social nature of language

One of the theoretical pillars is the hybrid ecology framework is embodied simulation, elaborated in the studies that Gallese refers below. His new paper, dedicated to the social nature of language is generalizing many studies. If to think how it is useful in our experimental ideas, we can think that not only texts, but also acustic or visual artifacts (eg. in Youtube) may trigger actions similarly like we believe the narratives might do.

What seems to be missing from his explanations is how these visual, acustic or verbal cues are triggering different actions ecologically same way like in the environment we evoke different affordances that let us accomplish our intentions and actions.

However, while in his experiments such non-stability shows no relation between certain type of clues and appropriate action statistically, considering this person-specific activation of certain actions seems to be necessary if we are supporting the Ecological psychology framework.

From an uncorrected proof from V. Gallese page:
Mirror neurons and the social nature of language: The neural exploitation hypothesis
Vittorio Gallese
2008

By neural exploitation, social cognition and language can be linked the experiential domain of action.

The perception of shared environment and behaviors helps in maintaining alignment between conversational partners (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Pickering & Garrod, 2004).

Embodied simulation is a specific mechanism through which the brain/body system models its interactions with the world (Gallese, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006).

Besides visual input, mirror neurons are also activated during the observation of partially hidden actions, when the action outcome can be predicted - the anticipated final goal-states of the motor acts (Umilta et al., 2001).

Nonhuman primates possess the ability to deduce what others know about the world on the basis of ostensive behavioral cues, like the direction of gaze.

Embodied conceptualization mechanism grounds meaning in the situated and experience-dependent systematic interactions with the world (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005)

Barrett et al. (in press) have argued that apparent cognitive complexity of the social domain emerges from the interaction of brain, body and the world, rather than being the outcome of the level of intrinsic complexity of primate species.

Viewing social cognition as an embodied and situated enterprise offers the possibility of new neuroscientific approach to language (Clark, 1997; Barsalou, 1999; Lackoff & Johnsone, 1999).

Meaning is the outcome of our situated interactions with the world.
With the discovery of written language, meaning is amplified as it frees itself from being dependent upon specific instantions of actual experience.

Language evokes the totality of possibilities for action the world puts upon us, and structures action within a web of related meanings.

Our way of being depends what we act, how we do it, and how the world responds to us.

When we speak, by means of the shared neural networks activated by embodied simulation, we experience the presence of others in ourselves and of ourselves in others.

According to the embodiment theory the neural structures presiding over action execution should also play a role in understanding the semantic context of same actions when verbally described.
Action contributes to the sentence comprehension.

The prediction of the embodiment theory of language understanding is that when individuals listen to action-related sentences, their mirror neuron system should be modulated which should influence the primary motor cortex, henceforth the production of movements it controls.

The experimental data shows that processing sentences describing actions activates different sectors of motoneuron system, depending of the effector used in the listened action.

Silent reading of words referring to actions of arm and leg led to the activation of different sectors of pre-motor areas controlling motor acts of the body congruent with the referential meaning of the read action words (Hauk, Johnsrude & Pulvermüller, 2004).

The mirror-neuron system is involved not only in understanding visually presented actions, but also in mapping acustically or visually presented action-related sentences.

The precise functional relevance of mirror neuron system and embodied simulation in the process of language understanding remains unclear.

When in the course of evolution selective pressures led to the emergence of language, the same neural circuits in charge of controlling the hierarchy of goal-related actions might have been exploited to serve the newly acquired function of language syntax.

amateurs and volunteered geography

An interesting paper was advertised in one of the Springer newsletters:

Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography
Michael F. Goodchild
GeoJournal (2007) 69:211–221

Why i find this paper interesting is that it asks the questions why do people do this. We truly don’t believe that it is done because to make better maps. Why would an amateur geographer do it?

I would just think of processes like:
- creating niches for ourselves, for better embodiment and enaction
- playfully following some cultural practices because we can, and because the environment calls for such actions,
- leaving for ourselves mental maps to free our thinking same way as we have learned to trust the files in our computer as an extra memory?
- streaming for self-administered, personalized, user-tagged and thus more appropriately filtered content for triggering our emotions and actions

Here are some from the paper:

Why is it that citizens who have no obvious incentive are nevertheless willing to spend large amounts of time creating the content of Volunteered Geographic Information sites?

Self-promotion is clearly an important motivator of Internet activity

Public personal usage - Many users volunteer information to Web 2.0 sites as a convenient way of making it available to friends and relations, irrespective of the fact that it becomes available to all.

Personal satisfaction from seeing their own contributions appear in the growing patchwork.

While geographic naming has been centralized and standardized, and assigns no role to obscure individuals, the new web 2.0 environments have given rise to the composition of layers of new kind of volunteered geographic information.

Remote sensing with satellites has replaced mapping.

Very few people know the latitude and longitude of their home, but in normal human discourse it is place-names that provide the basis of geographic referencing.

In Wikimapia…

anyone with an Internet connection can select an area on the Earth’s surface and provide it with a description, including links to other sources. Anyone can edit entries, and volunteer reviewers monitor the results, checking for accuracy and significance.

Google Earth and Google Maps popularized the term mash-up, the ability to superimpose geographic
information from sources distributed over the Web, many of them created by amateurs.

Practicality:

A collection of individuals acting independently, using shared protocols and standards, and responding to the needs of local communities, can together create a patchwork coverage.

Networks of human sensors

Humans themselves, each equipped with some working subset of the five senses and with the intelligence to compile and interpret what they sense, and each free to rove the surface of
the planet.

niches in hybrid ecology

We had quite a discussion on the niches in hybrid ecology with Anatole Pierre Fuksas. He assumed that novels are ecologically more evolved form of art for enaction than other types of art. In a way this argument puzzled me, because it seems that novel is a niche with more constraints for taking action and triggering emotion freely than for example symbolic art is, which has less sensory-motor action potentialities clearly defined.

One example indicating, that people like such forms that have seemingly more constraints is the learning course design - students always seem to prefer more constrained tutor-defined settings rather than free ones for self-directing their learning. In the beginning this idea did not make sense to me: why would the more constrained environment be ecologically preferred, since we know what happens with the over-specialized organisms in very specific niches - they die out as soon as something changes slightly.

Then we came to the idea that all man-made ecological niches, what novels, art or learning environments are, can be described on the axis of entanglement of emotional and action clues: symbolic art or music entangles both type of clues in one, while novels do separate emotional and action clues more clearly, as words and expressions in the narrative. So it seems we as humans rather prefer those niches, where the emotional and action clues are easily separable to be enacted.

This niche description triggered me to seek for more information of the niche concept. It seem that the feedback type of interaction of organisms with their environment creates niches both for themselves and the other organisms in the niches.

The basis of this feedback can be explained with the emergence of affordances in the interaction between the organism and the environment - the situated doing and being, as Heft (2003) explains it. Constructed embodiments (Heft calls it ecological knowledge) may be left as traces to the environment including tools, artefacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions. This is how people shape their surrounding environment as an ecological niche.

The less entangled potential triggers for action and emotion there are in the niche (like in novels), the easier it is to enact in this niche, and the more probable it is that the result of these actions and emotions will be reshaping ecologically this niche through the feedback. Thus, such systems may become more evolving.

I found the book:

Niche Construction:The Neglected Process in Evolution
F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, & Marcus W. Feldman
2003

All living creatures, through their metabolism, their activities, and their choices, partly create and partly destroy their own niches.

Organisms interact with environments, take energy and resources from environments, make micro- and macrohabitat choices with respect to environments, construct artifacts, emit detritus and die in environments, and by doing all these things, modify at least some of the natural selection pressures present in their own, and in each other’s, local environments. This role for phenotypes in evolution is called niche construction (Odling-Smee, 1988).

Niche construction should be regarded, after natural selection, as a second major participant in evolution. Niche construction is a potent evolutionary agent because it introduces FEEDBACK into the evolutionary dynamic.

Ecosystem control is one major new idea associated with the ecological effects of niche construction. It stems from the capacity of niche-constructing organisms to modify not only their own environments but also the environments of other organisms in the context of shared ecosystems.

In order for niche construction to be a significant evolutionary process, it is not sufficient for niche-constructing organisms to modify one or more natural selection pressures in their local environments temporarily, because whatever selection pressures they do modify must also persist in their modified form for long enough, and with enough local consistency, to be able to have an evolutionary effect. Where niche construction affects multiple generations, it introduces a second general inheritance system in evolution - an ecological inheritance (Odling-Smee 1988; Odling-Smee et al. 1996) - one that works via environments.

Genetic inheritance depends on the capacity of reproducing parent organisms to pass on replicas of their genes to their offspring. Ecological inheritance, however, does not depend on the presence of any environmental replicators, but merely on the persistence, between generations, of whatever physical changes are caused by ancestral organisms in the local selective environments of their descendants. Thus, ecological inheritance more closely resembles the inheritance of territory or property than it does the inheritance of genes.

Ecological inheritance also has a lot in common with the more familiar concept of ecological succession, except that it has evolutionary, as well as ecological consequences because it involves the inheritance by populations of modified natural selection pressures, via a succession of environmental states,which may then drive further evolutionary changes in those populations.

Any organism’s selective environment is potentially modifiable by any other organism that happens to be a neighbor or that shares, or that has previously shared, some common physical aspect of a mutual environment or that is capable of exerting an indirect influence by affecting the flow of energy or materials through that environment. All such neighbors are ecologically related but they need not be genetically related.

If organisms evolve in response to selection pressures modified by themselves and their ancestors, there is feedback in the system.

The niche-construction perspective stresses two legacies that organisms inherit from their ancestors, genes and a modified environment with its associated selection pressures. Ecological and genetic ancestors are not necessarily identical.

When phenotypes construct niches, they become more than simply “vehicles” for their genes (Dawkins 1989). Animal niche construction may depend on learning and other experiential factors, and in humans it may depend on cultural processes.

Niche-constructing organisms influence the evolution of their own and other populations, often indirectly via intermediate abiotic components. Some organisms create new niches for themselves, for example, through technological innovation or relocation to a novel environment, which again can influence the dynamics of their ecosystems.

When niche construction is incorporated, information can be seen to flow through ecosystems, and evolutionary control webs begin to emerge. Human cultural activities may influence or may actually be human adaptations, or be the result of other human adaptations, cultural processes may also influence human fitness. Cultural processes are not just a product of human genetic evolution, but also a cause of human genetic evolution.

This niche conception can be related with the affordance ideas:

Chemero (2000) suggests that events are changes in the layout of affordances in the animal-environment system.

Heft (2003) writes: 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. 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 Heft means experience that is direct and unmediated. We are simply immersed into situated doing and being.

Planning the course: Hybrid ecology of narratives

Last week we had several meetings in Tallinn and Helsinki among our core group to prepare the Hybrid ecology book: Anatole Pierre Fuksas, Mauri Kaipainen, Pia Tikka and myself. We plan entwined research activities and course with master students to give the ideas a better go.

We met in Helsinki at Pia’s and Mauri’s place to discuss the planned course in fall 2008 at the Tallinn University about Hybrid ecology of narratives. The planned master level course will be one of the testing grounds of the book ideas.

The main interest is to see how hybrid ecology evolves on the basis of traced clues in the virtual and real places. We plan the course activities partly as a field experiment, where students participate in planning, acting and analyzing data.

The initial story will be hidden locatively using new media based clues, and remains unknown to the students until the end of the experiment. The story may be either fictional narrative, commonly known to some extent to the participants, a film-based narrative, a social narrative based on the emotional perspectives of some real events, or even a crime story.

An interesting article about Literary places:

David Herbert 2001
Literary places, tourism and the heritage experience, in «Annals of Tourism Research», 28, pp. 312-333

The group of students, investigating this story with mobile technology and preferred reflection tools (eg. micro-blogging in Twitter, blogging or wiki tools), will be given the common starting point of the story from where they can continue guessing the storyline and building up their own reflections. They are supposed to continue the story with the necessary artifacts left into the virtual overlay of real places.

Such an activity is based on enaction: finding action and meaning-related clues in the real places, taking action or being emotionally involved by these clues, and contributing to the environment accordingly.

The initial story is embodied and enacted differently by each participant. Thus it would be possible to see how the enacted emotions and actions dynamically shape the hybrid ecology.

In the process of enaction the involved people get traces of each others’ actions and emotions, and their interpretations of the story. Such enaction based locative awareness calls for more involvement, and may lead to the interaction between participants and the formation of the enactive clusters around the locative story.

Such hybrid places, where stories can be embodied and enacted, have many dimensions depending of the users. These dimensions will appear and can be made visible if different content was locatively tagged by the users with soft ontology means either embodied knowledge based, that involves clues to the accompanied emotions and actions, or knowledge based, which involves our systems of activated concepts.

If participants have access to such soft ontological dimensions of the hybrid ecology, they can interact more. Also, besides the locatively situated artifacts, triggering their action and emotions, the ontological dimensions as whole will be perceived and enacted accordingly.

The tools that can be used at this course are locative maps (eg. Googlemaps), social software (Flickr, Youtube, blogs, wikis, microblogs) and analytical tools what enable to locatively tag embodied knowledge and select meaning or action perspectives withing the hybrid ecology (Montagemaker, Soft ontology tool etc.).

What is interesting in this experiment from the research point of view:
- due to embodied cognition and person-specific enaction different stories would emerge from the clues of the one initial story
- monitoring the hybrid ecology as an evolving system
- the rise of different meaning and activity spaces within the hybrid ecology that call for the formation of the communities of enaction
- persons as hybrid and distributed selves within hybrid ecology: interrelations between persons, their action traces, meaning-making traces, and various parallel dimensions of the hybrid ecology.

Some interesting ideas:
- not linear narratives with start and end but branched stories with many ends
- searching for someone, while also making side trips
- narrative as a quest game
- storylines and crossing path with characters
http://johnitc.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/digital-locative-storytelling/

Ecological aspects for learning theory of new Digital Age

Recently, the widespread public use of social software has triggered for the need to theoretically ground the learning phenomena in this new environment.

Siemens (2005) has suggested Connectivism as the learning theory for new Digital Age. Connectivism focuses on how information, situated externally from people in the web, and creating meanings publicly in social software environments, aids through connective processes the new creative learning- and knowledge-building cultures.

Besides information-centred view to learning, what Connectivism carries, the other view should explain how learning is triggered by the involvement into the activities or by the observation of the activities of other individuals and groups. This view suggests that embodied cognition could be also considered as part of our knowledge.

Thus, while modelling the learning theories the new social software environments call for, an activity centred view to learning would be of same importance as the information-centred view, and should be theoretically entwined with the latter.

In order to extract the new principles of learning, while considering the activities that are part of the digital culture in social software environments, the web of social software tools with its inhabitants as an evolving and ecological environment must be described. The interrelations between individuals, and the real and virtual places they adopt for themselves in the process of manifesting their ideas, and engaging themselves into various learning activities in self-directed manner should be theoretically explained. This new ecological perspective to learning in social software environments can reside on the ideas of Gibson‘s and his followers approach to ecological psychology, elaborated approach of Engeström’s Activity Theory, rising theory of embodied cognition, but also on the Lotman’s school of cultural semiotics.

Some aspects to be considered and elaborated:

It is generally accepted that learning and tools used by certain culture from one side, and individuals of this culture and their learning and tool-using habits from another side, are influencing and shaping each other mutually (see Vygotsky, 1979). By definition the more social software tools are used, the better they become adjusted to the cultural habits of their users. The more user-defined interrelations between the meanings exist and can be activated by certain social-software specific microformats, the better the systems get for social retrieval of information. The more users‘ activities in social environments are externally marked by the users, for example with machine-readable formats describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do (FOAF), the better the access to the activity-related information and people becomes. The positive side effect of it is also, that the systems obtain new qualities for monitoring and getting awareness, that would open the gateway to the otherwise non-traceble communities in which the members are not personally related into social networks through shared activities. They may or may not have an awareness of each other, but they share similar meanings or perform same type of activities. Access to such people in new environments is potentially opening a multi-dimensional place where individuals can learn from each other or where shared group activities can be initiated for learning purposes. The more people get involved into the similar activities while evoking for themselves certain functions the social tools offer, the stronger the pressure gets of developing the systems towards facilitating this activity, and the more this activity becomes part of the learning culture in this environment.

This presumes the ecological relationships between people and their objectives for action in certain learning environments, and the personally differentiated perception of meanings and tools in their surrounding environments which would all-together dynamically shape the social software environments as places for learning. In particular, the focus is on how social software systems become accommodated with their users through evoking different affordances in the environment, discussing the multi-dimensionality and dynamicity of such places, and explaining how creativity and active participation are triggered in these places ecologically through different types of interactions.

The inhabitants of social web are characterised as distributed selves between different real and virtual social spaces. They express their identity as part of indistinct activity patterns, involving different social tools and different people. They influence social environments by virally spreading ideas that weave people and social places into invisible meaning dimensions. They leave activity traces as cultural prompts for new similar activities within certain dimension of the environment. The personal meaning-space and activity-space may be or may not be transcendent for the other individual learners in the web if the learner is distributing one‘s self between different social software tools.

The awareness of different dimensions of the social web as places for creative learning is obtained by perceiving the other inhabitants of social web as similarly distributed wholes. Tracing the meaning-spaces and activity patterns of other people twined between the distributed real and virtual places they inhabit, the dimensions of social space become unfolded and usable for our own self-directed learning.

Two aspects here are important. The meaning centred aspect suggests to use distributed self to be aware of more communities and their meaning spaces, and to create conditions for transferring information from one conceptual dimension to another. This precondition for cross-border meaning-building activities has been focused both in cultural semiotics as well as in the theory of Connectivism. Weaving one’s own coherent meaning web on top of such connections in distributed places is part of learning practices individuals do in social web to propagate their own self. Second aspect is finding people to learn together with. To be involved in the similar activities, similar spaces need to be used for interaction. The activities the members of such lose communities get engaged with, do not necessarily have to be centrally coordinated, but rather may emerge and exist as social patterns.

Learning through meaning building, and learning from participating in socially shared activities can be explained all together as part of emergent hybrid ecologies. The architecture of such environments interrelates various meaning dimensions, activity dimensions, and the distributed selves. By distributed self people can access different dimensions, propagate their meanings and activities into these dimensions, and use crossing borders of different dimensions for creative knowledge-building, as well as, for embodying and embedding cultural practices of new social web.

Socio-cultural and ecological explanations to self-reflection

I was reading this sunday morning the chapter from the Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology (2007) by (eds.) Jaan Valsiner and Alberto Rosa:

Social basis of self-reflection
by Alex Gillespie
pp.678-691

Since i have been thinking in terms of inter-subjectivity, activity theory and cultural semiotics earlier, while now my understanding has more and more shifted towards the embodied cognition and hybrid ecology ideas, i tried to see where my standing-point is and where it differs from socio-cultural ideas.

It seems to me that the basic idea in this chapter is recognizing that signs (but then also tools, since both are mediators of action what person needs to realize his objectives in an environment?) are created during culturally constrained actions as multi-perspective and inter-subjective representations, including both the actor’s and the observer’s experiences of that action.

Gillespie suggests that in different social acts we will get experiences of the both sides of the act in lifetime (learner/teacher, giving/receiving), so we can activate these perspectives simultaneously when the we need to create/activate a mediator (sign, tool) to carry out any act.

The re-using of the signs means activating these embodied experiences and switching between these multiple perspectives when using certain sign either alone or with the others in interaction.

In Gillespie’s elaboration i can see direct relations with embodied cognition and mirror-matching theories: these theories assume that we need to experience something, embody it, and only then we can observe others doing it so that it might reactivate our similar neural processes. But embodied cognition has not dealt with this constant activation of different experiences simultaneously - my own perspective as an actor, and the other’s perspective as an observer of that action.

Secondly, in embodied cognition the representational mediation, the processing of signs that represent something is excluded, and the observation, hearing or reading can directly activate sensory-motor paths that make as feel and act.

Following Gillespie, and relating it how i understand these issues, in case of conscious self-reflective activities we might simultaneously activate several previously embodied affordances of the environment (extracted dimensionalities) to do something what we wish to do (eg. my experience of learning and also my experience of teaching), then we are running these sensory-motor activations in parallel/simultaneously/one-by-one that means as a result that we sometimes suppress some affordances in the environment that we initially perceived as coupling with our anticipated affordances for doing some actions.

Rupture and the use of internalized actions as part of self-reflection in this case are the constraints we put to the anticipated affordances of actions internally before even trying to carry them out. Can it be like conscious hindering certain sensory-motor neural activation patterns as part of our decision-making of what act to perform?

Mirroring from others and the social conflict are the constraints emerging from the environment as the response to find/make use our anticipated affordances of action. It means we consciously accommodate our sensory-motor activation paths ecologically, searching in other people, in the environment for coupling affordances of our anticipated affordances for action and hindering those sensory-motor activation paths that do not find the match to become activated.

These are some ideas what i got reading the following parts from the Gillespie’s article:

Self-reflection can be defined as temporary phenomenological experience in which self becomes an object to oneself.

People use semiotic mediators, or signs by which they pick out certain affective experiences or situations, thus distancing themselves from both self and immediate situation. These signs are combined into complex semiotic systems (representations, discourses, cultural artifacts, symbolic resources), that provide even greater liberation from the immediate situation.

Such distance enables self to act upon self and the situation.

Four socio-cultural theories of the origin of self-reflection:

1. Rupture theories of self-reflection posit that self-reflection arises when one’s path of action becomes blocked or when one faces a decision of some sort.

Peirce: A problematic situation. a small irritation or rupture stimulates reflective thought (1978/1998).

Dewey (1896): in ruptured situations the object becomes subjective because the actor has two or more responses toward the object, and the self-reflection arises.
However, from Pavlov’s experiments it is shown that contradictory responses can co-exist without leading to self-reflection.

According to Piaget (1970) the problem situation forces the child to abstract and recognize his/her developing schemas when these schemas lead to unfulfilled expectations.

It was not clear from this explanation, why semiotic mediators must be stimulated.

2. Mirror theories of self-reflection suggest that the defining feature in self-reflection is the presence of an other.

The other perceives more about self-reflection than self can perceive.
The reflective distance from self which self-reflection entails first exist in the mind of other. This can be fed back to self by other, such that self can learn self from the perspective of other (Bakhtin 1923/1990).
Other provides feedback to the self same as mirror provides feedback about our appearance that we cannot perceive unaided.

The society can be a mirror as well, leading to self-reflection (Cooley, 1902). According to him, self is a social product formed out of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling such as pride or mortification.
Cooly always related self-reflection with judgements leading to emotions such as pride, shame, guilt etc.

Questions: How does self take the perspective of the other? Is other a passive mirror, neutrally reflecting back to self?

3. Conflict theories of self-reflection suggest that self-reflection arises through social struggle.

Hegel: self-consciousness arises through gaining recognition from an other who is not inferior to self. Self and other treat each other as physical objects, and thus deny any recognition to each other. Due to this denial they enter into a struggle, the outcome of which is the relation of domination and subordination, that is master-slave relation. The slave can get recognition from the master but not vice versa. Slave struggles for recognition, developing new skills and competences. Self-onsciousness arises from struggling for recognition.

Psaltis & Duveen: Explicit recognition of new acquired knowledge by other and self is needed for durable cognitive development through interaction - the interaction needs to provide mutual self-reflection.

Sigel’s (2002) Psychological Distancing Theory asserts that discrepancies introduced by utterances of others can put a cognitive demand on the child which can in turn lead to representational work and thus distancing.

Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987) assumes that problematic situation includes problems introduced by the perspective of others. Participants within an activity system prompt each other to reflect upon the conditions and rules of their ongoing interaction. Thus contradictions between different counterparts of an activity system lead to reflection.

Social representation theory (Duveen) emphasizes that there are contradictions in the bodies of knowledge that is circulated in modern societies. Bauer and Gaskell (1999) suggest that people become of aware of the representations at the points at which they overlap or contradict each other. This coexistence of multiple forms of knowledge in the society can lead to self-reflection.

Similarly to rupture theories, it is not clear through which semiotic processes self-reflection arises.

4. Internalization theories of self-reflection posit that thought is a self-reflective internal dialogue with absent others, between their internalized perspectives.

Self-reflection arises through internalizing the perspectives that the other has upon self, followed by self taking the perspectives of other upon self.

Vygotsky (1997) emphasized that the process of internalization is a process of transformation rather than simple transmission. Signs are first used to mediate the behaviours of others, and later used to talk about self, reflect upon self, and mediate the behaviour of self.

Mead and Vygotsky conceive the sign (or significant symbol) as comprising two perspectives - the actor perspective and the observer perspective.

On one hand, there is the embodied actor perspective (the response) to some object (the child reaches hand to point to an object she wants to get). On the other hand, there is the distance introduced by the observer perspective of the other on the action (mother sees the grasping gesture indicating desire to get the object). The grasping becomes pointing when the child uses both of these perspectives.

Thus the sign (significant symbol) is fundamentally inter-subjective: it evolves both actor and observer perspectives in both self and other.

Questions: if the sign is composite of the perspective of self and other, how does this composite form, how are these two perspectives brought together.

Gillespie (2005) now starts to generate his own theory. He relies on the Mead’s theory of the social act suggesting that people move amongst the positions with a relatively stable social/institutional structure (host/guest, buyer/seller).

Each social act pairs (eg. giving/receiving, teaching/learning) entails reciprocal actor and observer positions and perspectives which mots people have enacted. They have previously been in these social positions of the other. Thus we are able to take these perspectives in each social act. The self becomes dialogical, containing multiple social perspectives for each act.

The social act is the institution that first provides individuals with roughly equivalent actor and observer experiences, and second, integrates these perspectives within the minds of individuals. When both actor and observer perspectives are evoked within a significant symbol (or sign) /like in gesture/, then there is a self-reflection, because self is both self and other simultaneously.

Gillespie calls self-reflection triggered by an actor perspective self-mediation and the self-reflection triggered by an observer perspective on an actor short-circuiting.

Gillespie assumes that different socio-cultural theories of self-reflection are not in opposition, but rather theorize different proximal paths leading towards self-reflection.

The magic of social act is that it integrates the actor and the observer experiences or perspectives into the formation of signs enabling higher level of semiotic mediation. Conceiving of the sign as this integration of perspectives elucidates the logic of self-reflection.

Whenever one uses the sign it can carry self from one perspective to another continuously.
Introducing the concept of sign (significant symbol) as a complex semiotic system entails abandoning the assumption that complex semiotic systems mirror the world. Instead, it conceptualizes these semiotic systems as architectures of inter-subjectivity, which enable translations between actor and observer perspectives within a social act.

Any narrative is not just a narrative that is analogical to self’s own experience, it is an inter-subjective structure that enables translations between actor and observer perspectives. Partially integrated actor and observer perspectives are the pre-condition for self-reflection. Rupture, feedback, and social conflict can cause self-reflection because of a pre-ecxisting and only partially integrated architecture of inter-subjectivity.

The illusion of Mediationism

To do something, what i wanted to do for a long time, i read the chapter claiming that mediationism is used like a miracle-tool in different theories. Why i was so hopeful - because there are approaches that deny the perceptional and representational way of making the world meaningful. For example, there is a theory of embodied cognition, where the processing of representations is not needed but they claim that persons directly activate the sensory-motor action paths in brain when being imposed to the sensory-motor action potentialities or affordances in the environment.

The Windowless Room:’Mediationism’ and how to get over it
by Alan Costall
pp. 109-123
From Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology
Eds. J. Valsiner & A.Rosa
2007

The book is standing on my table for a while, but the only chapter i have managed to take a look is the intriguing one by Alan Costall. I never saw such a lecture-style in a handbook!
His beautiful saying is: ‘making a fetish of mediation’. He describes several approaches how mediationism is used.

He uses the metaphor of windowless room to describe the mediationism. We find us over and over again in a room without windows, with pictures hanging on the walls, which depict other windowless rooms.

His conclusion is that there are so many ways of getting into this windowless room.

He does not want to suggest direct theory of perception or action, but wants to indicate that mediationism seems like a barrier between us and the world.

Within cognitive psychology mediationism has taken the form of representationalism.
Cognition has long been defined in terms of representations.
To deal with situated actions, representationalism gets into trouble because in different contexts the different representations become the second order representations that also involve contexts.
The meaning of representations is obtained when they are mapped onto the world.
It is believed we need to run internal representations to bridge the gap between the perceiver and the real world.

According to the social cognition approach we can only know about other people in an indirect way. Persons’ internal states cannot be observed directly and must be inferred from different cues.

Knowing as a representation or correspondence: knowing is viewing from outside, true knowing is theoretical not practical. Cognitive theory continues to identify knowing with practices of abstraction, such as classification, computing, calculation, logical inference. Our ability to interact approprately with objects depends on the capacity, fundamental of human beings, for categorizing objects and storing information about them, thus forming concepts, and on the capacity to associate concepts with names.

All apprehension of objective reality is mediated through subjective existence, ideas forever interpose themselves between the knower and the, objects which he would know.

In cultural psychology the representations are primary, they are situated in social practices rather than in mental models. But what then do these representations re-present?

In social constructivism the realm of socially constructed imposes itself between us and nature and through which we cannot reach the world itself.

For constructivists it is not material world itself what conveys meanings, but the language system or whatever system we are using to represent concepts. Social actors use conceptual systems of their culture and the linguistic and other representational systems to construct meanings and make the world meaningful and to communicate world meaningfully to others. Culture is about shared meanings. Meanings can be shared through our common access to language. Culture emerges from nature as the symbolic representation of the latter.

He suggest that we need to find a place in our theories for the existence of both meaning and mediation before and beyond the realm of representations and symbols, and take their materiality much more seriously. Mediation is taking place in the world and is changing the world, constituting objects not constituted before.

Interpreting hybrid ecology in augmented reality

A draft of my major ideas.

Background theory

Concepts: embodiment, neural representations of sensory-motor actions, action potentialities, affordances, anticipated goals, action, mediation, coupling, tool, hybrid ecology

The basic ideas in Activity theory (Leontjev, 1975) 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.).

Discoveries in cognitive and neuroscience about the functioning of mirror-neuron systems (Gallese et al., 1996), claim, that cognition is embodied through grounding knowledge directly in sensory-motor experiences without the mediation of symbolic representations (Pecher & Zwaan, 2005).

From observation of others and the environment (Rizzolatti et al., 2001), from listening narratives (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998; Iaccoboni, 2005) or from reading narratives (Scorolli & Borghi, 2007) and looking everyday images of objects or works of art (Gallese & Freedberg, 2007) we perceptually activate certain multi-modal action-potentialites to mediate our purposeful and goal-directed actions (see Gallese & Lakoff, 2005). These embodied dimensions are activations of neural representations located in sensory-motor areas in brain.

Hommel (2003) assumes that action control to all behavioral acts is ecologically delegated to the environment - when planning actions in terms of anticipated goals, the sensory-motor assemblies needed to reach the goal are simultaneously selectively activated in the environment, and bind together into a coherent whole that serves as an action-plan, facilitating the execution of the goal-directed actions through the interaction between the environment and its embodied sensory-motor activations.

My understanding of affordances sees them as the emergent constraints in the activity system dependent of various system components and interactions. I interpret them as action potentialities. 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.

Our hybrid nature

Hybrid ecology binds together into one inseparable whole the subjects aiming to do something, the surrounding environment with its objects, and the mediating tools of their action. In this view all external entities of the person can be considered as an environment (eg. living and nonliving things and their causal and structural interrelations).

In this symbiosis we can see that in any activity there is no clear and distinct border between subject and the environment. The mediation between the personal (internal) and environment (external) is a dynamic two way process of embodiment of environment’s dimensions, and expressing the embodied in the environment.

Any action can be taken only on the basis of embodied dimensions of the environment.

Environment becomes a place for action if we accommodate it with our tools, if we embed part of our embodied sensory-motor experiences to the external environment and if we reuse it constantly matching our internal embodied sensory-motor action potentialities and action potentialities that couple with it around us.

Extending and accommodating ourselves to the environment

To be purposely navigating and acting in the environment, persons need to embody part of the environment in order to toolisize it, and start using it for their action. This is not necessarily a conscious and goal-driven process. Also the environment with its culturally defined action potentialities in relation to persons’ previously embodied action-potentials and emotions can evoke certain goals for action. In such case certain aspects of the environment may be extended above the others to the range of the persons’ perception.

People can also toolisize the environment by externalizing their internal imaginations, emotions and sensory-motor action patterns to the environment as objects for use for themselves and the others.In a way it can be seen as making the environment as part of their symbiotic being where they can find and use the common sensory-motor action potentialities over and over again.

Toolization is not necessarily merely a process of symbolizing meanings. If toolization of the environment is done by language, or making narrative or visual artifacts it is done by using symbols as carriers of sensory-motor action potentialities. But toolization is also direct activity carried out in the environment, when the objects of the environment and some perspectives of the environment are actualized to express and carry out goals-directed action plan, which has sensory-motor neural correlates.

Creating new tools

Our usual acting in the personally accommodated environment is based on the preferred perception of affordances that match with our sensory-motor action correlates of previously embodied emotions and actions. Basically we repeat ourselves to feel safe in the environment. We actualize the affordances that we define for ourselves as the members of certain culture, those that enable us to take active part in this culture.

However, some of the affordances, that are very distinct from the usual affordances, may also be perceived and may start intruding the activation of embodied sensory-motor paths. These affordances can be viewed as the noise to be ignored or noise to be considered.

Some of the noise we try to ignore, telling to ourselves that it is the similar affordance to some other usual affordance. Similar affordances are coupled with the previously anticipated sensory-motor action potentialities.

Some of the noise we perceive as analogical affordances. Analogy is accepting the difference in nature but making the relation on the basis of some features. In this case partial coupling of anticipated affordances with the actualized affordances happens, which may activate only part of the previously embodied sensory-motor neural correlates or even some new ones.

Looking for the noise to activate different sensory-motor experiences is an important aspect of our creativity. Looking for the noise may lead us toolizising the environment for us differently. We basically create new tools to accommodate ourselves into the environment with our usual goal-directed plans. Or, the creation of these new embodiments from the environment would lead us to the totally new set of goal-directed action plans. We shift from one set of anticipated affordances we are looking for in the environment to another set.

Tools we create from tools left to the environment

Lev Manovitch has pointed out to some trends of tool designs in modern environment.

Manovitch deals with ‘interfaces’ enclused to ‘objects’. There is a new trend in design: disappearance of technological objects as such, which become integrated into our spaces. In such cases the previous culturally accommodated tool or artifact and the previously culturally accommodated technological interface may together start triggering different potential affordances for action.

The action potentials technology offers through ‘interfaces’, and the action potentials that the objects had in another previous culture, can be contraversial and may cause certain “battles” between what action to carry out, evoking the necessity for internal grounding between the different sets of affordances. This would result in not using these new devices most effectively as planned by the designers and visioners of new technology, because we would be triggered simultaneously by the affordances evoked by two different cultures.

Basically what we need, is immersion of cultures, becoming these new ‘immersive technology generations’ and we will no more distinguish the potential affordances the objects evoke as old and new activity potentials. Rather we will shift out internal immersed and augmented intentions into the environment activating combined affordances.

Do we need new designs to obtain the new culture or would the new culture emerge in using currently not ideally integrated technologically enriched objects and augmented reality? If so we will just start evoking different affordances in this environment and the design and immersion of old and new should not necessarily be melted to each other organically, we would do it by ourselves, with our perception and imagination.

In this case we can act in the current environment we are used to, but we can see, if we want so, in this environment also this virtual, technologically added space - we will get hybrid, augmented or ecologically defined environment for totally new activities, where we can go or not go depending our intentions.

Manovitch assumed that another trend in design is that tools are vanishing and becoming into seamless interfaces. It seems that in interaction with new technological and hybrid tools affordances of the activity-side become stronger and stronger perceived, while the affordances of the previously recognized tool or artifact sides, where interface is embedded, are decreasing in the perception of the user.

In the PhD thesis of Elza Dunkels “Bridging the Distance: Children’s strategies on the Internet” (2007) she conducted online interviews in chatroom to ask about how children perceive the Internet environment. She wrote: From 8000 words in the interviews kids actually mentioned the word computed 19 times, and only at 2 occasions this was initiated by the child. Communication and fun themes, rather the use of technology per se prevailed.Kids totally forgot that technology is there as a mediation tool of their action goals!

To interpret these results, it seems that the actualized affordances of Internet seemed not to depend of the objects, computers, technology with its functionalities and limitations, but instead these ‘information age immersed kids’ had real life and very warm and alive activity goals and thus they perceived in the technology environment other affordances than the grownups from earlier generations. Kids actualized for themselves the ‘communication and interaction affordances’ and did not consciously actualize the affordances of the technology as something that mediates their actions.

Hybrid beings interact

Interesting perspective emerges if the person, who externalized the embodied sensory-motor action potentialites (basically their tools as mediation devices) for themselves to the environment, is viewed from aside by another person. For the other person two versions of the environment may appear.

One is where he can see the other subject together with its mediation devices. The studies of embodied cognition indicate that it is highly likely to embody and directly activate the sensory-motor patterns they view the others doing in the environment - thus what is happening is the culturally defined selective embodiment of the action-potentialities (tools they make from the environment to use it)of the others. Evolutionary, this can be viewed as some kind of reuse or optimization strategy, getting the same result without using the energy what was initially used on creating the initial interrelation between the person and the natural environment.

Vyas and Dix (2007) suggest that sets of affordances exits at the level of person, group/community and culture, and that the interactions between these affordances may influence each other.

Second is if only these man-made objects (various cultural tools eg. texts, patterns, images, artcrafts etc.) and other type of traces of their activity are left to the natural environment, but their initial originators have left the scene. Now, it is the question of culture to couple the previously experienced sensory-motor action potentialities with those that are recognized in the environment. It is highly likely that this kind of embodiment and toolization of the environment for purposeful action is always partial or even completely transforming the initial action-potentialities of the tools.

The notion of meanings in activity-centered view to hybrid ecology needs to be elaborated. Meaning is the result of embodiment of environmental entities partially as sensory-motor action potentialities. Meaning-making is a more or less conscious search of action-potentialities in the environment that can be coupled with previously embodied ones in the process of making them mediating tools. What is meaning making for an individual in these situations when he/she can see only the environment toolisized by someone else?

First is, when does the person notice that the environment is actually toolisized - perhaps this is a culturally defied process of noticing certain affordances, coupling it with embodied affordances and taking action if there is a match of affordances. Noticing affordances and actualizing something from the environment as tools similarly as other people depends of whether they are part of this community and culture.

It can be assumed that cultures leave traces of activity potentials as patterns to the environment which can be actualized if the pattern is strong enough, frequent enough and matches with some of the anticipated affordances for the person. It is clear that if these patterns are left to the environment without perceived interrelation with their creators, they are harder to be actualized similar way by other people.

Hybrid ecology in augmented environments

The previous aspects of hybrid ecology are quite general and deal with the nature of individuals acting in an environment.
What happens if the environment too becomes hybrid?

Recent trends in the Web development have caused the immersion of borders between the real and virtual spaces, giving rise into the new potential learning environment. New kind of social software eg. blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services, social artifact repositories enable user integration into democratic content-development and publishing. Mashup technologies allow publishers to syndicate their data into machine-readable RSS feeds to which readers can selectively subscribe with free social software. Geotagging systems make it possible to create locative content by mobile devices, situated both in real and virtual environment (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006). Locative content is digital media applied to real places, any kind of link to additional information set up in space together with the information that a specific place supplies, which is triggering real social interactions with a place and with technology (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Hanzl, 2007, Kaipainen & Pata, 2007).

This new learning environment – an augmented reality/virtuality - consists of distributed virtual spaces generated by social software tools, and of the real spaces and objects, in which locative content has been added with mobile devices. Augmented reality, the reality overlaid with virtual reality, and virtual reality, in which representations of the real world have been embedded and contextualised, is enabling interactions both in real and virtual spaces. Lonsing (2004) suggests that an augmented reality system generates a composite view in real time - a combination of a real scene viewed by a user and a virtual scene generated by a computer, where the real scene is submerged with additional information in order to enhance the perception of the user.

Rich layers of embodied knowledge and practice in the real spaces, and authentic context triggering activities and knowledge-building in virtual spaces, makes augmented space into a potential learning environment with new challenges for the learners. This new learning medium is a distributed activity space in which learners meet other learners, knowledge artifacts and practices.

New augmented learning environment provides novel tools and triggers new types of activity patterns in this distributed space. Possible learning patterns involve both actions in real and virtual spaces - thus we need to view this space as one whole.

Several community-activities with new technologies can be built upon the relationships between real spaces/objects, people and meanings:
Space with dynamically embedded meanings (eg. spoken narratives, movement) entails action potentials. The embodiment of these action potentials is a process of coupling affordances evoked by internal imagination and goals in one hand, and the perceived and culturally predefined external affordances from the environment, on the other hand. As a result, this space becomes into a place for new interpretors and starts triggering activities.

Question is of course when can persons in such places perceive the patterns of activities, when can they perceive affordances of the certain culture to interact with this culture?
(eg. How much geotagged content at places/virtual content in blogs, social repositories there needs to be, that it would reveal activity potentials for triggering certain community activities. What happens if the activity potentials coupled with different anticipated activity potentials, how do such creative threads and activity derivations emerge and influence the augmented reality activity potentials?)

In which areas of the augmented reality (real or virtual) can the activity potentials be actualized, will the proceeding activity take place in the same dimensionality or can it cross the imaginary border of these spacial dimensions of the augmented reality?
(eg. i can add geotagged content in real place, but later it starts my virtual activities in virtual space, that in turn can be traced as activity patterns from the real place)

Artefact ecologies

Today i found a paper, which partially comes close to some ideas about tools, affordances and embodiment as some ecological system. Some ideas or formulations i don’t support 100 % (eg. artifacts have affordances perceived by the user who acts with them) and these seem to be not in accordance with the way they explain the dynamic and mutually influencing and emergent nature of affordances. Maybe it is the question of formulation rather than the step back. There notion of embodiment is not based on new ideas from neural findings.

Artefact Ecologies: Supporting Embodied Meeting Practices with Distance Access
Dhaval Vyas
Alan Dix

Material artifacts related with practices play a critical role in the activity formation.

Authors introduce the notion of artifact ecologies, which refer to a system of consisting digital and physical artifacts, people, their work practices and values, and lays emphasis on the role artifacts play in embodiment, work coordination and supporting remote awareness.

From the biological ecologies they take the following characteristics:
Ecology is made up of heterogeneous objects (environment) and organisms (species)
Organisms interact mutually
Interactions emerge between counterparts of the ecology
Organisms and objects are mutually adaptive
Organisms are co-adaptive with other organisms

Artifacts have affordances perceived by the user(s) who then act on them.
However, performing action changes the situation culturally, cognitively, physically (eg. user’s awareness of affordances increases when using an artifact).
This leads to reflection on the potential uses of artifacts and people’s roles (constraints on action).
Once the users are aware, their perceived affordances change.

They distinguish 3 levels of affordances: personal, organization/community and culture level, which differ also on the level of how rapidly they can change.
Affordances of different levels influence each other.
For example affordances one person can perceive may depend on the affordances the community perceives or culture uses as norms.

They refer to Ilyenkov (1977), who sees the creation of artifacts and tools as embodying practices of the community, claiming that artifacts embody cultural norms and values.

The notion of artifact ecology offers a set of analytical properties of artifacts that emerge from the interaction between participants and artefacts in different situations.

Embodiment: Artifacts allow participants to use their bodily skills and their familiarity of the real world objects.

Embodiment of abstract concepts

This weekend Anatole Fuksas visited Tallinn and we had great meetings and brainstorming with him and our new media prof. Mauri Kaipainen and his partner Pia Tikka from narrative film studies. Tomorrow Anatole is going to give a talk about ‘Storytelling and Hybrid Ecologies in the Age of Social Networking and Locative Media’ at KERG seminar in Tallinn University.

During these weekend days there were some talks and some events that enabled me to get better understanding of how the embodiment of abstract concepts could be explained.

We were talking at Mauri’s place, could concepts like ‘photosynthesis’ be easily embodied and activated directly through sensory-motor path, without the activation of symbolic schemata processing in between, like mirror-matching theories suggest would happen when we look, hear or read something from the environment that we have embodied before, and what relates with our intentional framework.

The problem with abstract concepts is that they are often invisible and thus not so easily embodied. For example, we can think of various kind of reasons why some abstract concepts cannot be directly embodied - they are at micro-level and thus we have no sensory-motor experience with them (genes) or complex at supra-macro level (why the seasons emerge due to astronomical causes), they may have the emergence patterns that make them visible only as time-related phenomena (like evolution), they may look totally different an have several visible and invisible emergence patterns (like boiling with start and end at visible level with various emotional and perceptional and motor-neuron activation and Brown movement at molecular level with endless chaotic movement of molecules at higher speed).

Previously, Anatole with his philology background, has suggested that photosynthesis for him relates with something green that is synthesized..and i argued with him that in many languages the concept is actually borrowed from foreign languages, and it does not activate anything familiar word-based, besides maybe thinking of the synthesis of photos that sounds similar and doesn’t lead us to the right path of embodiment.

Piia suggested that for her knowledge of photosynthesis, as the learned process, always emerges as the sensory-motor sequence of actions when she hears the word. Basically, if i have learned what photosynthesis means, i have embodied the sequence of actions through my neural sensory-motor path, and i can reactivate them when the keyword ‘photosynthesis’ is heard.
Ok, this seems quite likely…but still there is a problem how i created the pattern of sensory-motor activations that will later become related with the abstract word?

Today we went to see some nice medieval artifacts at Niguliste church. Then Anatole initiated talk about exemplars (eg. exemplar of guilt feeling at the altar paintings) what were supposed to create the emotional and motor-action correlates at believers.

The idea of exemplars as the carries of the whole complex system of abstract concepts reminded me the talks of photosynthesis. How we create the abstract concept, is enabling the person to embody the whole sensory-motor action system using some analogical exemplars of this concept. We need to model something, which evokes similar affordances for action potentialities.

Basically, the concept photosynthesis can be a bit differently triggered by many exemplars, which evoke different action potentialities and its emotional correlates, and the understanding and precise knowing of what photosynthesis is, presupposes having more than one embodied experience of these different exemplars.

So, we could teach the abstract concept by embodying sensory-motor actions from some known situations that are modeled to us in relation to the new abstract word.
Well, a bit trivial? Analogy-based teaching is mapping old sensory-motor experiences to new objects and processes.

As suggested by Gentner and Gentner, the success of an analogy-based teaching method depends on student knowledge of the base domain (i.e. prior knowledge), and student acceptance of the analogy.

If to go deeper into what the embodied concepts are, diSessa’s theory of knowledge as phenomenological primitives or p-prims (eg. closer means warmer), which are activated like fields by coordination classes, seems very similar to the affordance emergence (field-like, perspectives) and embodied concepts (sensory-motor experiences, phenomenological primitives).

p-prims can be understood as simple abstractions from common experiences. They are phenomenological in that they are responses to experienced and observed phenomena. They are are linked to, cued by, those phenomena rather than being general or abstract. They are primitive in the sense that they generelly are self-evident and need no explanation; they simply happen.
Coordination classes are internally coherent networks of primitives and readout strategies.

When teaching an abstract concept, we will try to activate a field of phenomenological primitives the learner has previously activated as sensory-motor paths leading to perceiving those phenomena, embodying them as concepts. Then we try to tag the new abstract symbol (eg. photosynthesis) to these embodiments and relate these sensory-motor experiences to the new elements from the environment. It is about migrating the emergence of affordances (action potentialities) from one system to another new system.

It is known that the activation of wrong phenomenological primitives (eg. warmer means closer) can cause altered understandings of the processes (eg. sun moves closer to the earth, and then we get summer, and when it moves further away it gets colder and we will have winter).

Teaching abstract concepts through embodied simulations has been one of the suggested methods in science (eg. playing sun system or molecules) at primarily level. For example, my friend Pirkko Hyvonen has studied PLE-s, Playful Learning Environments where students learn mathematics and other subjects outdoors by playing and embodying concepts.

Since it is known that embodiment can also be visually triggered (great paper i saw of embodying movements in art for example Anatole showed me), the models can be used for understanding or embodying concepts.

For example, studies of Uri Wilensky about participatory simulations, where kids can learn difficult phenomena by programming them at different emergence levels with NetLogo programming language, that helped them to understand phenomena better can be explained as embodiment by moving the LOGO turtles and perceiving their actions at individual (one molecule in the water) and system level (boiling water as a system).
Another nice example of participatory simulations with PDAs.

So, important in studying abstract concepts is that we can do something with the model elements to embody action- and emotion potentialities as sensory-motor paths?