lecture 3- Embodiment

Question 1

experimental observations: how do you feel?

Answer 1

• While adopting either a ‘conventional’ working posture or one of two so-called ‘ergonomic’ postures - in which the back
  was straight and the shoulders were held high and back, or in which the shoulders and head were slumped - experimental participants learned that they had succeeded on an
  achievement test completed earlier.
• Those who received the good news in the slumped posture felt less proud and reported being in a worse mood than participants in the upright or working posture. Stepper & Strack (1993)

Question 2

experimental observations: Valence and movement

Answer 2

• Images that typically evoke emotionally positive and negative responses were presented on a computer screen. Experimental participants were asked to indicate when a picture appeared by quickly moving a lever. Some participants were instructed to push a lever away from their body, whereas others were instructed to pull
  a lever toward their body.
• Participants who pushed the lever away responded to negative images faster than to positive images, whereas participants who pulled the lever toward themselves responded faster to positive images.
  Duckworth et al. (2002)

Question 3

experimental observations: is that a decent pen?

Answer 3

• Under the guise of studying the quality of different headphones, participants were induced either to nod in agreement or to shake their heads in disagreement with statements. While they were “testing” their headphones with one of these two movements, the experimenter placed a pen
  on the table in front of them. Later, a different experimenter offered the participants the pen that had been placed on the table earlier or a novel pen.
• Individuals who were nodding their heads preferred the old pen, whereas participants who had been shaking their heads preferred the new one.
  Tom et al. (1991)

Question 4

experimental observations: is that a nice symbol?

Answer 4

• Novel Chinese idiograms presented during arm flexion
  (i.e., an action associated with approach) were
  subsequently evaluated more favourably than idiograms
  presented during arm extension (i.e., an action
  associated with avoidance).
  Cacioppo et al. (1993)

Question 5

A Digression:
The Mind-Body Problem

Answer 5

• Dualism

body: works like a machine (obeys laws of physics)

mind: non-material (functions mysteriously)

Problem - how can the mind influence the body (and vice versa)?

as it turns out, very easily!

Question 6

what is the nature of knowledge?

Answer 6

it is generally agreed that the processing of any mental content, including social information, involves internal symbols of sort (i.e., mental representations - symbolic
processing, computational processing).

Question 7

what are these representations?

Answer 7

How do representations derive their meaning (i.e.,
symbol grounding problem - Harnard, 2003)?
Amodal vs. Modal Architectures

Question 8

Amodal Architectures

Answer 8

• mind as computer metaphor
  hardware vs. software (Block, 1995)
  body vs. mind (independent)
• high-level cognitive operations (inference,
  categorization, memory) are performed using abstract, amodal symbols that bear arbitrary relations to the perceptual states that produce them (Newell & Simon, 1972).
• knowledge is abstract and amodal - symbols may represent any ideational content irrespective of which sensory modality was involved in its perception.

Question 9

An Amodal Dog

Answer 9

• Sensory-Motor Information (modality specific systems) what do dogs look like?
  what sounds do dogs make? how do dogs smell? how do dogs move? etc
• multi-sensory information transformed into amodal symbolic representation
• mental operations (e.g., thinking) are then undertaken on these amodal representations

Question 10

An Amodal Person:
Knowledge Accumulation

Answer 10

• When interacting with a person, amodal symbols redescribe the experienced perceptions, actions, and introspections to establish a conceptual representation
  of the interaction in long-term memory.
• As our knowledge grows, the underlying amodal systems become organized into structures that represent concepts (e.g., schemas) extracted from experience.
• Amodal redescriptions of social experience constitute social knowledge.

Question 11

Amodal Architectures:
Some Problems

Answer 11

• What exactly is the redescription process that produces amodal symbols from modality-specific (e.g., perception, action) states?no evidence exists for such a process in the brain
• There is no compelling evidence that the brain contains amodal symbols.
• The amodal symbol account is at odds with the available empirical evidence

Question 12

Embodied Architectures

Answer 12

• Researchers have recently adopted the notion that knowledge is embodied or grounded in bodily states and in the brain’s modality-specific systems (Barsalou, 1999).
• The basic idea underlying theories of embodied cognition is that cognitive representations and operations are grounded in their physical context. Rather than relying on amodal abstractions that exist independently of their physical instantiation, cognition relies on the brain’s modality-specific systems and on actual bodily states.
• Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS - Barsalou, 1999)

Question 13

Perceptual Symbol Systems:
Barsalou (1999)

Answer 13

• modality-specific states that represent perception, action and introspection in on-line situations are also used to represent these situations in the off-line processing that underlies memory, language and thought.
• rather than using amodal redescriptions of on-line modality- specific states to represent situations, the cognitive system uses

reenactments (simulations) of them instead.
* the key notion of PSS is that simulations of perceptual, motor, and introspective experience underlie the representation and
processing of knowledge.

• reenactment (simulation) of processing operations in modality-specific systems (i.e., think about a dog).

Question 14

Evidence for Embodied Social Cognition

Answer 14

• Attitudes
• Social Perception
• Emotion
• On-line/off-line embodiment

Question 15

Embodiment of Attitudes

Answer 15

• Darwin (1904) defined an attitude as a
  collection of motor behaviours -
  especially posture - that convey an
  organism’s response toward an object.
• body involved in attitudinal processing

Question 16

(On-Line) Embodiment of Attitudes

Answer 16

• Participants instructed to nod or shake their
  heads while wearing headphones, under the
  pretext that the research was designed to
  investigate whether the headphones slipped off while the listeners moved to music.

While nodding or shaking, participants heard
either an agreeable or disagreeable message
about a university-related topic. Later they rated how much they agreed with the message.

Movements modulated judgments (nod = agree with message, shake = disagree with message).
Wells & Petty (1980)

Question 17

(Off-Line) Embodiment of Attitudes cont

Answer 17

• Participants generated the names of famous
  people and later classified the individuals
  according to whether they liked, disliked, or
  were neutral about them. During the name
  generation task, participants either pulled up on the table in front of them from underneath its bottom surface (an approach behaviour) or pushed down on its top surface (an avoidance behaviour).

Participants who performed the ‘approach’
behaviour during name generation retrieved
more names of people they liked, whereas those who performed the ‘avoidance’ action retrieved more names of people they disliked.
Förster & Strack (1997, 1998)

Question 18

(On-Line) Embodiment of Social Perception

Answer 18

• Neonates imitate basic facial gestures such as tongue protrusion and mouth opening.
  Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1989)
• synchrony, behavioural cordination
  speech rate accent syntax walking speed
• Facilitates rapport and harmony (LaFrance,
  1985)

Question 19

(Off-Line) Embodiment of Social Perception cont

Answer 19

• Embodiment of social perception when targets are not present. Category priming (e.g., grey, Florida, bingo) and subsequent walking speed.

Participants walked more slowly when primed
with elderly stereotype.
Bargh et al. (1996)

Question 20

(Off-Line) Embodiment of Social Perception cont

Answer 20

• Participants formed impressions of people with whom they might later work on a problem- solving task. Some of these people were competent while others were incompetent. Facial EMG was measured.

Participants were more likely to display positive facial reactions when their imagined partners were competent rather than incompetent.
Vanman et al. (1997)

Question 21

(On-Line) Embodiment of Emotion

Answer 21

• Researchers told participants that they were studying adaptations for people who had lost the use of their hands. Such individuals would need to use their mouths to hold pencils for writing, or to use a television remote. The study was to assess whether the unpleasantness or difficulty of these tasks affected people’s responsiveness.
• The participants then held a pencil in their teeth (which naturally activates the muscles typically used for smiling) or lips (which does not activate those muscles) and then rated several cartoons for funniness. Those who were (unknowingly) “smiling” rated the
  cartoons as funnier than people who were not smiling.

Strack et al. (1988)

Question 22

Embodiment of Social Perception (On-line):
Additional Findings

Answer 22

• Prior to an impression-formation task,
  participants were required to hold (during a brief elevator journey) a cup of hot or iced coffee. Afterwards, they gave their impressions of a stranger.
• Participants considered the target to have more favourable traits (e.g., generous, caring) when they previously held the hot rather than cold cup.
• warmth, nurturing
  Williams and Bargh (2008)

Question 23

Embodiment of Social Perception (Off-line):
Recent Findings

Answer 23

• Prior to an impression-formation task,
  participants were required to imagine holding a cup of hot or iced coffee (from a first- or third- person perspective). Afterwards, they gave their impressions of a hypothetical stranger.
• Participants considered the target to have more favourable traits when they previously imagined holding hot rather than iced coffee – but only from a first-person perspective.
  Macrae et al. (2013)

Question 24

pain in the brain

Answer 24

• imagined pain (Jackson et al., 2005)
  AI - interoception (Craig, 2009)
• guided mental imagery
  stub toe, slam hand in door etc
• manipulate visual perspective (within
  subjects)
  actor (1PP) vs. observer (3PP)

Question 25

Emotion Recognition

Answer 25

* Recognizing a facial expression of emotion in another person and experiencing that emotion oneself involve overlapping neural structures. * Understanding other minds via simulation (mirror neurons) – body-based simulation (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004).

Question 26

that stinks

Answer 26

* Participants were required to sniff odors that generated feelings of disgust. The same participants then watched videos of other individuals expressing disgust. Results showed that areas of the anterior insula were activated both when individuals observed disgust in others and when they experienced disgust themselves. * Mirroring Wicker et al. (2003)

Question 27

Some Closing Examples: Grounding Abstract Thought In Concrete Experience

Answer 27

* thinking about the future caused participants to lean slightly forwards while thinking about the past caused them to lean slightly back (i.e., future is ahead, see Miles et al., 2010). * squeezing a soft ball prompted participants to perceive gender neutral faces as female while squeezing a hard ball influenced them to perceive the faces as male (i.e., female is soft, see Slepian et al., 2011). * participants who held heavier clipboards judged currencies to be more valuable and their opinions to be more important (i.e., important is heavy, see Jostmann et al., 2008). * participants asked to think about a moral transgression, like adultery or cheating on a test, were more likely to request an antiseptic wipe after the experiment than those who had thought about a good deed (i.e., morality is purity, see Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006).

Question 28

Washing Away Your Sins Embodiment and Moral Purity

Answer 28

* Zhong & Liljenquist (2006) - Lady Macbeth Effect are physical and moral purity interchangeable? Participants were asked to describe an unethical deed from their past and were then given the option of cleaning their hands with an antiseptic wipe. Afterwards, participants who had chosen to clean their hands were less likely to volunteer their time to help a desperate student with their research. They were also less likely to express feelings of guilt, regret and shame in a survey. physical cleansing restores our moral self image. * abstract thought grounded in concrete experience (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).

Question 29

Weight and Importance Jostmann et al. (2009)

Answer 29

* How many Euros does it take to buy 100 Japanese Yen? * Participants holding a heavy clipboard increased the monetary value of foreign currency compared to those holding a light clipboard. * Embodiment of importance. metaphoric cognition abstract to concrete

Question 30

But Are These Effects Real?

Answer 30

* large effects, small samples * high powered replications (OSF) power poses (Garrison et al., 2016) warm/cold showers (Donnellan et al., 2015) facial feedback (Wagenmakers et al., 2016) moral transgressions/cleanliness (Johnson et al., 2014) priming elderly (Doyen et al., 2012)