9 resultados para embodied knowledges
em Aston University Research Archive
Resumo:
This research, based on qualitative interviews and non-participant observation, emerges from a larger study investigating what factors influence the ‘contraceptive careers’ of British women in their 30s. The women informants recognized that contraceptive products often impacted on their health, but viewed them as distinct from ‘medical matters’. Rather than doctors being seen as having expertise, it was women health professionals, be they nurses, midwives, health visitors or doctors, who were perceived as the ones who ‘know’ about contraception, through an assumption that they are contraception users.This embodied knowledge is valued by the women above their formal medical training. I will also show how general practice surgeries and family planning clinics were viewed as gendered spaces, which altered the expectations and experiences of the women during contraceptive consultations. This study found that as ‘real’ expertise over contraception stems from embodied rather than textual knowledge, the women’s choices were grounded by a gendered sense of trust.
Resumo:
One field study and five experiments show that seemingly irrelevant bodily actions influence consumer behavior. These studies demonstrate that arm flexion (in which the motor action is directed toward the self) versus arm extension (in which the motor action is directed away from the self) influences purchase behavior, product preferences, and economic decisions. More specifically, arm flexion increases the likelihood of purchasing vice products (Study 1a), leads to a preference for vices over virtues (Studies 1b and 2a), and leads to preference for smaller, sooner over larger, later monetary rewards (Studies 2b, 3, and 4). The authors argue that arm flexion induces present-biased preferences through activation of approach motivation. The effect of bodily actions on present-biased preferences is regulated by the behavioral approach system (Studies 3 and 4) and relies on the learned association between arm flexion and activation of this approach system (Study 4). The authors discuss implications for Intertemporal decision making, embodied cognition, and marketing practice. © 2011, American Marketing Association.
Resumo:
We investigated the effect of posture congruence on social perception. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that completing "body gestalts," rather than being a purely visual process, is mediated by congruence in the postures of observer and stimulus. We developed novel stimuli showing a face and 2 hands that could be combined in various ways to form "body gestalts" implying different postures. In 3 experiments we found that imitative finger movements were consistently faster when the observer's posture matched the posture implied by the configuration of face and hands shown onscreen, suggesting that participants intuitively used their own body schema to "fill in the gaps" in the stimuli. Besides shaping how humans perceive others' bodies, embodied body-gestalt (eBG) completion may be an essential social and survival mechanism, for example, allowing for quick recovery from deceptive actions. It may also partly explain why humans subconsciously align themselves in everyday interactions: This might facilitate optimal corepresentation at higher, conscious levels. © 2012 American Psychological Association.
Resumo:
It has been argued that hallucinations which appear to involve shifts in egocentric perspective (e.g., the out-of-body experience, OBE) reflect specific biases in exocentric perspective-taking processes. Via a newly devised perspective-taking task, we examined whether such biases in perspective-taking were present in relation to specific dissociative anomalous body experiences (ABE) - namely the OBE. Participants also completed the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS; Sierra and Berrios, 2000) which provided measures of additional embodied ABE (unreality of self) and measures of derealization (unreality of surroundings). There were no reliable differences in the level of ABE, emotional numbing, and anomalies in sensory recall reported between the OBE and control group as measured by the corresponding CDS subscales. In contrast, the OBE group did provide significantly elevated measures of derealization ("alienation from surroundings" CDS subscale) relative to the control group. At the same time we also found that the OBE group was significantly more efficient at completing all aspects of the perspective-taking task relative to controls. Collectively, the current findings support fractionating the typically unitary notion of dissociation by proposing a distinction between embodied dissociative experiences and disembodied dissociative experiences - with only the latter being associated with exocentric perspective-taking mechanisms. Our findings - obtained with an ecologically valid task and a homogeneous OBE group - also call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between OBEs and perspective-taking in terms of facilitated disembodied experiences. © 2013 Braithwaite, James, Dewe, Takahashi, Medford and Kessler.
Resumo:
TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. © 2013 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
Resumo:
We re-analysed visuo-spatial perspective taking data from Kessler and Thomson (2010) plus a previously unpublished pilot with respect to individual- and sex differences in embodied processing (defined as body-posture congruence effects). We found that so-called 'systemisers' (males/low-social-skills) showed weaker embodiment than so-called 'embodiers' (females/high-social-skills). We conclude that 'systemisers' either have difficulties with embodied processing or, alternatively, they have a strategic advantage in selecting different mechanisms or the appropriate level of embodiment. In contrast, 'embodiers' have an advantageous strategy of "deep" embodied processing reflecting their urge to empathise or, alternatively, less flexibility in fine-tuning the involvement of bodily representations. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
Resumo:
Humans are able to mentally adopt the spatial perspective of others and understand the world from their point of view. We propose that spatial perspective taking (SPT) could have developed from the physical alignment of perspectives. This would support the notion that others have put forward claiming that SPT is an embodied cognitive process. We investigated this issue by contrasting several accounts in terms of the assumed processes and the nature of the embodiment. In a series of four experiments we found substantial evidence that the transformations during SPT comprise large parts of the body schema, which we did not observe for object rotation. We further conclude that the embodiment of SPT is best conceptualised as the self-initiated emulation of a body movement, supporting the notion of endogenous motoric embodiment. Overall our results are much more in agreement with an ‘embodied’ transformation account than with the notion of sensorimotor interference. Finally we discuss our findings in terms of SPT as a possible evolutionary stepping stone towards more complex alignments of socio-cognitive perspectives.
Resumo:
We set out to distinguish level 1 (VPT-1) and level 2 (VPT-2) perspective taking with respect to the embodied nature of the underlying processes as well as to investigate their dependence or independence of response modality (motor vs. verbal). While VPT-1 reflects understanding of what lies within someone else’s line of sight, VPT-2 involves mentally adopting someone else’s spatial point of view. Perspective taking is a high-level conscious and deliberate mental transformation that is crucially placed at the convergence of perception, mental imagery, communication, and even theory of mind in the case of VPT-2. The differences between VPT-1 and VPT-2 mark a qualitative boundary between humans and apes, with the latter being capable of VPT-1 but not of VPT-2. However, our recent data showed that VPT-2 is best conceptualized as the deliberate simulation or emulation of a movement, thus underpinning its embodied origins. In the work presented here we compared VPT-2 to VPT-1 and found that VPT-1 is not at all, or very differently embodied. In a second experiment we replicated the qualitatively different patterns for VPT-1 and VPT-2 with verbal responses that employed spatial prepositions. We conclude that VPT-1 is the cognitive process that subserves verbal localizations using “in front” and “behind,” while VPT-2 subserves “left” and “right” from a perspective other than the egocentric. We further conclude that both processes are grounded and situated, but only VPT-2 is embodied in the form of a deliberate movement simulation that increases in mental effort with distance and incongruent proprioception. The differences in cognitive effort predict differences in the use of the associated prepositions. Our findings, therefore, shed light on the situated, grounded and embodied basis of spatial localizations and on the psychology of their use.
Resumo:
While some aspects of social processing are shared between humans and other species, some aspects are not. The former seems to apply to merely tracking another's visual perspective in the world (i.e., what a conspecific can or cannot perceive), while the latter applies to perspective taking in form of mentally “embodying” another's viewpoint. Our previous behavioural research had indicated that only perspective taking, but not tracking, relies on simulating a body schema rotation into another's viewpoint. In the current study we employed Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and revealed that this mechanism of mental body schema rotation is primarily linked to theta oscillations in a wider brain network of body-schema, somatosensory and motor-related areas, with the right posterior temporo-parietal junction (pTPJ) at its core. The latter was reflected by a convergence of theta oscillatory power in right pTPJ obtained by overlapping the separately localised effects of rotation demands (angular disparity effect), cognitive embodiment (posture congruence effect), and basic body schema involvement (posture relevance effect) during perspective taking in contrast to perspective tracking. In a subsequent experiment we interfered with right pTPJ processing using dual pulse Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (dpTMS) and observed a significant reduction of embodied processing. We conclude that right TPJ is the crucial network hub for transforming the embodied self into another's viewpoint, body and/or mind, thus, substantiating how conflicting representations between self and other may be resolved and potentially highlighting the embodied origins of high-level social cognition in general.