This study aims to show the socio-cognitive engineering of the pickpocket craft from the point of view of cognitive ecology. Being a pickpocket has a wider, existential status; studying it goes ...beyond the field of cognitive sciences. My ambitions are more modest: I try to show that the question about what it is like to be someone like a pickpocket is also a question about the cognitive structure of his or her activity space. In this light, I analyze some aspects of the reality presented in the movie Pickpocket by Robert Bresson. From the ecological point of view, scenes from the old movie present pickpocketing techniques in the context of the opportunities and constraints of a given environment. I claim that studies like this require integrating certain conceptual tools, like distributed cognition approach, ecological psychology, and cognitive studies of design.
The article presents the interdisciplinary approach of Edwin Hutchins, analyzing his conception of distributed cognition as probably the most important and lasting contribution of anthropology to the ...repertoire of theoretical tools in cognitive science. At the same time, this conception resulted in one of the most interesting relationships between cognitive science and social sciences. These relationships are made possible by the assumptions of Hutchins’ conception, which directly contribute to interdisciplinary collaboration. His account of distributed cognition has enormous potential, allowing the integration of research into cognitive and social processes. This is also because it breaks with methodological individualism.
In this paper, we argue that several recent 'wide' perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While ...these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives toward building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. Wide perspectives are essentially research heuristics for building mechanistic explanations. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the study of "mindreading" and debates on emotions. We argue that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals toward the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences.
There are two main reasons that the editors of the Avant magazine decided to present a fragment of a book by the psychologist Andrzej Lewicki (1910–1972) to contemporary English-speaking readers. One ...reason is historic. This outstanding researcher—a representative of psychology at the Lvov-Warsaw School (see Rzepa, 1997)—not only made an important contribution to Polish psychology, including clinical psychology, but his work was also on a par with contemporary world trends, and was sometimes even ahead of them. It is worth presenting these facts more widely outside the circle of Polish language users, even though the professor’s work was prematurely interrupted. The second reason looks to the future; it is related to changes in the scientific paradigm of research on cognitive processes. Both the general theoretical framework of Lewicki's works and some of his discoveries and theses seem to be extremely close to the assumptions of so-called cognitive ecology, a contemporary perspective that is also rooted in the past, especially in early research in ecological psychology. ...
To make the system visible Witold Wachowski
Avant (Toruń),
12/2015, Letnik:
6, Številka:
2-3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The paper is a comment on distributed cognition treated as an approach to the study of all cognition. This account is presented by E. Hutchins in the article “The cultural ecosystem of human ...cognition” (2014), as well as in other works.
Tekst stanowi wprowadzenie do artykułu Davida Kirsha „Myślenie za pomocą reprezentacji zewnętrznych” wpisujące badania nad tytułowymi reprezentacjami w szerszy kontekst dyskusji nad znaczeniem ...pozaneuronalnej sfery poznania, także z perspektywy innej niż tego autora.
The organization of the cyclical open-air festival Night of Culture in Lublin in cooperation with a research group works on two levels. The first is the level of an offer of experiences and ...reflections for the audience of the Night of Culture. The second is the level of research social and other on the design, implementation and effects of the first level. On both levels, a phenomenon plays an important role that can be described from the perspective of cognitive ecology with the term "affordance." A systematic analysis of this can lead to the third level: a meta-analysis of the street festival under discussion. I will not undertake such a complex task in this text, which is partly a review and then a "report", but I will make a brief reconstruction of the conceptual and design work related to the Affordances Activity, in which I participated significantly and regularly, as well as will consider the stage of the production of designed objects and their subsequent operation during this year's (2023) edition of the Night of Culture, in which a group of volunteers (students of the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University) played an important role. Remarks of the aforementioned meta-research dimension of the project constitute a wide margin of the article.
Studies on music in the area of cognitive sciences – quite varied despite their short history – meet with scepticism. The author of this introduction, presenting some spectacular examples of research ...on musical improvisation, tries to demonstrate that they enrich rather than reduce our understanding of this phenomenon.
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