Useful misrepresentation: perception as embodied proactive inference

According to the predictive processing framework, perception is geared to represent the environment in terms of embodied action opportunities as opposed to objective truth. Here, we argue that such an optimisation is reflected by biases in expectations (i.e., prior predictive information) that facilitate ‘useful’ inferences of external sensory causes. To support this, we highlight a body of literature suggesting that perception is systematically biased away from accurate estimates under conditions where utility and accuracy conflict with one another. We interpret this to reflect the brain’s attempt to adjudicate between conflicting sources of prediction error, as external accuracy is sacrificed to facilitate actions that proactively avoid physiologically surprising outcomes. This carries important theoretical implications and offers new insights into psychopathology.

Constructions of Artistic Creativity in the Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Artistic creativity is presently considered to be a multidimensional phenomenon that unfolds over time and is in constant conversation with the social and historical context of the artists, as well as their personal life experiences. This article adopts a narrative perspective and explores Vincent van Gogh’s understanding of the constructs of creativity as reflected in his letters to his brother Theo, friends, and other family members. To inquire into van Gogh’s correspondence, narrative thematic analysis was employed. Findings highlight the artist’s constructs around creativity, which seem to depict elements of both modern and post-modern views of creativity. Major themes include creativity as (a) a developmental, dynamic learning process characterized by dedication and persistence; (b) a relational process in the context of people and nature; (c) an embodied action; (d) an oscillation between asceticism and socio-cultural participation, (e) suffering, and (f) a larger-than-life force. With this study, we join the conversation of scholars around recent developments in the field of creativity, calling for a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches to this complex and multifaceted construct. Moreover, we hope to move beyond the ‘mad genius’ stereotype and myths around psychopathology and artistic creativity, as exemplified in the present analysis of van Gogh’s correspondence.

THE INTERACTIONAL ORGANISATION OF PAIN DISPLAYS IN MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS

<p>Pain is commonly understood as a private experience situated within the individual. However, pain also takes place in the social world, emerging as an interactional event between individuals. The current thesis examined pain displays in interaction and showed how they are sensitive to, and shaped by, the immediate social environment. Discursive psychology and conversation analysis were used as theoretical and methodological frameworks to investigate pain displays as social actions. The empirical data of the study were video recordings of medical consultations between general practitioners and patients. Pain displays within physical examinations were analysed as complex multimodal Gestalts following Mondada (2014b); these are locally constituted from a web of embodied and vocal resources. The first analytic chapter focused on pain displays and the organisation of turns. Participants oriented to pain displays as structural units with an onset, peak, and projectable completion place that organised when and how they built their turns-at-talk. Pain displays were also visible in the progressivity of turns-at-talk, emerging at transition relevant places, suspended and re-initiated with respect to speaker turns. The second analytic chapter showed that pain displays were sequentially organised. Pain displays were oriented to as responsive actions that progressed pain solicitations. However, they did not lead to activity closure, raising questions about the status of pain displays as conditionally relevant next actions. The thesis demonstrated the orderly ways pain displays were coordinated with, and contributed to, the diagnostic work of the ongoing medical interaction. Pain displays were found to be inextricably tied to the interactional environment, a finding supported by other research which has shown internal states like pain and emotion are produced as socially-organised practices. Finally, the thesis contributes to debates within multimodal research, providing support for the utility of talk-focused conversation analytic concepts to describe embodied action. The findings also have practical applications for people seeking medical help for pain.</p>

THE INTERACTIONAL ORGANISATION OF PAIN DISPLAYS IN MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS

<p>Pain is commonly understood as a private experience situated within the individual. However, pain also takes place in the social world, emerging as an interactional event between individuals. The current thesis examined pain displays in interaction and showed how they are sensitive to, and shaped by, the immediate social environment. Discursive psychology and conversation analysis were used as theoretical and methodological frameworks to investigate pain displays as social actions. The empirical data of the study were video recordings of medical consultations between general practitioners and patients. Pain displays within physical examinations were analysed as complex multimodal Gestalts following Mondada (2014b); these are locally constituted from a web of embodied and vocal resources. The first analytic chapter focused on pain displays and the organisation of turns. Participants oriented to pain displays as structural units with an onset, peak, and projectable completion place that organised when and how they built their turns-at-talk. Pain displays were also visible in the progressivity of turns-at-talk, emerging at transition relevant places, suspended and re-initiated with respect to speaker turns. The second analytic chapter showed that pain displays were sequentially organised. Pain displays were oriented to as responsive actions that progressed pain solicitations. However, they did not lead to activity closure, raising questions about the status of pain displays as conditionally relevant next actions. The thesis demonstrated the orderly ways pain displays were coordinated with, and contributed to, the diagnostic work of the ongoing medical interaction. Pain displays were found to be inextricably tied to the interactional environment, a finding supported by other research which has shown internal states like pain and emotion are produced as socially-organised practices. Finally, the thesis contributes to debates within multimodal research, providing support for the utility of talk-focused conversation analytic concepts to describe embodied action. The findings also have practical applications for people seeking medical help for pain.</p>

Cognition stays wild: A commentary on Ross and Vallée-Tourangeau’s Rewilding Cognition

A “failed” experiment (Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2021) tried to reveal the role played by materiality in solving an insight problem that made reference to embodied action, leading to valuable insights about the nature of cognition and the experimental method. In this commentary, we argue that this study reveals various forms of interactivity and brings new evidence against the idea that “pure” cognition can be isolated from either materiality or sociality. The question becomes, then, not whether the use of objects helps or hinders problem solving, but how objects, bodies, and other people participate in it, even in controlled lab settings, and to what effect. Reflections are offered on why and how cognition stays wild (i.e., embodied, dialogical, and surprising) and what this means for experimental work.

Imaginary friend play in light of enactivism

Review of psychological data of how children engage in imaginary friend play (IFP) shows that it involves a lot of explicit embodied action and interaction with surrounding people and environments. However, IFP is still seen as principally an individualistic activity, where, in addition to those interactions, the actor has to mentally represent an absent entity in imagination in order to engage in IFP. This capacity is deemed necessary because the imaginary companion is absent or not real. This article proposes a proof of concept argument that enactivism can account for complex imaginary phenomena as imaginary friend play. Enactivism proposes thinking of IFP in a fundamentally different way, as an explicitly embodied and performative act, where one does not need to mentally represent absent entities. It reconceptualizes imagination involved in IFP as strongly embodied, and proposes that play environments have present affordances for social and normative interactions that are reenacted in IFP—there is no “absence” that needs to be mentally represented first. This article argues that IFP is performed and enacted in the world without having to be represented in the mind first, which best captures the social and interactive nature of this form of play.

Modeling in semiotics: an integrative update

This paper provides an integrative and updated view of modeling in semiotics. It postulates that the essence of modeling is supersession. In any act or instance of modeling, the model supersedes and is brought to the front for salience, accessibility, and operability, whereas at the same time the modeled recedes and exists in the background, inaccessible and inoperable. The paper goes on to differentiate between two major types of modeling, the underlying “existential modeling,” functioning as the fundamental scaffold and the genuine foundation of all other types of modeling as we know them, and the overlaying “semiotic modeling,” designating the process of creation and use of “forms of meaning,” a process that underlies both cognition and communication. By focusing on semiotic modeling, the paper features an unconventional view that casts a new light on the relation between a model and a sign and thus the relation between semiotic modeling and semiosis. Endorsing an embodied approach to meaning-making as semiotic modeling, the paper finds it important to stress the appropriateness and necessity of understanding the term “model” as a verb rather than as a noun, in that modeling is never static and should be properly regarded in terms of embodied action.

Performance beyond Drama

The field of performance studies has invigorated premodern scholarship by directing critical attention to live, ephemeral events that unsettle the textual archive. This special issue of JMEMS builds on this work by stepping away from the usual emphasis on theater and its texts to examine “performance” conceived more broadly. With case studies that range from a pig-clubbing “game” in medieval festivals to the gnomic utterances of secretive eighteenth-century philosophical rituals, these essays ask how we study a medium that has, by its nature, disappeared. How, in other words, do we engage textual remnants to locate traces of embodied action? A forum midway through the issue offers speculative and provocative answers to this question, and an afterword takes a wider view of the enterprise to think through its implications for periodization and historical analysis.

If-Clauses, Their Grammatical Consequents, and Their Embodied Consequence: Organizing Joint Attention in Guided Tours

In linguistics, if-clauses have attracted the interest of scholars working on syntax, typology and pragmatics alike. This article examines if-clauses as a resource available to tour guides for reorienting the visitors’ visual attention towards an object of interest. The data stem from 11 video-recorded tours in Italian, French, German and Dutch (interpreted into Flemish Sign Language). In this setting, guides recurrently use if-clauses to organize a joint focus of attention, by soliciting the visitors to bodily and visually rearrange. These clauses occur in combination with verbs of vision (e.g., to look), or relating to movement in space (e.g., to turn around). Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study pursues three interrelated objectives: 1) it examines the grammatical relationship that speakers establish between the if-clause and the projected main clause; 2) it analyzes the embodied conduct of participants in the accomplishment of if/then-constructions; 3) it describes if-clauses as grammatical resources with a twofold projection potential: a vocal-grammatical projection enabling the guide (or the addressees) to achieve a grammatically adequate turn-continuation, and an embodied-action projection, which solicits visitors to accomplish a situationally relevant action, such as reorienting gaze towards an object of interest. These projections do not run independently from each other. The analysis shows how, while producing an if-clause, guides adjust their emerging talk—through pauses, expansions and restarts—to the visitors’ co-occurring spatial repositioning. These practices are described as micro-sequential adjustments that reflexively affect turn-construction and embodied compliance. In addressing the above phenomena and questions, this article highlights the fundamentally adaptive, situated and action-sensitive nature of grammar.

Situating embodied action plans: pre-enacting and planning actions within knowledge communication in sports training

This article investigates action plans not as mental but as situated and observable activities in social interactions. I argue that projections and action plans can be understood as complex embodied practices through which actors prepare and coordinate further actions as part of a trajectory of a “communicative project”. “Projections” within ‘talk-in-interaction’ are a central topic of conversation analysis (CA), e.g. for the micro analysis of the organization of turn-taking or for the identification of turn-constructional units. Aside from former CA-studies on syntactic and prosodic features, current research using CA from a multimodal perspective shows how embodied resources, such as gestures, serve as “premonitory components” of communicative actions. Using video data of communications in sports training in trampolining, I will show how communicatively situated “embodied action plans” are applied within pre-enactments and instructions for the production of embodied knowledge. Pre-enactments not only serve the production of an ideal imagination to corporally produce intersubjectivity. Pre-enactments are also used temporally for the multimodal and visibly situating of embodied action plans, to which actors can coordinate and orientate their current and prospective communicative actions.