Plenary Speakers

Daniel D. Hutto (Wollongong University, Australia)

Educating Enactive Minds 

Abstract

Mainstream cognitivism sponsors a vision of mind that, in line with a venerable tradition, construes cognition as essentially representational, computational, and wholly brain-based in character. As such, the embodied activity of organisms and their histories of development and interaction with their environments are seen, at most, as shaping but not constituting cognition. Newly articulated embodied and enactive approaches to mind and cognition challenge foundational cognitivist assumptions and offer powerful alternative conceptions of the nature and reach of minds. This presentation offers reasons to favour that alternative conception, and thus for thinking that mind and cognition are best conceived of as being extensively world-involving and dynamically interactive in character. Against this backdrop, this presentation assesses potential links between theory and practice – focusing on Shapiro and Stolz’s (2019) claim that, “the emerging research agenda of embodied cognition has much to offer educational practitioners, researchers, and/or policy-makers” (p. 34). Specifically, it focuses on the implications that more and less radical versions of enactive and embodied conceptions of mind could have for thinking afresh about educational practice.

Brief Biography

Daniel D. Hutto is Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology and Head of the School of Liberal Arts at the University of Wollongong. He serves on the Australian Research Council College of Expertise and conducts peer reviews for national grant awarding bodies worldwide. He is co-author of the award-winning Radicalizing Enactivism (MIT, 2013) and its sequel, Evolving Enactivism (MIT, 2017). His other books include: Folk Psychological Narratives (MIT, 2008) and Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy (Palgrave, 2006). He is editor of Narrative and Understanding Persons (CUP, 2007) and Narrative and Folk Psychology (Imprint Academic, 2009). A special yearbook,Radical Enactivism, focuses on his philosophy of intentionality, phenomenology, and narrative. He is regularly invited to speak internationally, not only at philosophy conferences but at expert meetings of anthropologists, clinicians, educationalists, narratologists, neuroscientists, and psychologists.

 Cristine Legare (University of Texas at Austin, United States)

 The Development and Diversity of Cumulative Cultural Learning

Abstract

In her talk, Dr. Legare will use a cross-cultural perspective and draw from work in developmental and cognitive science, anthropology, and comparative education to address how cumulative cultural learning across multiple generations is the product of universal processes of embodied learning, which vary in kind and frequency based on the particular cultural ecology that the child inhabits. She will present evidence that these universal learning processes are shaped by values and socialization practices associated with educational institutions and systems of knowledge. The processes by which children acquire and transmit the culture of their communities provide unique insight into the cognitive foundations of cumulative cultural transmission—the cornerstone of human cultural diversity.

Brief Biography

Cristine Legare is a Professor of Psychology and the Founder and Director of the Center for Applied Cognitive Science at The University of Texas at Austin. An author of more than 100 articles, her research examines how the human mind enables us to learn, create, and transmit culture. Dr. Legare’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation, among other agencies. Dr. Legare is the recipient of the 2015 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions (2015) and the APA Boyd McCandless Award (2016) for her research on the evolution and ontogeny of cognition and culture.

 Blandine Bril (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France)

Culture as Rhythm: Bodies, Artifacts, and the Emergent Coordination of Enacted Practice

Abstract

Adaptive behavior may be defined as an expression of the functional coupling between the organism as a whole and the multiple facets of the environment. Rhythmic activities, from walking to drumming, hammering to swimming, so common in everyday life, act as good instances of motor actions to grasp how multiple factors give rise complexly to a well-organized behavior. Looking at walking, for instance, the anatomical parameters of the body, the value of gravity (gait would be considerably different on the moon), as well as the walking surface are all determinant internal and external factors to movement coordination. In line with this approach, hammering action depends not only on gravity and body characteristics but also on the weight and shape of the hammer as well as on features of the object to be hit. 

Based on a few examples taken from the incredible diversity of real-life skills, and more specifically on instrumental goal-directed actions, I’ll defend a functional view of motor skill regarded as the analysis of how the actor satisfies the constraints of the task to be achieved. Along this line, the multiple factors involved are viewed as prompting and “dictating” the actual actor behavior. Such a “bottom-up” view should benefit a better understanding of what kind of knowledge is involved in motor skills and ultimately in the learning process.  

I’ll conclude by highlighting a need to develop naturalistic experimental paradigms and devote more attention to how people in different (cultural) contexts have developed various ways of solving akin motor problems.

Brief Biography

Blandine Bril, is Directeure d’études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (recently retired). At the borderline between Psychology and Anthropology she conducts analyses of enculturation processes as emergent coordination dynamics among humans collectively engaging artifacts in purposeful activities and more specifically tool-use. The research program is to foreground non-linguistic aspects of cultural transmission. The construct of fields of promoted action (developed with Edward Reed) theorizes development and learning as dynamical attuning to cultural features of the physical ecology wherein individuals are enculturated through figuring out how to move in new ways that accomplish perceived tasks. She has done field work in Mali and India and developed experimental field methodology that constitutes a compromise between laboratory experimentation and the observation of daily life situations.

 Catherine S. Tamis–LeMonda (NYU, United States)

 Feedback Loops in Learning: Infants’ Activities & Behaviors in Everyday Settings

Abstract

Developmental science is rife with theoretical separation. And perspectives on infant learning and development are especially siloed. Infant scientist or socially-scaffolded learner? Top-down or bottom-up learning? Impoverished or rich environment? Domain-general or domain-specific mechanisms? Cognition in the mind or cognition in the body? And the list goes on. Fortunately, developmental science continues to move away from its longstanding tradition of separation to a growing emphasis on integration and coordination among developing systems—as reflected in embodied and embedded perspectives of learning. A focus on embodied learning rejects the split between mind and body that has reified the disciplinary boundary between cognitive and perception-action accounts of development (for example)—and consequently challenges the assumption that a transition from sensorimotor activities to abstract thought is the hallmark of cognitive development. Likewise, a focus on embedded learning rejects separation of the body from the social and physical world in which humans and animals interact and grow—and consequently challenges the assumption that highly controlled experiments in sterile environments are the gold standard for uncovering learning mechanisms. In this talk, I illustrate the nature of embodied and embedded learning by drawing on examples of infant locomotion, object play, and language interactions in the everyday home environment. I show that learning is embodied in that infants’ behaviors and social experiences are inextricably bound to what infants’ bodies can do at any given moment during specific activities in specific locations with specific cultural artifacts. In turn, infants’ moment-to-moment interactions with the people, objects, and places of their environment instigate perceptual and social feedback loops that support learning across domains. Finally, I illustrate that an embodied and embedded perspective of learning applies to concepts traditionally considered to be highly “abstract”, such as the learning of words that refer to number and space. I close by underscoring the importance of observing infants’ and caregivers’ unconstrained behaviors in everyday settings as a window into the sensory actions and inputs that shape cognitive development in the “here and now”.

Brief Biography

Dr. Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda is a Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University.  An author of more than 200 articles and chapters, she is widely known for her work on play, language, culture and development, developmental cascades, and parenting in fathers and mothers.  She is past President of the International Congress of Infant Studies, past Associate Editor of the journals Infancy, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development, and author of the recent text, Child Development: Context, Culture and Cascades, among other volumes. Dr. Tamis-LeMonda’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.  She is currently co-leading (with K. Adolph) a large NIH multi-site project on play and learning across the first year (PLAY).

 Anna Shvarts  (Utrecht University, Netherlands)

Embodying Culture, Enculturating Bodies: A Case of Teaching and Learning Mathematics

Abstract

The embodied turn in cognitive science problematizes the traditional notion of cultural knowledge transmission and questions the ontological nature of abstract concepts as mental representations. A functional dynamic systems perspective—theoretically rooted in works by Lev Vygotsky and Nikolai Bernstein and empirically grounded in episodes of teaching and learning mathematics—provides a fundamental alternative to information-processing perspectives on cognition and learning. Mathematical concepts are theorized as systems of cultural artifacts-in-action re-invented in intercorporeal collaboration with cultural agents. Empirical examples through the lens of (dual) eye-tracking illustrate how new cultural forms of actions and perceptions are actively re-discovered and yet socially scaffolded within a teacher–learner intercorporeal system.

Brief Biography

Anna Shvarts is an Assistant Professor at the Freudenthal Institute for Mathematics and Science Education, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She combines cultural-historical and radical embodied perspectives in investigating teaching and learning processes. Using dual eye-tracking technology and embodied design environments, Dr. Shvarts strives to understand cognitive and intercorporeal processes that allow different people to perceive and conceptualize the world in a similar way. Her focus on mathematics education is determined by the challenge that abstract mathematics presents for radical embodied cognitive science. Her educational designs can be found at https://embodieddesign.sites.uu.nl/