A blog about problems in the field of psychology and attempts to fix them.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Embodied Cognition and the Direction of Inquiry in Psychology


One aspect of the embodied cognition argument regards the direction in which psychology should proceed. My impression (from sparse readings of works from Plato through the middle ages) is that once upon a time you could start psychology at any point, by wondering about any interesting phenomenon, and proceeding from there however you wanted.

Sometime around Descartes, I’m not sure if he started it or just popularized it, everyone decided that you had to start by figuring out so-called higher mental functions. The idea was that if you got a handle on how that stuff worked, you would automatically understanding how lower mental functions. In those days, hierarchies of being were all the rage, so the higher vs. lower metaphor worked. The modern “offline” vs. “online” distinction, taken from the cog-psych computer metaphor, is basically the same thing. This was not a bad hypothesis, but it really hasn’t worked out. It is not clear that all of our studies of thinking, reasoning, planning, imagining, etc., over the past centuries have told us much about how behavior works and, worse, it is also unclear how much it has told us about thinking, reasoning, planning, and imagining.

Several of the approaches that come together in the more extreme forms of embodied cognition assert that the direction of inquiry has been backwards. The entails a few claims, some already well supported: First, we can make rapid progress on the problems of behavior – success at this has been demonstrated in several areas. Second, it is also quite likely that a better understanding of behavior will help us understand how the “online” activities work. While critics of embodied cognition are correct that EC is not very good, at present, in dealing with phenomenon such as delusions, hallucinations, mystic experiences, synesthesia, etc., that is to be expected, because a) the field is young, so one would not expect a wide array of successes outside core areas, and b) it is it is quite likely that a better understanding of behavior will lead us to redescribe the "higher" phenomenon before it provides a good explanation for them.

Hopefully I will be able to give a series of examples demonstrating the utility of the alternative direction of inquiry. To start out, I will offer a good, but non-ideal example. I'm starting with it though because it also addresses the interests of a few commenters who have asked about the relevance of Ecological Psychology to Behavior Analysis.

One common method in Ecological Psychology, adopted readily by some Embodied Cognition people, is to aggressively redefine "Cognitive" tasks as "Perceptual" tasks. For an example of my work along these lines (preliminary data published, attempts at grant funding infuriating), let's take the classic Heider-Simmel task. In this task involved creating a stop-motion film, showing interacting shapes. Viewers watched the film and described what they saw; their descriptions included attributions of causality, intentionality, emotion, etc. The original video can be found here. The basic paradigm is now extremely popular in the study of both normal people and the study of people with problems attributing emotion, etc., to others. Patient populations typically include "people with autism", but also have included people with several other types of problems. Those doing the studies think of the Heider-Simmel type tasks as being a "cognitive" task, in which the participants "project" emotional content onto the stimuli. They thus put very little effort into making the videos their studies require.

An EEG lab might need several 15 second clips, an fMRI lab several 45 second clips. Each lab makes their own stimuli, does little to know validation, then goes about scanning people. One of the few labs to do validation, allowed in any video clip that 3 out of 5 normal people attributed emotional content to. Yes. That's right. They took videos that 2 out of 5 normal people didn't attribute emotionality to, called them the "emotional" clips, and proceeded to show them to autistic children in a scanner. Uhg! Millions, and millions of dollars have gone into this type of work, and still... wait for it... no one has any idea what the crucial aspects of the stimuli are!

What if we just acknowledged the obvious fact that there is something in the displays that people are responding to when they attribute emotional content? That is, what if we thought about this as a perceptual task, with a complex, but ultimately tractable psychophysical element? Well, then it would be obvious that we should dump at least a little money into characterizing the critical aspects of the stimuli. A good enough model would be able to adapt to individual differences (modern psychophysics loves to measure individual differences). This would include the ability to determine which aspects of the display particular patients were not responding to, when failing to identify emotional content "normal" people would typically see. A good mathematical model would also allow the creation of pre-normed novel displays, greatly increasing the efficiency and accuracy of research using these types of tasks.

Why are researchers so resistant to these types of ideas? I think, in part, it is because they think emotions are a thing people have, rather than a thing people do. If people "do" anger, by acting and interacting in certain ways, then my recognizing your anger can be thought of as a purely perceptual task. Thus, it is not absurd to think of what is happening in the Heider-Simmel task as purely perceptual. In fact, if the Heider-Simmel task represents a distillation of crucial movements that make the problem much more tractable. If, on the other hand, you are convinced that emotions are a dualistically unobservable thing that people have (somewhere, somehow), then all attributions of emotion must involve some form of magical guessing. And if that is true, then the Heider-Simmel task instead represents a far more magical achievement.

And yes, I do know that there is some very cool work looking at the perception of intentionality that has done some modeling. Brain Scholl's work, for example, is pretty cool (including collaborations with Gregg McCarthy and Tao Gao). Despite these successes, when you start talking about things like "emotion attribution" people very quickly stop doing careful analyses of their stimuli. This is especially problematic when trying to better characterize people's deficits in these tasks, and even more problematic when trying to help fix those deficits.

For the behavior analysts in the audience... Imagine if we could take a child with problems attributing emotions, and determine exactly which types of movements most people perceive as emotional, but they do not. Not "stimuli" that they are not responding to, but dimensions of stimuli which they seem less sensitive to. Imagine how much easier it would be to do an intervention!

9 comments:

  1. "For the behavior analysts in the audience... Imagine if we could take a child with problems attributing emotions, and determine exactly which types of movements most people perceive as emotional, but they do not. Not "stimuli" that they are not responding to, but dimensions of stimuli which they seem less sensitive to. Imagine how much easier it would be to do an intervention!"

    Is this not essentially what they do with training things like Theory of Mind to children with autism? At least, the way you've described the issue is how I had conceptualised the problem in my own head.

    In behavioral analytic terms, the person who is unable to attribute things like emotions and intentions to the stop-motion shapes would be said to exhibiting overly strict stimulus control, where their ideas of how to determine emotion would be limited to very narrow characteristics. So instead of associating it with "anything that moves", they might associate it with "things that look like humans", or worse, they might associate it only to specific examples, i.e. "mum, dad, me".

    The key then would be to teach stimulus generalisation by, as you say, determining what component is currently associated with emotional capability and extending/training these components into other people/objects/situations.

    I think the idea (as applied to Theory of Mind) is discussed along these terms in this article: "A Behavior Analytic Interpretation of Theory of Mind" (http://www.ijpsy.com/volumen8/num3/209/a-behavior-analytic-interpretation-of-theory-EN.pdf).

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  2. all children have different kinds of attitudes, some are behave and some are very hyper active,some are emotional,some are not..we also adults have different attitudes that is hard to understand..so we need to determine why do we have this kind of behavior..

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  3. Psychology,
    Of course, a BIG, largely neglected, part of "why we have this kind of behavior" is that we are responding differently to particular, identifiable-if-we-went-through-the-effort, parts of the world.

    Mike,
    Yeah... exactly... (what you said, not the article)...but you can't do any of that without a systematic study of the thing-being-responded-to. You can get really far with just the term "stimulus", used as the behaviorist does to refer to an aspect of the world (See Gibson 1960 "The concept of the stimulus in psychology", with clarification regarding Skinner in 1967 "On the proper meaning of the term stimulus".

    As for the article, I was not aware of it, and thank you for the link. Having skimmed, but not read the article thoroughly, it doesseems to be going in the right direction research wise, but the language is still backwards. The words "inference" and "perspective taking" are unnecessary. Also, it seems to me more likely that one "learns" "theory of mind" by generalizing from the behavior of others to ones own behavior. That is, we see other people doing anger, and learn to label it, then someone teaches us how to label the same thing in ourselves. It goes something like this:

    "Hey, why are you angry"
    "I'm not angry!"
    "Were you just stomping around the house and yelling?"
    ".... yeah...."
    "Ok, well you are angry. Why are you angry?"

    Person 2 might be, for example, either of my daughters a few years ago. The current battle is to teach them what it looks like when they are tired. ("I'm not tired!")

    The complexity of the stimulus is (presumably) pretty tremendous... but still ultimately tractable, broken into a combination of dimensions, best characterized (my bet is) topologically. One could then design sets of stimuli identical, except for the particular parts a child needs training with. So really, one of the biggest things Eco Psych is offering (so far as the Behavior Analyst need be concerned), is a way of determining very specifically the crucial dimensions along which generalization and discrimination should occur for proper completion of a given task.

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  4. Hey Eric,

    "Yeah... exactly... (what you said, not the article)...but you can't do any of that without a systematic study of the thing-being-responded-to. You can get really far with just the term "stimulus", used as the behaviorist does to refer to an aspect of the world..."

    Yeah definitely, but isn't this just what you were getting at when you were discussing the fact that stimuli are composed of different dimensions - which is just what we know from theories and studies in stimulus control. That is, if you train a rat to respond to a red light with a black line through it, we need to figure out whether it is responding to the red light or the black line (which leads to more complicated problems when we factor in effects like blocking and overshadowing).

    Or am I still completely missing the point you're driving at?

    "Also, it seems to me more likely that one "learns" "theory of mind" by generalizing from the behavior of others to ones own behavior. That is, we see other people doing anger, and learn to label it, then someone teaches us how to label the same thing in ourselves. It goes something like this"

    Yes, I agree! I think Skinner himself discusses this issue himself when trying to explain subjective experiences and how we learn to identify them without being born with some intuitive concepts like "This is what anger is". I think with ToM though, there is a feedback effect where we learn to identify these emotions and behaviors in ourselves, and then generalise them to other people. So we might build up a simple identification strategy of basic mental states in other people as we're learning about ourselves, but it's through practice and experience we learn how to generalise the more complex aspects of ToM (i.e. being able to pass tests like the Sally-Anne task).

    But I actually think this issue might just be a linguistic one, in that we're forced into thinking of ToM as a discrete ability that you either have or don't have, when of course realistically it is something that develops over time and through a continuum. So we get better at ToM, we don't have ToM.

    "So really, one of the biggest things Eco Psych is offering (so far as the Behavior Analyst need be concerned), is a way of determining very specifically the crucial dimensions along which generalization and discrimination should occur for proper completion of a given task."

    I think all experimentalists in behavior analysis recognise this, as it just represents the warning from Guttman and Kalish from years ago who reminded us that just because we've set up a stimulus for the subject to respond to does not mean that the subject is responding the stimulus we've set up (i.e. different dimensions of a stimulus can control a behavior in different ways).

    The applied behavior analysts are a different breed though and I think there is still a bit of difficulty sometimes trying to get them to incorporate results from basic research into their therapies. I agree that the method you're suggesting would be perfect for the problems you suggest it could solve, but I think it's a conclusion that the eco psychs and experimental behavioral analysts have come at independently but agree on the conclusion. The task is then to convince those in the applied fields to adopt it..

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  5. Mike,
    I don't think you are missing anything here. If you are, it is the additional assertion that Eco Psych people have a repertoire of methods for analyzing the-thing-responded-to that (to my knowledge) are more sophisticated. They have been working on the problem in a more concerted way for longer. For example, when determining the length of a wielded (but unseen) rod, people are responding to the inertial moment, which, if I recall correctly is the third derivative of rotational resistance.* That particular property of the object is only detectable in a rod moved in particular ways. There is nothing that in-principle would stop behavior analysts from determining that. But in-practice they probably would have no reason to be interested in the task, and more importantly there is no emphasis in analyzing stimuli to that degree. So, what Eco Psych offers (one of the things it offers) is a complementary set of techniques focused on stimuli.

    The converse of this is that behavior analysts have their own techniques that, in my opinion, the Eco Psych people could use profitable. That's another story though, and most of them are resistant due to silly-even-at-the-time 40 year old battle lines.

    *Don't quote me on this. One of the other blog readers will surely scold me solidly if I am wrong. Look here.

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  6. Thanks for the info, Eric. I'll have to read up some more on the topic, it sounds pretty interesting.

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  7. http://psychology-quotes.blogspot.com/ get mote quotes here

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  8. We are depending on what we think so that we need to keep positive thought. counseling degrees

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  9. Special thanks for providing like this information. Really helpful.

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