Abstract
The radical embodied approach to cognition directs researchers’ attention to skilled practice in a structured environment. This means that the structures present in the environment, including structured interactions with others and with artifacts, are put at least on a par with individual cognitive processes in explaining behavior. Both ritualized interactive formats and artifacts can be seen as forms of “external memory,” usually shaped for a particular domain, that constrain skilled practice, perception, and cognition in online behavior and in learning and development. In this paper, we explore how a task involving the recognition of difficult sensory stimuli (wine) by collective systems (dyads) is modified by a domain-specific linguistic artifact (a sommelier card). We point to how using the card changes the way participants explore the stimuli individually, making it more consistent with culturally accrued sommelier know-how, as well as how it transforms the interaction between the participants, creating specific divisions of labor and novel relations. In our exploratory approach, we aim to integrate qualitative methods from anthropology and sociology with quantitative methods from psychology and the dynamical systems approach using both coded behavioral data and automatic movement analysis.
Highlights
In the ecological psychology approach, the forces shaping behaviors and skills are thought to belong to the structured environments and to individual adaptations and tunings to these environments, with both having equal importance
We argue that connecting these works more closely with the ecological psychology views on perception and action, especially with recent developments in the field regarding social affordances, is especially promising in making the picture more complete, resulting in concrete, sensible measures, and testable predictions
Drinking wine occurred more frequently in the “no card” condition (t = −5.61, df = 62.72, p < 0.001, padj < 0.001), drinking water was more frequent in the “no card” condition (t = −6.06, df = 76.45, p < 0.001, padj < 0.001), and smelling wine was more frequent in the “card” condition (t = 5.94, df = 62.79, p < 0.001, padj < 0.001)
Summary
In the ecological psychology approach, the forces shaping behaviors and skills are thought to belong to the structured environments and to individual adaptations and tunings to these environments, with both having equal importance. Recent developments in embodied, distributed, and situated cognition have changed this situation, resulting in a substantial body of integratory work (Hutchins, 1995, 2006; Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 2001; Fowler et al, 2008; De Jaegher et al, 2010; Cooke et al, 2013; Hasson and Frith, 2016; Fuchs, 2017; Di Paolo et al, 2018) Following and elaborating these approaches, we present a study in which we aimed to recognize the role of an element of the environment, a culturally constructed professional artifact, in shaping individual and collective behavior
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