a stronger link between the body and the mind and that our lived experiences and adaptations to our environment creates a structural coupling and pathways that constrain us in certain ways. 'All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing'. - Cognition is a very circular process as evident by human's being capability of metacognition and our ability to discover our own unknowns and to determine our certainties. - Cognitivism generally sees the brain as a black box where computation happens and some processes are encoded. Embodied cognitivism challenges this in a few different ways: - Body mind dualism - Cognitivists separate out the mind and body and feel that cognition is like a program that can run on different brains. - Amodal symbols - Cognitivists believe that the neural activity we have in our brain are just symbols that represent a particular thought. They don't believe that there is an intrinsic connection between the content of the mind and the neurons themselves. - Poverty of stimulus - Cognitivists believe that the stimulation that we encounter is not sufficient and that we require layers of computation to make sense of it. - The main idea behind embodied cognitivism is that the mind and body are intertwined and that the body plays a role in cognitive processing. It's not quite clear how the connection happens. - There's an interesting experiment conducted by Glenberg et.al in 2008 that gives a good example of this. They asked subjects to move 600 beans from a wide mouthed to a narrow mouthed jar. They gave two different cases one where the wide mouthed was near and the narrow mouthed was far and the other vice versa. Following this they gave subjects some sentences (the sentences involved similar actions like "You deal Venkatesh the cards") that either made sense or nonsense. It was fascinating that subjects in each case processed the sentences at different speeds. This only makes sense from an embodied cognition perspective. Glenberg explains this as how repeatedly performing the action might have fatigued or activated a certain part of the brain so when comprehending sentences it played a role. If this explanation is accurate it also really proves that our brain doesn't have amodal symbols and that the parts of the brain comprehending the words are connected to the ones performing the action. - Pulvermüller in 2005 showed something similar. Reading a sentence about kicking a ball will activate areas of the brain that actually involve kicking a ball. - Embodied cognitivism makes a lot more sense when you consider some real world examples. When you consider a someone catching a ball that's gone really high the cognitivist assumes that the stimulus of the vision is not enough and that there are advanced calculations happening in the brain. But the embodied approach means that the catcher moves until the ball is not curved but rising in a straight line. This likely makes a lot more sense since it reduces the cognitive load necessary. - Similarly when we consider why a toddler might look under the same cup for a toy even after it's moved to a different cup. The cognitivist attributes this to a mismatch in object representation but the embodiment explanation favours the relation between the body and the mind and considers the mass of the arms, the distance between the infant and the toy etc. - When it comes to learning embodied cognition denies that learning is dependent on establishment of a complex set of symbolic rules that are decontextualised from sensory experiences. On the contrary embodied cognitivists believe that learning is contingent upon the cognitive activity that is triggered by the environment. - Embodied cognitivists don't just value experiential and first hand learning but they feel that there needs to be both first hand as well as second hand knowledge. - Gestures also offer insights into embodiment of cognition. Church and Goldin-Meadow have conducted numerous experiments on gestures. They found in 1986 that children whose gestures mismatched with what they were saying also tended to be those who were able to appreciate that the amount of water in a tall thin glass and a short wide glass is the same. They noted that gesture and speech mismatch measurements could give insights into the brain and the learning state the child is in. - The paper recommends that we notice gestures more actively while teaching particularly when there are mismatches. The paper also recommends that we use more gestures while teaching and encourage learners to produce gestures of their own or imitate gestures. - Walkington in 2014 also conducted a really cool study where they asked students to prove that the sum of the lengths of two sides of a triangle is always greater than the length of the third side. He found that those who used dynamic gestures were able to prove 63.6% of the time while those who neither used gestures or a pen and paper only provided the correct proof 11.5% of the time. Students who used static depictive gestures were able to get it right 34.3% of the time. ----- |Shapiro, Lawrence, and Steven A. Stolz. "Embodied cognition and its significance for education." _Theory and Research in Education_ 17.1 (2019): 19-39. ||APA|| - [Link](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/1477878518822149)