Teaching and Learning Guide for: Body in Mind: The Role of Embodied Cognition in Self‐Regulation

摘要

This guide accompanies the following article: Emily Balcetis and Shana Cole, ‘Body in Mind: The Role of Embodied Cognition in Self‐Regulation’, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3 (2009): 1–16, 10.1111/j.1751‐9004.2009.00197.x Author’s Introduction What is the mind and how does it work? This article summarizes a new perspective on these questions, suggesting that the physical body, in the environment, interacts with the mind to influence how we think. Seemingly effortful, deliberate, and intentional judgments and decisions, like whether we want to buy a Snickers or a Mars Bar candy bar, can change depending on whether we are nodding or shaking our heads. That is, judgments might actually be less a conscious choice and more a reaction to basic bodily systems than once supposed. Furthermore, this article suggests that the influences of body states on judgment processes may serve an important purpose, and that is to provide information to help people accomplish their goals. The influence of the body on the mind might be one tool to aid the self‐regulation system. As Andy Clark (2001) advanced, the mind is not naked but is instead clothed in the actions of the body and the environment. People do not think any thought, reach any haphazard judgment, form any random conclusion, but instead, as touted by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999), our minds think only what our embodied minds allow. This article serves as an introduction to a debate in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience regarding the mind. Is cognition a separate system unto itself? Do perceptual, cognitive, and action systems interact to influence each other? Authors Recommend On Embodiment Theory Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension . New York: Oxford University Press. In Supersizing the Mind , Clark argues that our thinking is not located only in our heads but that some, if not most, types of cognition cross the boundaries of brain, body and world. The world and objects in the world are all extensions of the mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human‐computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind suggests a conception of mind that is extended rather than brain‐bound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason. Spivey, M. J. (2007). The Continuity of Mind . New York: Oxford University Press. The Continuity of Mind argues that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day’s events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time. This book argues that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time. It presents a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. These seemingly separate mental constructs turn out to be fuzzy graded transitions of the same process. This book presents behavioral and neurophysiological evidence that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, and visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. It discusses what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. While the traditional information‐processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach, this book argues for a dynamical‐systems perspective on mental activity. Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review , 9, 625–636. This article distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims of embodied cognition: (