forest…

affords love

In the forest with mom and Villem.

activity theory, affordances and tools

I made an effort to conceptualise initially on the figure what i believe happens in activity settings, what are affordances and how they relate with mediation and emergence of tools.

This theoretical framework is based on the neurobiological findings of embodied simulation of humans (see Gallese et al.; Iaccoboni), ideas of mediation and tools and imaginations expressed by Vygotsky, ecological psychology conceptualizations of affordances, events and meanings (Gibson; Heft; Chemero), conceptualizations of affordances from computer-based action (Gaver; Wiredu; Vyas et al., etc.; Arminen & Raudakoski), activity theory and activity systems (Leontjev; Kuuti; Engeström), cultural semiosis (Lotman; Stecconi), psychology (Neisser).

I believe that we can look at the affordances as the constraints we create for ourselves in the functioning of the current activity system. Both observation of this activity system elements in action and embodied simulation of actions, emotions of others from the system, as well as, the imaginatons we create internally for explaining systems and externalise in the course of action or by mediational means are sources of constraints of the activity system. Activity is always mediated by the tools we create in the process of actualizing affordances – when making something from the environment into our own or when bringing something of our own into the environment.

Basic arguments, my ideas rely on are:
Tools and signs always mediate the relationship between human agent and objects of environment (Vygotsky).
How tools appear is by embodiment of external environment or externalization of imaginations. Both processes are based on affordance perception.

Events are changes in the perception of affordances (Chemero).
Affordances point to percepual meanings (Heft).
Affordances emerge in the process of goal-directed action (Heft).
The object’s meaning derives from a particular set of intrinsic properties that it possesses in relation to the perceiver and is perceived in the context of a goal-directed action (Heft).
Affordances must be actualized, they are meaningful potentialities for action (Arminen & Rautakoski).
Affordances change dynamically (Vyas et al.,).
Neisser elaborated Gibson‘s concept of affordance and distinguished three perceptual modes:
- Direct perception/action, which enables us to perceive and act effectively on the local environment;
- Interpersonal perception/reactivity, which underlies our immediate social interactions with other human beings, and;
- Representation/recognition, by which we identify and respond appropriately to familiar objects and situations. Neisser’s interpretation introduces the interpersonal perception of subjects in action as an additional source of affordances in the social and regulative domain. Another type of affordances relates with learners‘ familiarity of perceiving certain aspects of the environment certain ways, which is culture-dependent.
The culturally defined affordances or canonical affordances exits (Heft).
From an interaction-centred view (Vyas et al.) affordances are the perceived possibilities for both thinking and doing, what learners perceive and signify during their actual interaction with an artefact or tool.

There are some aspects of cognition related to awareness caused by mirror-neurons the Activity Theory might consider.
Simulation mechanisms of action, language and emotion constitute altogether a shared manifold of intersubjectivity (Gallese).
Any intentional relation can be mapped as a relation between a subject and an object (Gallese).
To observe objects is equivalent to automatically evoking the most suitable motor program required to interact with them (Gallese).
A common functional mechanism, embodied simulation, is the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding:
- unconscious modeling of our acting body in space
- our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains (Iaccoboni).

how tools and mediation works

Finding something new is always fascinating. Yesterday’s finding was a reference towards POGO storyworld from University of Siena.
Antonio Rizza and his associates have a couple of papers online that introduce the environment.
I was reading the Pirkko’s thesis about PLEs and these POGO papers today and was thinking of how relativistic is the tool conception.

Theoretical ideas from POGO paper:

According to Vygotsky (1978) a human individual never reacts directly (or merely with inborn reflects) to environment. Instead, tools and signs mediate the relationship between human agent and objects of environment; thus, for Vygotsky, mental process can be understood only if we understand the tools and signs that mediate them.

Surprisingly this is very much in line with the new ideas of what affordances are. If affordances are not direct part of the environment, but rise in the cognitive processes as part of putting intentions into actions – the tools (either cognitive or material) are nothing but the part of the environment we make meaningful, literally ‘our own’ when we try to shift some of it from external to internal, from separate to embodied, using the affordances. The perception of affordances makes tools.

Lev Vygotsky maintained that the notions of reality and imagination are not as separated as they appear to be in every day life. Fantasy disposes traces of events in new forms. This constitutes the first relation between fantasy and reality. The second relation does not consist of a relation between the elements of fantastic construction and reality, but between the ready product of fantasy and any complex phenomenon of reality.
The third kind of relation concerns emotion. Fantasy’s images supply an inner language to our feelings. Our feelings select elements that are isolated from reality and combine them together in a relationship that is internally conditioned by our state of mood, instead of by temporal or logical relationship among images. Each construction of fantasy influences our feelings, so even if it’s not a construction that corresponds to reality, the feeling evoked by it is effective and really lived.
A construction of fantasy may constitute something effectively new, something which has never existed before in the experience of man, and which does not correspond to any object/concept really existing. Yet, once this crystallized image of imagination is externally embodied, once it is concretized, once it has become a thing among other things, it really starts to exist in the world, and to impact upon other things.
The cycle of creative imagination is a process that develops in four phases, namely exploration, inspiration, production and sharing, and describes how the individual experiences the external world, elaborates the impressions received, assembles them in a novel way and shares this production with others.

If we use external tools (cognitive, like language and material, like artifacts), why cannot we consider that there are also internal tools what enable us to realize our objectives and actions. Imaginations what we create and use in our mind, can be seen as these internal tools that mediate between our objectives and actions.

These relations derived from Vygotsky, are at the core of the pedagogical objectives of POGO. The POGO environment should:
(1) expand as much as possible the sensorial experience of children within each type of relationships: the imaginary relationship between the real elements (first relation), and real relationships between not-experienced elements (second relation);
(2) allow comparison and experimentation among both relationships, stressing the social origin of the second relationship (cf. the forth pedagogical objective).
Emotional relation is the central issue of the second pedagogical objective: the POGO environment should support children in developing emotional knowledge (e.g. empathy) through the law of the common emotional sign and the law of reality of imagination.
The third pedagogical objective: the POGO environment should sustain children to complete the circle of creative imagination that starts from sensorial knowledge of reality and goes back to reality through active modification of the environment produced by the embodiment of imagination. The process of embodiment concerns not just the material/technical aspects but also the emotional/conceptual ones.

POGO should support the understanding and the management of different ways to organize narrative processes (i.e. narrative structures) so to enable a richer way to build meaning out of our experience and consequently to become conscious of what the narrative interpretation imposes on the reality it builds.

Any artifact has a dual nature, a material one and a conceptual one and that both, but specially the conceptual one, give shape to the human cognitive process when people interact with that specific artifact.

POGO mediates cognitive activity. In POGO world, the conceptual level of the artefact is step by step embodied in the physical and functional form of the artefact.

If i understand it correctly, the idea is that we create internal conceptions, which will be turned into narrative/material form by embodying the them as meanings into cognitive or material tools.

It is sort of the process of making the external tools from the internal ones, while the other process, what i described earlier, is making the external tools from external world, environment.

Internal conceptions, imaginations come first, and then through abstracting them (could it happen if we make up the main features of them, select affordances?) we externalise conceptions as meanings and embody them into certain cognitive or material ‘objects’ which will then mediate our meanings as tools.

This shifting of the borders is in principle the main idea in semiotics what Lotman has suggested. Can we say that what mediation (and tool-using/tool-making) actually is, is shifting the borders between external and internal, outside and embodied, align and our own. This shifting happens by finding the translation points (what Stecconi and Lotman both describe). These translation points are very much alike to the affordances what we anticipate and what we put in action.

PLE affordances

PLE (Playful Learning Environment) and its affordances for educational activities and -play is the topic Pirkko Hyvonen is currently writing in her forthcoming thesis.
Kindly, she has shown me some of what she has been writing.

Pirkko redefines affordances as conditional processes.

I consider them basically as processes of perceiving–finding–fulfilling, when needing, intending, meaning and capaciting includes in the entire processes making them conditional.

She has distinguished the categories of affordances for PLEs.

This last aspect we also did initially when elaborating the affordances of activity systems. However, Sebastian Fiedler pointed out that it is theoretically not correct to separate affordance types in case of activity system conception, because we cant artificially take part of the activity system out of it. As soon as we try so, these affordances what are derived from the noncomplete activity-system would be different from those that originate from whole system.

It is quite difficult to write of the affordances without slipping to describe them as part of the objective environment.
In Pirkkos work she uses:
afford – to allow
affordance + to offer
affordance=feature that actualise
affordaces are for activities
affordances as meaningful potentialities

I dont feel that all of these are interactional enough.

I like this reference:

Arminen and Raudaskoski (2003) assume that the concept of affordance is useful in revealing the features that actualise when children and teachers use PLEs; those features are meaningful potentialities for action.

Pirkko noted that:

The affordances have similarities with sociocultural perspective.

I totally agree with this point. Affordances are intersubjective, exist between subjects and objects, subjects and subjects, and even interrelational objects or -subjects evoke affordances if someone acts with them.

I like that Pirkko uses the ideas related to mediated affordances: meaning for example the teacher mediation of affordances for students, but also tool-mediation of affordances. There have been some claims (eg. Heft, 2003; Michaels, 2003) that the affordances are always direct and unmediated, which i disagree.

For me it is a big question when a tool is a tool and when it is part of the environment. It seems to me that as soon as i use part of the environment to mediate my action, it technicaly becomes the tool. So i could say something of the environment becomes a tool in action if activity gives meaning to and actualises something (affordances) in the environment.

Gibson (1979, 128) wrote: What other persons afford comprises the whole realm of social significance for human being.

Here the interpersonal emergence of affordances is supported.

Pirkko writes:

On the basis of Gibsons theory (1979), I have concluded that these processes (of reciprocally providing affordances) bind teacher, children and their environment together; they form a reciprocal relation.

It makes me to think that in activity system, activity system is functioning due to affordances..in my interpretation affordances constrain possible activities in the activity system, but here it is that they bind together the activity system

..which is the same but in differnet meaning.

Interesting part is a table where the dimensions of affordances (eg. expected, misleading, harmful etc.) are defined.

The table with PLE affordances itself was a bit disappointment because Pirkko defines affordances through what they afford (eg. affords creation).
In my understanding affordances are interrelational and thus they must be named accordingly
(eg. creating_jointly_paths; etc.)

Her thesis is an interesting work woth reading if ready, especially if someone is interested in affordances and PLEs.

About affordances in ‘Ecological Psychology’ 2003

ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, 15(2) is a special number of affordances.
Here are some of the paper-notes from this issue.

An Outline of a Theory of Affordances
Anthony Chemero

The paper makes difference between inferential theory of perception (when the meaningful perception is created in brain) and direct perception (when environment contains meanings and animal gathers meanings from the environment). Gibson’s theory of affordances is in line with the direct perception theory.

Chemero (2003) attempts to offer the description of affordances that would be ontologically respectable, but still in line with Gibson’s theory.

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill (Gibson, 1979).

An affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective–objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. (Gibson, 1979, p. 129)

According to Gibson, affordances are properties of the environment but taken relative to an animal (Chemero, 2003).

Chemero (2003) assumes that previous post-gibsonian attempts have claimed that affordances are animal-relative properties of the environment (eg. Heft, 2001; Reed, 1996; Turvey, 1992), which have some significance to the animal’s behaviour.

Reed (1996) related affordances of the environment and the natural selection – according to him affordances create the selection pressure to the development of the perceptual system.

Turvey (1992) suggested that affordances are dispositional properties of the environment. Dispositional properties are tendencies to manifest some other property in certain circumstances. Chemero (2003) elaborates it: Environment is such that in some circumstances, certain properties will become to manifest. Dispositional affordances depend of the presence of animals to actualize them, and the animals need to have properties that would be complementary to the affordances (effectivities) (Shaw, Turvey, Mace, 1982). Thus, effectivities are also diapositions and they must be complemented to the affordances of the environment to become actualized.

Chemero (2003) assumes that everyone of these authors agrees that affordances are relations between the abilities of animals and features of the environment.

Chemero disagrees that affordances are the properties of the environment. He claims that they are rather the relations between particular aspects of the animal and the situations
.

As relations, affordances are both real and perceivable but are not properties of either the environment or the animal. He distinguishes between features and properties and suggests that perceiving affordances is actually placing features – it is perceiving something about oneself and not in the environment, it is seeing that the environment allows certain acitivity.

eg. I must move myself accordingly to fit withe the certain affordance of the environment.

Chemero (2003) suggests that affordances are features of whole situations (meaning the actors are part of this situation).

If affordances are not the properties of the environment there is no need for complementing properties in actors. He disagrees with Turvey (1992) who defines effectivities as diapositions, Chemero claims that in Turvey’s interpretation if effectivities match with affordances both will always be manifested. Diapsoitions never fail, while abilities can be manifested or not in the appropriate circumstances.
Instead of diapositional effectivities Chemero (2003) suggests to use abilities as functional properties of the animals.

Animals perceive only the affordance relations.Humans can also perceive their abilities and the features of the environment (Chemero, 2003).

Events are conceived as changes in the physical layout (Stoffregen, 2000). Chmero (2000) suggests that events are changes in the layout of affordances in the animal-environment system.

This is very interesting aspect, which enables to relate events into the affordance ontology which we have tried to create! Affordances are dynamically changing and events will be related with the perception of these changes.

In the end of the paper Chemero (2003) assumes that ecological psychology is the form of realism about meaning, in which meaning (affordances) is real aspect of the world and not just in our heads, as indirect theories of perception maintain.

References:
Turvey, M. (1992). Affordances and prospective control: An outline of the ontology. Ecological Psychology, 4, 173–187.

Reed, E. S. (1996). Encountering the world. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stoffregen, T. (2000). Affordances and events. Ecological Psychology, 12, 1–28.

Heft, H. (2001). Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of William James’s radical empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Chemero, A. (2000). What events are. Ecological Psychology, 12, 37–42.

Chemero, A. (2001). What we perceive when we perceive affordances. Ecological Psychology, 13, 111–116.

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Shaw,R., Turvey,M., & Mace,W. (1982).Ecological psychology: The consequence of a commitment to realism. In W. Weimer & D. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and the symbolic processes (pp. 159–226).Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
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Affordances: Four Points of Debate
Claire F. Michaels

In this paper the assumption is that affordances do not arise as consequences of mental operations, but are action-referential properties of the environment that may or may not perceived.

I wonder, if humas can also anticipate affordances and abilities as Chemero (2003) claims, then they can create affordances as mental operations.

Michaels (2003) argues that there is a risk that affordances and meanings become synonyms. For example Chemero (2003) makes this strong relation.

Michaels claims that perceiving affordances is more than perceiving relations, it brings attention to the action-guiding information and sets up action systems to act.

She brings up an interesting point, if the tool in hand the effectivities of people will change.

In the end of the paper she brings some definitions of affordances, which give on my opinion some rules about them.

Affordances are actions permitted an animal by environment (objects, events, places, people etc.). Actions are goal-directed and entail intention, detection of information, and relation between information and control movement.

Rule* Actor with intentions is needed to activate environmental affordances as actor’s activities. This suggests awareness concept where intentions select of what we become aware of.

Affordances are multidimensional compounds of properties from other measurments, descriptive or conceptual systems.

Rule* Actor needs to perceive itself as a separate entity in respect to the environment. This suggests awareness concept in which this separation is made.

Rule* Multidimensionality aspect enables the actication of very different activities and coupling with very different effectivities. It also refers that if there are several affordances, which have multidimensional compounds these compunds can interact differently within or between affordances.

Affordances exist independent of being perceived.
Affordances entail effectivities for its actualization, but not for existance.

Perceiving affordances is seeing that some actions can be engaged in by the perceiver himself, it is not perceiveing what actions others can engage in.

Rule* One can perceive only affordances for ones own action.
I believe that new neural mirroring studies reject this assumption. Instead they demonstrate that one can also perceive the actions, intentions and emotions of others as one’s own actions or emotions if the intentions overlap and we become aware of the others. Thus it seems possible that we may be partially aware of the affordances what the other person perceives and engages in its activities.

————————————————————-
Affordances, dynamic experience, and the challenge of reification.
Heft, H.

The most interesting part of this paper is about canonical affordances which are socio-culturally determined and maybe even cause the prospectivity of human perception.

Perceiving the affordances of our environment is the first order experience that is manifested in the flow of our ongoing perceiving and acting. By first order experience I mean experience that is direct and unmediated . We are simply immersed into situated doing and being. we have firts-order non-analytical awareness.
We can also shift our attentional focus and isolating particular portions of immediate experience holding it in the awareness for analysis. When we are engaged in this second-order knowing we experience objects and events of the world largerly in relation to each other rather than experiencing them in relation to us as perceivers-actors, that is as affordances (Heft, 2003).

Can the affordances be mediated? Mediated by some tools eg. the developer’s canonical affordances become mediated to the user? The mediation of action potentials has been the startingpoint of developing any tools.

Can the affordances be cognitively mediated as well? For example if we observe some people and dynamically simulate with mirror neurons what they do and emotionally feel as if these were our own actions and emotions, don’t we then mediate the affordances what other persons perceive?

Cannot we perceive relations as affordances for our actions?
I do not understand the difference of first- and secons order awareness, and why in first case we perceive affordances in the environment in relation to us, and in the second case we differentiate relations of ourselves and don’t see them as affordances. I think that if we differentiate relations we can also perceive these inter-relations as the affordances the environment evokes in response to our intended actions.

Reciprocal influences can be divided for analytical purposes:
- person-related factors: physical bodily attributes, perceptual learning, motors-skills, intentionality;
- immediate environmental context: socio-cultural processes

Affective and motivational qualities are intrinsic to affordances. Awareness of affordances typically is an interwining of knowing, feeling and acting.

This is an important claim if we want to consider mediated affordances as part of the picture. One thought relates again with mirror-neurons which are supposedly enabling us to be aware of and simulate both actions and emotions.

Knowing is something that relates with canonical, socio-culturally defined affordances. Ecological knowledge for Heft (2001) is socio-culturally defined meanings (affordances).

Heft names some interesting aspects in relation of the affordance perception.

Recognizing the prospectivity of perceiving.
Meaning can be found in perceptual experience.
The perceptual meanings that he affordances point to are fluid – features of the environment can possess alternative affordances at different times and contexts.
Affordance meaning is typically established by a feature’s relation to a broader environmental context.
Object’s canonical affordance must be based on a history of experiencing the culturally normative use(s) of an object in particular contexts.
Once an object’s canonical affordance is established, that meaning may seem to exist independently of any context.
Affordances can be seen as embedded in ongoing collective social activities.
The affordances that are available to be perceived by the individual over time reflect an interweaving of reciprocal, continuing, historical process.

——————————————————-

The two other papers of this issue were of about more canonical affordance definitions and Chemero refers to these ideas in his paper.

Ecological knowledge and affordances

When browsing the Journal of Environmental Psychology (Journal of Environmental Psychology 27 (2007) 1–13 ) I came to an interesting article about the book review.

Book ‘‘Ecological Psychology in Context’’ by Harry Heft (2001).
Revisiting Gibson, Barker, and James’ Radical Empiricism—And Rethinking Environment and Environmental Experience

The book is mostly discussing ecological psychology through the commitments of James Gibson and Roger Parker. The author emphasises affordances as a conceptual construct which has been influencing research in various areas.

Heft has a particular, socio-cultural viewpoint towards ecological psychology.

Ecological refers to the dynamic reciprocity that characterizes animal and environment relations.

‘Ecological psychology’ perspective does have its own and interesting take on the nature and place of ‘environment’ and the ‘social/cultural’ in such an ecological approach.

Ecological psychology offers the discipline a much needed focus on the environment considered from a psychological and relational point of view.

Instead of needing each individual to construct a private, subjective environment, the individual would need to possess the means for detecting structure already present in the environment. Such an analysis would provide the grounds for the possibility that features of the environment are directly perceived by an individual, even while these properties exist independently of the individual.

If directly perceivable environmental features exist independently of an individual, they can be viewed as features of a possesses in relation to the perceiver and are perceived in the context of a goal-directed action.

The gap between the individual knower and the known can be bridged (side-stepped actually), and the common grounds for shared, mutual understanding, although still leaving vast freedom for differences between knowers, becomes a possibility.

In the synopsis Heft writes: knowing is rooted in the direct experience of meaningful environmental objects and events present in individual–environment processes and at the level of collective, social settings.

For Heft all these objects constitute environmental knowledge.

I like one of the sentences, in which the book author argues against psychological distinction of the environment and mind.

The environment is not in the head, but the head and body are in and of the environment, which we directly perceive and experience, and which is ‘by nature’ both an objective given and independently meaningful in terms of functional significance.

The environment is meaningful. We directly experience an environment of meaningful objects, of meaningful events, of meaningful places, of meaningful social actions, and of meaningful institutions.

We engage a meaningful environment of affordances and refashion some aspects of them…These latter constructed embodiments of what is known—which include tools, artefacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions—can be called ecological knowledge.

Heft also pursues an argument based on a consideration of shared meanings in shared environments, with the meaningful features of these common environments being literally ‘constructed’ embodiments of what is known, i.e. ecological knowledge, including tools, artefacts, representations, social patterns of action, institutions.

Ecological knowledge through its various structural, material culture, human setting manifestations becomes an integral social and cultural part of ‘the environment’, with these social and cultural affordances constituting effective, largely material, forms of knowledge with their own functional significance, cultural transmission, and
adaptation implications.

Heft is following the specific object- or action-focused meaning-conception.
He both socialises and encultures the notion of affordances.

Especially significant about affordances and behaviour settings is that from the point of view of the actions of the individual they are perceptually meaningful features of the environment. Affordances are environmental features that are enfolded in goal-directed actions, that is, they are constitutive features of actions.
The object’s meaning derives from a particular set of intrinsic properties that it possesses in relation to the perceiver and is perceived in the context of a goal-directed action.
In principle, affordances are specified by stimulus information. Included among the categories of affordances to be found in most human cultures are tools, artefacts, representations, and places.
Behavior settings are perceivable dynamic environmental structures of collective, interdependent actions and milieu (p. 384).

The whole review is rather critical and raises several questions in the end.
However, I find it particularly interesting that Heft plays with ‘ecological knowledge’ which is created in cultural actions and the ‘affordances’ as some stimulus features of actions and ‘ecological knowledge’.

iCamp Trial 2 initial scheme

Barbara Kieslinger asked me to make the scheme of Trial 2 of iCamp Project. Here is something preliminary to discuss. The lines connecting tools and activities actually mean the free choice (coupling) among those tools on the basis of affordances perceived in the activities at team level and anticipated tool affordances.

LEARNERS MAKE WEBLOGS AND VIDEO OR PHOTOLOGS TO GET INTRODUCED.
Getting introduced patterns

FACILITATOR INTRODUCES PROJECTS, MAYBE IN WEBLOG. FACILITATOR INTRODUCES HOW WORK IS ORGANISED.

LEARNERS SELECT TEAM ACCORDING TO THE PROJECT.

AFTER ASSEMBLING TEAM ENVIRONMENT AND DISTRIBUTING TASKS THEY DO PERSONAL CONTRACTS.

Some ideas:
http://tihane.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/work-distribution-patterns/
Community-directed application of contracts
What are conversational contracts

PEER-EVALUATION PAIRS MUST BE CREATED TO MONITOR PERSONAL CONTRACTS AT CERTAIN TIMES. ONLY TEAM-MEMBERS CAN DO IT FROM INSIDE BECAUSE THEY KNOW WHAT IS ESSENTIAL FROM THE PROJECT ASPECT AND WHAT TASKS THEY DIVIDED TO PEOPLE.

TEAMS CONSTRUCT THE PROJECT IN SHARED AREA, THEY CAN ALSO AGGREGATE PROJECT FROM PERSONAL ARTIFACTS, BUT BETTER TO MAKE SHARED ARTIFACT OR CONSTRUCT SOMEWHERE.

CERTAIN TIME-SLOTS MUST BE DECIDED TO ANALYSE TEAM-MEMBERS BY PERSONAL CONTRACTS FROM THE PROJECT ASPECT. TEAM CAN DECIDE TO CHANGE PERSONAL CONTRACTS AT SOME EXTENT IF PROJECT DEVELOPS DIFFERENTLY. BUT THIS CAN HAPPEN ONLY AT CERTAIN ANALYSIS/REFLECTION MOMENTS.

FACILITATOR SUPPORTS TEAMS AT TEAM/PROJECT LEVEL USING WEBLOG AND MONITORS THE TEAMS IN THEIR AGGREGATORS. FACILITATOR DOES NOT DO PERSONAL-CONTRACT LEVEL SUPPORT BECAUSE HE/SHE IS OUTSIDER.

TEAM-MEMBERS EVALUATE EACH OTHER IN THE END OF THE PROJECT USING CONTRACTS, THEY MAY NEED TO PRESENT IT TO THE FACILITATOR SO THAT IT WAS CONTEXTUALISED.
FACILITATOR CAN EVALUATE THE INDIVIDUAL CONTRACTS ONLY IN THE END.

FACILITATOR EVALUATES THE PROJECT. WILL WE LET THE TEAM ALSO TO EVALUATE THE PROJECT?

Environmental awareness paper

The mirror-neurons approach (see Gallese, 2000, and other studies) triggered recently some good ideas how to build up the awareness paper in environmental education.

The working title is:
Conceptualizing awareness in environmental education: an example of knowing about air-related problems

The main idea would be demonstrating how environmental literacy development has been exploiting the knowledge-related conceptual awareness conception, while there are studies from dynamic systems about situation awareness , and the studies about mirror neurons of the embodied simulation of actions and emotions perceived by other people which suggest towards activity related awareness.

I would claim that as environmental problems are very complex and multi-perspective, and the latter activity-centered awareness conception is more relevant, and it should not be forgotten.

Current situation in teaching environmental behaviours relies heavily on taught conceptual knowledge and behaviours, while it has been demonstrated that in real activities people do not behave accordingly. They have real problems in being aware of the situation in general sense, which is in most cases the real cause of dilemma type of problems. Thus, it is necessary to teach awareness not as a knowledge-based conception only, but simulated activities in dynamic problem-solving cases (role-plays, investigations, analysis of newspapers) should be organised as well. I think it is necessary to integrate this activity-related awareness into the environmental literacy model.

The empirical data were collected by Eneken Metsalu, the master student under my supervision. There were students’ questionnaires and teachers’ interviews about teaching methods. The separate factor analysis with certain questionnaire items enabled to find the conceptual awareness about four air-related problem issues. Next the factors were classified into nice hierachical clusters that integrated social-awareness components; task-and process awareness components; and contextual knowledge awareness + task- and process awareness components.
K-means clustering and subsequent discriminant analysis showed that also people could be clusered into the same kind of types.

The most interesting was that if the students learned with active methods outdoors they were significantly belonging into the cluster of only task- and process awareness (2).
If they did active learning where posters were developed and brainstorming sessions were carried out, they had only social and contextual awareness (1).
Only the students who got traditional lecturing were having both the task- and process, social and and contextual awareness (3), supposedly because these awareness components were clearly elaborated by their teacher.

paper is published in SEI Science Education International

intersubjectivity from embodied simulation

I have had interests towards intersubjectivity as a phenomenon for quite some time.
Reading the works of Gallese i found interesting explanations that relate intersubjectivity with mirroring systems of our brain, and simulation processes:

From:
The mirror matching system: Ashared manifold for intersubjectivity
Vittorio Gallese, Pier Francesco Ferrari, and Maria Alessandra Umiltà

Simulation theory in fact holds that we understand others’ thoughts by pretendingto be in their “mental shoes,” and by using our own mind/body as a model for the minds of others (Gallese & Goldman 1998; Goldman 1989; Gordon 1986; Harris 1989).

Preliminary results suggest that a mirror matching system could be at the basis of our capacity to perceive in a meaningful way, not only the actions, but also the sensations and the emotions of others (see Gallese 2001).

In conclusion, these recent findings suggest that a neural matching system is present also in a variety of apparently non-motor-related human brain structures. Thus, different simulation mechanisms are applied in different domains, being sustained by a mirror-matching, dual-mode of operation (action-driven and perception-driven) of given brain structures. We propose that such simulation mechanisms may constitute altogether a shared manifold of intersubjectivity (see Gallese 2001).

From:
Subitted to JAPA
Vittorio Gallese / Paolo Migone / Morris N. Eagle*
INTENTIONAL ATTUNEMENT: MIRROR NEURONS AND THE NEURAOF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Such personal body-related experiential knowledge enables our intentional attunement with others, which in turn constitutes a shared manifold of intersubjectivity.

This we-centric space allows us to understand the actions performed by others, and to decode the emotions and sensations they experience. When observing others we do not just see an action, an emotion, or a sensation. Side by side with the sensory description of the observed social stimuli, internal representations of the body states associated with these actions, emotions, and sensations are evoked in the observer, as if he/she would be doing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion or sensation.

Fonagy & Target (1996a, 1996b, 2000) have shown within the context of their studies on self reflective function, the ability on the part of the mother to think and react as correctly as possible to the infant’s mental state (his/her intentions, affect states, etc.) will allow the infant to build the ability to understand his/her own mental states as well as those of others (see also Fonagy et al., 2002).

This is how Wood et al., 1976 originally described what scaffolding is…comprehending mutually each other’s intentions and mindset.

The shared blended space enables the social bootstrapping of cognitive and affective development because it provides an incredibly powerful tool to detect and incorporate coherence, regularity, and predictability in the course of the interactions of the individual with the environment. The shared space is paralleled by perspectival spaces defined by the establishment of the capacity to distinguish self from other, as long as self-control develops.

The shared intersubjective space doesn’t disappear. It progressively acquires a different role: to provide the self with the capacity to simultaneously entertain self-other identity and difference. Once the crucial bonds with the world of others are established, this space carries over to the adult conceptual faculty of socially mapping sameness and difference (ì am a different subject).

Given the shared sub-personal neural mapping between what is acted and what is perceived constituted by mirror neurons the action model can also be used to predict the consequences of actions performed by others. Both predictions (of our actions and of others’ actions) are instantiations of embodied simulation, that is, modeling processes.

Embodied simulation automatically establishes a direct experiential link between agent and observer, in that both are underpinned by the same neural substrate.

Can a machine be an agent?

The agent parameter must be filled.
Indeed, not all kinds of agents will do. The brain imaging experiment on communicative actions shows that only stimuli consistent with or closely related to the observeris’ behavioral repertoire are effective in activating the mirror neuron system for actions (Buccino et al., 2004).

It has been proposed that simulation process may constitute a basic level of experiential understanding, a level that does not entail the explicit use of any theory or declarative representation (see Gallese et al., 2004; Gallese, 2004, 2005).

Our seemingly effortless capacity to conceive of the acting bodies inhabiting our social world as persons like us depends on the constitution of a shared meaningful interpersonal space. This shared manifold (see Gallese, 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2005) can be characterized at the functional level as embodied simulation, a specific mechanism, likely constituting a basic functional feature by means of which our brain/body system models its interactions with the world.

When we confront the intentional behavior of others, embodied simulation generates a specific
phenomenal state of intentional attunement. This phenomenal state generates a peculiar quality of familiarity with other individuals, produced by the collapse of the others’ ́intentions into the observers’ ones.

The gap between the two perspectives is bridged by the way the intentional relation is functionally mapped at the neural-body level. Any intentional relation can be mapped as a relation between a subject and an object.

It might well be the case that embodied simulation scaffolds the propositional, language-mediated mechanism.

Simulation is a functional process that possesses a certain representational content, typically focusing on possible states of its target object.

I still struggle with the problem what is the source of intersubjectivity if we cannot perceive the actor directly. The theoretical studies about what neural processes take place when i look at the objects and artifacts around without the actor’s presence and interaction with them seem to be out of my knowing..

But yet, here is the image what i constructed about a year ago when searching and thinking about intersubjectivity. It seems to me some of the ‘artifact’s knowledge and intentions’ are missing from the picture of embodied simulation.

There are studies from neuropsychology about the transfer from one kind of information (eg. sound, images of facial expressions) into the intentional activation of mirror neurons. For example if the monkey hears someone to crack the nut, it can assume that there is some food around..or if someone looks at the images of facial expressions the observer would be experiencing a small dose of the emotion corresponding to the observed person’s facial expression (Ekman, 1993, 1998; Ekman & Davidson, 1994). And then mirror neurons get activated. Do artifacts in action (either cognitive or manual application) trigger the mirror neurons?

Supporting the theory of ecological narratives with the mirroring studies would need some neuroimaging proof.

Anatole Fuksas is pointing to some possible sources. I would like to know more about the studies of silent reading in relation to activating inner action with mirror neurons.

Flöel, A. – Ellger, T. – Breitenstein, C. – Knecht, S. 2003
Language perception activates the hand motor cortex: implications for motor theories of speech perception, in «European Journal of Neuroscience»18: 3: 704-708.

The theory predicts that listening to the ‘gestures’ that compose spoken language should activate an extended articulatory and manual action-perception network. To examine this hypothesis, we assessed the effects of language on cortical excitability of the hand muscle representation by transcranial magnetic stimulation. We found the hand motor system to be activated by linguistic tasks, most notably pure linguistic perception, but not by auditory or visuospatial processing.

I could not access full paper so it is a bit unclear, but it does not say they used narrative written texts.

Watkins, K. E. – Strafella, A. P. – Paus, T. 2003
Seeing and hearing speech excites the motor system involved in speech production, in «Neuropsychologia» 41: 989-994.

In this experiment the size of the motor-evoked potentials was compared under the following conditions: listening to speech, listening to non-verbal sounds, viewing speech-related lip movements, and viewing eye and brow movements.
Thus, text reading was not tested.

Watkins, K. E. – Paus, T. 2004
Modulation of motor excitability during speech perception: the role of Broca’s area, in «Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience» 16:6: 978-987.

During auditory speech perception, there is increased excitability of motor system underlying speech production and that this increase is significantly correlated with activity in the posterior part of the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area).

Again, it does not support the ideas of reading text and mirror neuron activation.

Then, action-related knowledge can be retrieved not only by visual or auditory perception, but even by language, that is by sentences actually describing actions (Watkins and colleagues 2003, Flöel and colleagues 2003, Watkins and Paus 2004, Tettamanti and colleagues 2005).
Indeed, the mediated perceptions of narrative actions might induce motor facilitation, triggering action potential as the planning, the observation or the the auditory clues associated to given actions do.
Since mediated visual stimuli actually trigger ideomotor actions, some similar degree of ideomotricity may be entailed by the textual processing of narratives, both through direct listening to stories verbalized aloud and internal verbalization after silent reading. If so, textual perception and narrative action might share a common coding mechanism, as perception and action do. That is, recognition of narrative action through the pragmatical flow of the text should be supported by the activity of a mirror matching mechanism.

The Ecological Theory of the Novel mantains that perception and action are tightly connected through the narrative flow of the novel. The description of the setting features verbs, nouns and adjectives actually referring to perceptive events, sensory-related properties and body part-specific affordances of items in order to trigger action potential. Narrative action, entailed by motor, sensory and action-related verbs referring to actual affordance, exerts the potential entailed by the described items. Since references to states of mind, emotions, evaluations are seldom independent from perceptual and action-related events, a general network may subserve processing of both body part-specific and general aspecific events, effectors, attributes.

What is the neural mechanism of semiotic processes? Basically, there is similar kind of perspective awareness happening. However, beyond perspective awareness the person who sees the others or some people in action with objects, must also have its own intentional structure – clear grasp of own and unfamiliar differences. Can we see the same intentional structure in written narratives or even narrative images?

embodied simulation and activity theory

Anatole pointed out that there are some aspects of cognition related to awareness caused by mirror-neurons the Activity Theory might consider.

The basic ideas in Activity theory relate ‘people who want to reach some goals’ with their ‘mediating tools for realising activities’ necessary to ‘reach the goal’. Mediating tools can be cognitive (eg. language, gestures, content of narrative artifacts or pictures etc.) or material artifacts (tools, objects etc.).

This article suggests cognitive relationships between perception – motorical action/language – goal.

What i find interesting is that in the paper they differentiate between two kinds of neurons – some react on action potentials (affordances) and some react on actions. The latter has been related to social cognition.

My understanding of affordances sees them as the emergent constraints in the activity system dependent of various system components and interactions. However, affordances can also be potentially embedded into mediating tools due to cultural use of language or due to culturally defined activity potentials objectified in artifacts and tools. Which part of mirroring systems is responsible of just defining affordances of objects for certain actions and which part requires the actual seeing of certain actions of interest on others? Both are part of the activity system’s functioning.

It is not clearly articulated in the paper but ‘context’ and ‘culture’ play a major role in the activation of mirror-neurons. Activity theory is explaining several aspects of the activity systems which could be in relation to mirroring.

Actions embedded in contexts, compared with the other two conditions, yielded a significant signal increase (Iacoboni et al., 2005).

For example scaffolding (that is based on the comprehension of each others goals) and the interpersonal zone of proximal development would be well explained by the mirroring systems.

My question is: How does (does it?) mirroring happen in mediated spaces where we cannot see the others, but we can see the consequences of actions on software, articulated responses etc.?

Does mirroring get activated if we read a book?

Also, how does mirroring influence certain kind of learning in authentic settings?

Does mirroring influence how our value systems develop and what kinds of actions we perceive as relevant ones (eg. environmentalism), and does it also have to do with what we selectively become aware of if the situation is multiperspective (dilemmas).

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From PERSPECTIVES ON IMITATION:

FROM MIRROR NEURONS TO MEMES
Volume 1
Mechanisms of Imitation and Imitation in Animals
Susan Hurley and Nick Chater, Editors
MIT Press
Chapter 2.
Understanding Others: Imitation, Language, Empathy
Marco Iacoboni

Minimal neural architecture for imitation: This architecture comprises a brain region that codes an early visual description of the action to be imitated, a second region that codes the detailed motor specification of the action to be copied, and a third region that codes the goal of the imitated action.

Neural mechanisms implementing imitation are also used for other forms of human communication, such as language. Functional similarities between the structure of actions and the structure of language as it unfolds during conversation reinforce this notion. We come to understand others via imitation, and imitation shares functional mechanisms with language and empathy.

The two types of neurons on maquaces are called canonical and mirror. Both types fire when the monkey executes goal-directed actions, such as grasping, holding, tearing, manipulating. Some of these neurons fire for precision grip, when the monkey grasps small objects like a raisin, and some other neurons fire for whole- hand grasp, when the monkey grasps bigger objects, such as an apple. When it comes to their visual properties, canonical neurons that fire when the monkey grasps a small object with a precision grip, respond also to the sight of small objects graspable with precision grip but not to the sight of bigger objects graspable with, say, a whole-hand grip. Note that these visual responses are obtained when the monkey does not reach and grasp the object; the simple sight of the object is sufficient to activate canonical neurons.

In other words, canonical neurons seem to be coding the affordance of an object, the pragmatic aspect of how-to-grab-that-thing, rather than its semantic content.

In contrast, mirror neurons do not fire at the sight of an object but will fire at the sight of a whole action. If it is a mirror neuron, will fire at the sight of another individual grasping an object, but will not fire at the sight of the object alone and will not fire at the sight of a pantomime of a grasp in absence of the object.

There was a convincing anatomical correspondence between the areas identified in the human brain as having mirror properties, and the macaque mirror areas.

The study shows a modulation of activity in inferior frontal mirror areas during imitation of goal-oriented action, with greater activity during goal-oriented imitation compared to non goal-oriented imitation (Koski et al., 2002).

It has been shown that mirror neurons in the macaque fire not only at the sight of an action, but also at the sound of an action (i.e., breaking a peanut) in the dark (Kohler et al., 2002). These data suggest two things: first, mirror neurons have auditory access necessary to implement speech perception.
Second, they enable a multimodal representation of action that is not linked to
the visual channel only. This may facilitate learning of speech sounds via imitation.

How does one go from a relatively simple action recognition system to the complex symbolic levels reached by human language?

A type of answer (very vague, admittedly) to this question, provided by others elsewhere (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998), is that ‘gestures may be a primitive form of grammar’. The problem with both question and answer is that they accept a view of language as a phenomenon that can be essentially reduced to formal constructs such as grammar.

A salient feature of typical conversations that is ignored by traditional linguists is turn-taking. The average transition space from one speaker to another is less than 0.2 seconds, and longer pauses are immediately perceived as violations of temporal norms, even by young children.
Eye-gaze, body torque, rhythm attunement and simultaneous gesture are part of a social interaction (rather than a “software program” as classical cognitivism advocates) critically dependent on the motor system’s facility for temporal orientation and sequence organization and, I propose, also dependent on (and plausibly even deriving from) the action recognition or mirror system.

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There are some other important aspects from other sources.

The hypothesis is that the motor system, through its mirror neurons, is involved in perceiving speech, and that through evolution, the “motor resonance”generated by the mirror neurons has been diverted from its original function to serve the needs of language.
Intentional communication requires one individual who is transmitting information and a second who is paying attention to receive it.

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Neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others:
Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they experience.

A common functional mechanism embodied simulation is the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding:
- unconscious modeling of our acting body in space
- our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains

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The fact that mirror-neuron activity is impaired in autistic children
fueled the speculation about the importance of mirror-neurons for
social cognition.

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This system of neurons allows the brains in humans (and primates) to
perform its highest tasks including learning, imitating and
empathizing. The mirror neuron system allows for the ability to create
an image of the internal state of another’s mind.

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Vittorio Gallese (2000)
The Inner Sense of Action
Agency and Motor Representations
Journal of Consciousness Studies
www.imprint-academic.com/jcs

When describing correlations between neurons and behaviour we are forced to select a foundational perspective defining the broader context in which our investigation is supposed to be framed.

My personal view of this ‘broader context’ is that brain functions can be accounted for only by considering the dynamic interplay that occurs between the biological agent as a whole, and the ‘external world’ (see also Jarvilehto, 1998).

Any attempt to characterize brain functions as the outcome of encoding devices whose final product is a symbolic ‘language’ totally remote from the acting body is bound to fail.

Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982) have influentially proposed that the dorsal pathway should function to analyze the spatial relationships among objects, while the ventral pathway should code their identity. This model posits that vision is ‘implemented’ along two parallel routes: the where and what pathways.

From the early nineties this model has been questioned by an equally influential— and partly alternative—one (Milner and Goodale 1995; see also Gallese et al., 1999 for a critical discussion of it). In Milner and Goodale’s view (1995) the dorsal pathway is involved in the sensorimotor ‘on-line’ control of action (the where becomes how), while the ventral pathway is maintained (pretty much in accord with Ungerleider and Mishkin) to be the privileged site for the semantic description of objects.

Both models, although with substantial differences, posit a strict dichotomy between regions of the brain supposed to control the doing of things, and other ones supposed to know what things really are.

In the next sections I will address the relationship between action and perception quite differently from the tenets of classical cognitivism and neuroscience. This perspective will show the impossibility of drawing a sharp line between acting and perceiving. Furthermore, this account of sensorimotor processes will enable us to formulate some new hypotheses about how our brain is capable of re-presenting the world as phenomenally experienced.

The notion of representation needs to be freed from its abstract connotation — typical of the representational–computational account of the mind—and has to be relocated within a naturalistic perspective.
This new account of representation stresses its pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic roots. What does it precisely mean to define representation in control terms? It means to underline its relational—and therefore intentional—character.

The achievement of different goals turns those very same movements into different actions. What relationship exists between the motor system, movements and actions? Until not so many years ago the motor system was conceived as a mere movement controller. However, recent
neurophysiological findings convey a totally different picture: the motor system controls actions.

It is more plausible to postulate that the objects whose observation triggers the neurons’ response are analyzed in relational terms. Object observation, even within a behavioural context not specifically requiring an active interaction on the side of the observer, determines the activation of the motor program that would be required were the observer actively interacting with the object. To observe objects is therefore equivalent to automatically evoking the most suitable motor program required to interact with them.

What I am proposing here is that to be phenomenally conscious of the meaning of a given object depends also on the unconscious simulation of actions directed to that object.

In humans, the development of language allows a new way of categorizing objects by means of their naming. By receiving a verbal description of an object one can infer its category without the need of acting on it. However, ‘to receive a verbal description of an object’, if one looks closer at it, could still be a way of experiencing this object, by involving the internal simulation of an action directed to that object.

What then really constitutes the meaning of an observed and internally represented object? A purely pictorial description of its shape, size and colour features, or rather also its intentional value? The pictorial description only gains its full, interesting meaning by being transiently bound to an individual first-person perspective on the level of conscious experience, by becoming the object-component of a much bigger, comprehensive picture.

Peri-personal space is by definition a motor space, its outer limits being defined by the working space of different body effectors such as the head or the arms. In fact, what is relevant to the neurons of these brain sectors is the location, with respect to the body, of ‘something’ that will become the target of a purposeful action. Again, we see that even space is inherently, intrinsically dependent on the dynamic relationship between agent and environment. Even more suggestive that this perspective is right are the data by Iriki and co-workers (1996).

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