embodied-cognition.
49 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-157 v2 | Roberts — Talkative AI and the fiction of artificial minds | If a substantial class of mental states (interoceptive, affective, perceptual, and bodily-agentive states such as effort, trying and ownership) depends on an animate body, then today’s disembodied chatbots lack them, and their many self-ascriptions of such states are “systematically untrue”. Roberts argues that users can nonetheless engage chatbots through make-believe, as a new kind of fictional character that is interactive, co-constructed, self-involving and blended with the real world. He argues that this fictionalist stance escapes the epistemic norms that bind realist belief. | Read |
| NOTE-180 v4 | Clark & Chalmers — The Extended Mind | The paper argues from a functionalist parity claim that a process or standing state which would count as cognitive if it happened in the head counts as cognitive when an external resource carries it, provided the resource is actively coupled to the organism here and now. Otto’s notebook entry is its example of such a standing belief. From this it infers, in one paragraph, that the self extends too. The four “criteria” for a coupled resource (constancy, direct availability, automatic endorsement, and the admittedly “arguable” past conscious endorsement) are offered as the features that make the paradigm case clear. The paper explicitly says they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. | Read |
| NOTE-331 | Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio — Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy | Ten controls and six ventromedial prefrontal patients play the four-deck gambling task while anticipatory skin-conductance responses (SCRs) and verbal reports are tracked. Every control and no patient develops anticipatory SCRs; three patients who can state the right strategy still choose badly. Controls prefer the good decks significantly only from the hunch period, and the pre-hunch SCR effect is a group-by-period interaction, not a deck difference, so “before knowing” is better supported for articulated strategy than for any awareness at all. | Read |
| NOTE-332 | Damasio — The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex | The somatic marker hypothesis as its author stated it in 1996. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores links between classes of situation and the body states that accompanied them; on recurrence it re-enacts those states, via the body or an “as if” loop, and the re-enacted state marks imagined option-outcome pairs as good or bad, overtly as a feeling or covertly as a bias, pruning the space reasoning must search. The evidence is summarised from earlier lesion and skin-conductance studies, without numbers. The mechanism is argued, not shown, and the paper says it is not a theory of prefrontal cortex as a whole. | Read |
| NOTE-343 | Rupert — Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition | Rupert separates extended cognition (HEC) from embedded cognition (HEMC) and from content externalism, then argues that HEC loses to HEMC on conservatism. LIT-097’s criteria give a dilemma: without past endorsement they overgenerate beliefs; with it the organism is privileged. Memory research (conversation, negative transfer, the generation effect, power laws) shows external stores are a different kind, and a generic kind spanning both does no explanatory work. | Read |
| NOTE-351 | Intelligence without representation | A methodological manifesto with working robots behind it. Brooks argues that AI should build complete autonomous Creatures incrementally and test them in the real world, and that intelligence should be decomposed into parallel activity-producing layers, each running from sensing to action, not into perception, central reasoning and action. His robots have no central representation or control, and their coherence exists “in the eye of an observer”, as in Minsky’s account of human behaviour. The evidence is three layers on one robot, described, not measured, and the broad hypothesis about representation is flagged as a hypothesis. | Read |
| NOTE-356 | Chalmers — Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness | Chalmers restates the 1998 extended-mind thesis as a claim about constitution through sensorimotor interaction, because the original statement is satisfied by wired-in “extended circuits” that the critics accept. He keeps the perception-action boundary as the strongest objection, and argues that consciousness does not extend because it needs information directly available for global control, and perception makes availability indirect. Both moves are proposed and defended against a few cases, not demonstrated. | Read |
| NOTE-363 | Clark — Intrinsic content, active memory and the extended mind | Clark defends LIT-097 against Adams and Aizawa’s intrinsic-content objection: the notion is unclear, silicon could carry it, and their own concession that not every cognitive state needs non-derived content lets a conventional encoding serve as a belief’s vehicle. Against the active-memory objection, he concedes the notebook is static and argues that how and when memory is updated is a difference below the level that matters. He closes on brains as open-ended controllers and persons as forensic, not biological, items. | Read |
| NOTE-368 | Adams & Aizawa — The bounds of cognition | Adams and Aizawa grant LIT-097’s parity sentence but deny that any actual case meets it. Cognition, they assume, needs non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal process. Otto’s inscriptions have only derived content, Otto’s retrieval uses vision and motor control that Inga’s does not, and coupling a process to its surroundings does not extend it. So cognition is brain-bound as a contingent fact, and human-plus-tool systems are too motley for a science. | Read |
| NOTE-369 | Chalmers — Foreword to Supersizing the Mind | Ten years after LIT-097, its co-author says the iPhone has made the thesis vivid, that the only principled objection is the perception-action boundary, and that the right reply is to let belief-ascription follow explanatory purpose, so that Otto’s belief is extended for some explanations and not others. Consciousness probably stays internal, because no twin case for it can be built. The thesis needs only a weak parity-style functionalism. | Read |
| NOTE-380 | Adams & Aizawa — Defending the Bounds of Cognition | A reply to a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge”. It names the coupling-constitution fallacy, coupled is not part of, and restates the 2001 marks of the cognitive. Against Clark’s Euler-circle case it separates how a diagram gets its meaning from how a mental image of it does. Against a “brain-tool science” it argues that tools are an open-ended motley. The fallacy is shown by one analogy, and the processing differences are asserted, not measured. | Read |
| NOTE-456 | Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition | An enactive account of social cognition built on coordination dynamics. When coordination and the encounter shape each other, the interaction gains its own precarious operational closure; it is social only if the interactors stay autonomous. Coordinated sense-making then ranges from one partner’s sense-making being modulated to meanings made jointly. Conceptual throughout; evidence is illustrative (corridor, charades, mother–infant timing, perceptual crossing). | Read |
| NOTE-458 | Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action | Minimal agency needs a self-individuated system that is the source of modulations of its coupling with the environment and regulates them by norms it generates. An autonomous organization, a precarious network of mutually enabling processes, generates all three when it adaptively modulates its coupling for its own maintenance. Life is sufficient, not necessary. The definition is a proposal: the authors say asymmetry’s formalization is incomplete and modeller-relative. | Read |
| NOTE-467 | The Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model: from matter to movement to mind | Kelso’s retrospective on HKB. The relative-phase equation dφ/dt = −a sin φ − 2b sin 2φ has stable in-phase and anti-phase states for b/a > 1/4 and only in-phase below; with noise the switch is a nonequilibrium phase transition with critical fluctuations and slowing. Symmetry breaking gives metastability (relative coordination); merged with Kuramoto it models groups. The same dynamics is reported within and between people and in brain activity. A first-person account, not a review. | Read |
| NOTE-719 v2 | Di Paolo — Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency | Autopoiesis, read as conservation, gives only an all-or-nothing norm that an observer can see and the system cannot use. Sense-making needs adaptivity in addition: a graded capacity to monitor and regulate tendencies toward the viability boundary, which yields good, neutral and bad ways of staying alive for the system itself. Agency is the regulation of coupling with the environment, not coupling itself. The argument is conceptual, with one footnoted model (the Chemoton), and the closing section on non-metabolic values is declared speculative. | Read |
| NOTE-720 v2 | Weber & Varela — Life after Kant | An argument, not a model: Kant’s natural purposes (§§ 64–65), Jonas’s metabolism and Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis converge on an intrinsic teleology, in which a self-producing system’s maintenance of its own identity is its purpose and the source of value for it. The boundary is in the definition (components “constitute the system as a distinguishable unity”), but no test tells a produced boundary from an imposed one, and a multicellular organism is said not to be autopoietic itself. Value is “objective” only relative to the organism, though one passage reaches a right to life. | Read |
| NOTE-727 | Rubin, Roli, Stano & Damiano — Genealogies of organizational closure | A conceptual genealogy of the notions of closure (closure to information, cyclic, operational, semantic, catalytic, metabolic, closure to efficient causation, closure of constraints) from mathematical logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition. Its thesis is that closure is best read as a circular organization of efficient causes by which a living system produces the conditions of its own existence. That is not feedback, self-organization or a catalytic cycle, and it cannot be exhaustively characterized as a state-determined syntactic procedure. Current AI, agentic LLM systems included, is said to approximate closure without instantiating it. The genealogy is historical; the non-computability and AI verdicts are asserted or argued from Rosen, not demonstrated. | Read |
| NOTE-826 | Turvey — Preliminaries to a theory of action | An essay, not a study. The executive cannot command muscles one by one, so acts are built from relatively autonomous coordinative structures, reflexes and their functional combinations, a term Turvey takes from Easton (1972). Higher levels specify equivalence classes of acceptable states and tune the parameters of these units, like the stiffness and rest length of a spring. The spinal cord is shown, by reflex probes, to be retuned before a voluntary movement, and optical information may set the tuning directly. | Read |
| NOTE-867 | Hutchins — How a cockpit remembers its speeds | In an MD-80 approach, the correspondence between airspeeds and wing configurations for the day’s landing weight is computed once, 25 to 30 minutes before landing, by selecting a printed speed card with the displayed gross weight, and is stored in the positions of movable bugs on both airspeed indicators; when the plane slows 10 to 15 minutes later, the needle’s approach to a bug cues each flap call by a judgment of spatial proximity. Hutchins argues that this memory belongs to the cockpit as a functional system and that speed bugs do not improve any pilot’s memory but replace a recall-and-scale-reading task with a perceptual one. The account is a stylized description of mandated procedure, informed by more than 100 observer flights and simulator recordings, with no measured performance, no comparison of crews with and without bugs, and no failure cases; the claim that the arrangement changes what the system can do is established by analysis of the tasks, not by data. | Read |
| NOTE-871 | Kirsh — The intelligent use of space | A classification, from video of cooks, assemblers and baggers, informal observation and the Tetris studies, of how people arrange things around them to cut the time and memory a task needs: arrangements that simplify choice (hide or highlight affordances, eliminate decisions, offload heuristic properties), arrangements that simplify perception (clustering, regions, marking, the vernier effect), and spatial dynamics that save internal computation (Tetris rotation, self-cueing). It frames the savings in search-complexity terms and links informational structuring to amortized computation in a footnote, but says the savings cannot in general be meaningfully quantified and offers no cost model, no measurements beyond the cited Tetris timings, and no case of an arrangement failing under a deadline. Its agents are experts arranging their own workspace in the medium and short term; long-term, pre-built environments are set aside. | Read |
| NOTE-872 | Kirsh — Adapting the environment instead of oneself | A conceptual paper. It models a task as a directed graph of states and actions with a cost metric on transitions, and classifies how an agent can improve its payoff by actions external to the task: pruning hard initial states, routine maintenance, scouting ahead, tools (which change the graph), and actions that make a space more “cognitively congenial” (which leave the graph intact and reduce mental operations). It names amortization once, as a parenthetical gloss on chimps leaving nut-cracking stones in place, and gives an investment rule for maintenance (future benefit against present cost times an “interest factor” for risk) in words only. There is no cost model with reuse frequency, retrieval cost or staleness; mental cost lies outside the graph, and the paper says there is “no general theory” of congeniality. The empirical figures are unpublished pilot results. | Read |
| NOTE-878 | Kirsh & Maglio — On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action | Kirsh and Maglio define an epistemic action as a physical action whose primary function is to reduce the space, time or unreliability of the agent’s own mental computation, and argue from Tetris keystroke data that players rotate and translate pieces for that reason: zoids are rotated more than plan-then-act would need, rotation starts within a few hundred milliseconds of a zoid appearing, and a translate-to-wall check is used more the higher the drop. The computational saving is argued, not measured: physical rotation of 90° takes as little as 100 ms against an estimated 800–1200 ms mentally (a three-player pilot), and fewer attentional probes and less working memory are needed. The trade is physical action in place of internal computation at the moment of use, not precomputation or caching; the paper explicitly sets it against caching and chunking accounts of skill, and mentions amortized complexity only in passing for everyday cases such as sorting bolts before assembly. It says the choice fits a Stigler-style cost–benefit model in outline but that such models fail in detail, because an epistemic action’s value depends on the particular internal computation it serves. | Read |
| NOTE-883 | Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook & Rao — Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition | At about a third of a second, the time scale of a saccade, the article models fixation as a pointer that binds a variable in a behavioural program to a place in the world, so that what is bound is only the task-relevant feature, fetched just before use. In a block-copying task subjects looked back at the model about 1.3 times per block on average, the commonest cycle being two looks per block (one apparently for colour, one for position), and chose this slowest, lowest-memory strategy (about 3 s a block, against about 1.5 s for copying from memory) though told to be fast; separating model and copy by 70° cut looks to 1.0 per block, and one-colour patterns that could be chunked cut them to 0.7. The authors read this as working memory having a “carrying cost” that exceeds the cost of re-acquiring from the world, but that cost is inferred from the choices and never measured or modelled, and the evidence is one task with small samples (seven subjects for the main data, three for the colour-change experiment) and no statistics reported in the article. What is left in the world is unprocessed input, not a computed result, and the article argues against precomputation where the needed products cannot be foreseen. | Read |
| NOTE-887 | Risko & Gilbert — Cognitive offloading | A short review that defines cognitive offloading as physical action that changes a task’s information-processing requirements to reduce cognitive demand, splits it into offloading onto the body and into the world, and proposes a metacognitive model: whether people offload is a strategy choice driven by their evaluation of internal versus extended strategies, which tracks objective internal demand but can be wrong, and offloading in turn changes both memory and those evaluations. The evidence is a handful of choice/no-choice studies, summarised qualitatively; the review reports no effect sizes and no formal account of costs. It names costs (memory for offloaded content, GPS-impaired spatial memory, photo-taking impairment, automation complacency and bias, skill decay, inflated self-knowledge, a self-reinforcing drift toward external reliance). It does not frame offloading as computation reused over time, and says nothing about how often an offloaded result is used. | Read |
| NOTE-960 | Friston et al. — action and behavior: a free-energy formulation | Existence is taken to require a low-entropy ensemble density; an ergodic assumption turns that entropy into time-averaged surprise, and because the setup stipulates that action is the only way an agent changes the hidden states it senses, action as well as perception must minimize a free-energy bound on surprise. Action enters nowhere in the generative model: it is a gradient descent that fulfils proprioceptive and visual predictions, and in simulations of eye, arm, mountain-car and Lorenz movements it cancels unexpected perturbations so they are not perceived. The paper fixes the model and re-samples the data, and answers the worry that this confirms a wrong model by appeal to existence: agents without the right priors cannot exist. | Read |
| NOTE-990 | Lush, Botan, Scott, Seth, Ward & Dienes — Trait phenomenological control and the rubber hand illusion | Hypnotisability predicted rubber hand illusion reports after both synchronous and asynchronous brushing (n = 353, about half a scale point per SWASH point, rs 0.26), a visual control item as well, and synchronous drift weakly (rs 0.11); it also predicted vicarious pain and mirror touch. The expectation manipulation failed and the pre-registered difference-score test was inconclusive, so the study shows that the standard controls do not exclude suggestion, not that the illusion is suggestion. | Read |
| NOTE-992 | Abdulkarim & Ehrsson — No causal link between hand position sense and limb ownership | A motor slid the hidden hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand during brushing, too slowly to be noticed. Pointing followed it by about 5–6 cm, but questionnaire ownership depended only on synchrony and not on where the hand was moved, in two experiments of 18. With the hand still, the classic synchronous drift and its correlation with the illusion reappeared. The authors conclude drift is not a cause of ownership; the null is from small samples within the illusion’s known spatial range. | Read |
| NOTE-993 | Kalckert & Ehrsson — Moving a rubber hand that feels like your own | A moving rubber hand illusion in which the participant’s hidden finger moves a model finger by a rod. Synchrony gave ownership, agency and drift toward the model; asynchrony removed all three. Passive movement removed agency and kept ownership and drift; a model hand rotated 180° removed ownership and drift and kept agency. The double dissociation is on questionnaires; agency was stronger, and tied to ownership, only when the hand was owned. | Read |
| NOTE-997 | Ehrsson et al. — No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | A reanalysis of Lush et al.’s (2020) open data, n = 353. The synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in rubber-hand illusion ratings is unrelated to hypnotisability (rho = -0.066, BF01 = 5.7), is significant in every hypnotisability quartile, and is not changed by explicit suggestions about which condition should work; the hypnotisability correlations Lush et al. report appear equally for the asynchronous condition and an “impossible” control item. The authors conclude the illusion is a perceptual one, “driven primarily by multisensory mechanisms”. The reply grants every number and disputes that the asynchronous condition controls for expectation. | Read |
| NOTE-998 | Hohwy & Paton — Explaining away the body | With a foreign arm seen exactly where one’s own arm lies, synchronous tapping raised ratings that the felt touch was produced on the seen arm, and after onset also that a finger hovering 5 cm away caused it or that it was caused on a cardboard box; the box gave no synchrony difference without prior onset. Samples of 9 to 13, single leading questions, no ownership item, no expectation measure, and a 0.13 °C cooling of the real hand in one comparison of four, significant only one-tailed. | Read |
| NOTE-1000 | Seth — Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | An opinion article that extends predictive coding to interoception. Felt emotion is the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals. Prediction errors are registered in the anterior insula, and are also cancelled by autonomic action under attenuated precision. The experience of body ownership is the same inference run over interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. The evidence is indirect and cited: insula anticipation and error responses, false cardiac feedback, interoceptive sensitivity predicting rubber-hand susceptibility, and a heartbeat-synchronous virtual hand owned more. No direct test is claimed. | Read |
| NOTE-1001 | Roseboom & Lush — Serious problems with interpreting rubber hand illusion experiments | Resampling 351 synchronous-condition reports from Lush et al. 2020 into 10,000 studies of 20, the authors find that samples from above the median of hypnotisability almost always “find” the rubber hand illusion, and samples from below it find agreement with the ownership statement about 4% of the time. The ownership result holds at n = 50; the result for the averaged statements is largely a matter of power. No asynchronous condition, drift or new data are analysed. | Read |
| NOTE-1002 | Blanke & Metzinger — Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood | Names minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), the simplest experience of being a self, and gives it three dimensions: global self-identification with the body, self-location, and a weak, geometrical first-person perspective. Part ownership (rubber hand, somatoparaphrenia) does not reach MPS; out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and full-body illusions do, varying it dimension by dimension. A passive multisensory sense of owning the whole body suffices, so agency is causally enabling but not constitutive. The necessity and sufficiency claims are asserted, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-1003 | Lush & Seth — Reply to: No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | The reply to Ehrsson et al. accepts their reanalyses and denies their reading: expectancies are higher for synchronous than asynchronous brushing, the difference does not vary with hypnotisability (b = -0.16, P = 0.072, B = 0.07), so a null relation between hypnotisability and the synchrony effect is what demand characteristics predict. Agreement with the ownership item rises with hypnotisability (b = 0.76 per SWASH point, rs = 0.27) and reaches minimal agreement only in the top 31%. Whether multisensory integration matters to RHI measures awaits experiments that control expectation. It shows that the suggestion control THEORY-765 accepts can be met without the confound being removed. | Read |
| NOTE-1004 | Longo et al. — What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | 131 people rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis found embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement and affect in both conditions and deafference after asynchrony only; embodiment split into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location crossed from negative to positive with synchrony and each predicted proprioceptive drift (1.34 cm against 0.30 cm); agency stayed negative. No control separates any of it from expectation. | Read |
| NOTE-1005 | Lush — Demand characteristics confound the rubber hand illusion | People told about the rubber hand procedure, but never put through it, expect the illusion statements more than the control statements and more under synchronous than asynchronous brushing (d = 1.40 and 1.05, n = 20), which is the pattern published reports show. So the field’s standard controls do not control for suggestion. The paper does not show that the illusion is suggestion, and says so. | Read |
| NOTE-1006 | Botvinick & Cohen — Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see | The founding report of the rubber hand illusion. Synchronous brushing of a seen rubber hand and the hidden real hand made ten subjects feel the touch at the rubber hand and feel it as their own; after 30 minutes, blind reaches drifted toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion lasted, and asynchronous brushing removed both effects. The authors read it as constraint satisfaction among vision, touch and proprioception, and conclude that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”. | Read |
| NOTE-1008 | Alsmith & Longo — Where exactly am I? | Ten adults pointed a rotating pointer “directly at” themselves, by hand blindfolded or by eye. Answers fell mostly on the upper face or the upper torso, and the pointer’s starting position, above or below, decided which. The authors conclude that the self is judged neither spread over the body nor at one point, and that the spatial concept of the self is “inherently ambiguous”. A pilot-sized study with a fifth of its trials lost and a misreported reanalysis; its start effect is also what a first-acceptable-stop strategy predicts. | Read |
| NOTE-1009 | Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst — Feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift do not go hand in hand | With robot stroking and a visual probe of felt finger position, drift toward a rubber hand was as large when the hand was only seen as under synchronous stroking (about 6 cm), and as large under asynchronous stroking interrupted every 10 s; only continuous asynchrony kept it near zero. Ownership by questionnaire needed synchrony. The authors conclude that drift is visuo-proprioceptive integration that asynchrony suppresses, separate from ownership, and not a proxy for it. Groups of ten; the vision-only ownership report is anecdotal. | Read |
| NOTE-1057 | Safron, Klimaj & Sheikhbahaee — IWMT and the Human Consciousness Hypothesis | A seven-page symposium paper that restates Integrated World Modeling Theory and says it agrees with the Human Consciousness Hypothesis of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. On IWMT, phenomenal consciousness is what it is like to be the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s generative world model, run either coupled to sense data (perception) or decoupled from it (imagination). Embodied grounding is required: integrated information or a global workspace without it does not suffice. Transformer language models are said to lack the recurrence, closure and embodiment needed. No new argument or data. | Read |
| NOTE-1065 | Ward — What is enactivism? | A conceptual paper. The usual taxonomy, which lumps every view stressing sensorimotor loops as “enactivism” and splits it into autopoietic, sensorimotor and radical variants, hides what is distinctive about The Embodied Mind. A second axis, organicist against informationalist, runs across the cognitivist–embodied one. Enactivism is organicist, and it adds the primacy of lived experience and a reciprocity in which scientific vocabularies reshape the experience they describe. Most embodied views, predictive processing among them, are informationalist. It argues for a taxonomy, not for enactivism’s truth. | Read |
| NOTE-1074 | Wacquant — A concise genealogy and anatomy of habitus | A short essay that takes habitus back to Aristotle’s hexis and to Bourdieu’s first use of it, for the misfit between dispositions and a changing world in Béarn and Algeria, and clears four misreadings: habitus is multilayered and revised in practice, not the replica of one structure; it need not be coherent; it suits crisis and change as well as reproduction; and it never generates action by itself, but only as triggered by positions in a social world. A conceptual clarification, not a finding; its empirical warrant is cited. | Read |
| NOTE-1082 | Radvansky et al. — Walking through doorways causes forgetting: further explorations | Three experiments. The doorway effect appeared with small monitors and in real rooms carrying a box of six objects, and returning to the room where the objects were picked up did not help: memory followed the number of rooms involved, worst after two new rooms. The authors attribute it to retrieval interference between event models that both contain the probed object, not to the loss of an encoding context. | Read |
| NOTE-1083 | Radvansky & Copeland — Walking through doorways causes forgetting | Two desktop virtual-reality experiments. With distance held equal, walking through a doorway rather than across a large room raised errors and slowed responses to a probe for the object being carried; memory for the object just set down was not affected. The authors read it as situation-model updating at a spatial shift. The effect rests on few no-shift trials (5 per condition), and the shift and no-shift rooms differed in size and wall pattern. | Read |
| NOTE-1092 | Penglase — The unspoken whiteness of Brazilian jiu-jitsu | An anthropologist’s argument, from secondary histories, Gracie family sources and a little ethnography, that the Gracies’ challenge matches against luta livre placed their jiu-jitsu in Brazil’s racial hierarchy as white, mostly through class, neighbourhood and employment rather than in words. Along the way it documents that the Gracies fought over the rules as well as under them, and that jiu-jitsu prospered while luta livre, poorer and darker, went underground; it then absorbed luta livre’s no-gi style until only the social difference remained. | Read |
| NOTE-1093 | Bigand et al. — The geometry of interpersonal synchrony in human dance | In 35 dyads of untrained dancers facing each other, shared music and visual contact were varied independently. Each raised interpersonal synchrony, in different principal movements and with no interaction: lateral and hand movements synchronized through seeing the partner, anteroposterior movements such as head bobs through the shared music, and vertical bounce through both. Which factor drove a movement’s synchrony could be read from its spatial direction (100% classification) and not from its periodicity. The direction of coupling between partners was not estimated. | Read |
| NOTE-1424 | Haken, Kelso & Bunz — A theoretical model of phase transitions in human hand movements | A theory paper. It takes relative phase as the order parameter of bimanual rhythmic movement and models the switch from anti-phase to in-phase at a critical frequency with φ̇ = −∂V/∂φ, V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ, anti-phase being lost when |b| < |a|/4. It derives that equation from two self-sustained oscillators whose coupling must be nonlinear, and shows the switch and hysteresis in one simulation. The data it models are Kelso’s earlier experiments, summarized, and critical fluctuations and slowing are left to future work. | Read |
| NOTE-1433 | Kelso, Scholz & Schöner — Critical fluctuations | As bimanual wrist or finger movement is paced faster, the standard deviation of relative phase grows as the anti-phase pattern nears its switch to in-phase, peaks in the transition (about 85° mean phase, near the 90° of a uniform spread), and falls once in-phase is reached; started in-phase, the same movement shows neither a switch nor that growth. The authors take this as critical fluctuations, a mark of a nonequilibrium phase transition. Critical slowing is predicted, not measured, and the evidence is shown for a few subjects without a test. | Read |
| NOTE-1449 | Kelso, Scholz & Schöner — Dynamics governs switching | Four people switched on cue between in-phase and anti-phase finger movement. Going from in-phase to anti-phase took about twice as long as the reverse at every frequency tested, with a longer-tailed distribution, significant for each subject. A stochastic HKB equation with the earlier experiments’ parameters plus a term pulling relative phase toward the intended pattern reproduces the asymmetry and the shapes, with one parameter set to the right order of magnitude: the less stable a pattern, the faster it is left. Loss of stability before spontaneous switches is cited, not shown. | Read |