Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi talk will regard:

Can we Begin with Context?

Ecological and enactive methods integrate for the study of cognition in interaction

Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
Human Interactivity and Language Lab
University of Warsaw

Our cognition develops in a social world that is structured by the presence and actions of others. The “action-first” cognition is immanently for co-action: it arises by participating in meaningful events with living and feeling beings. In the first months of life a reliable “caregiver permanence” is much more important than any “object permanence”; control over the world and agency develops in engagement, by learning the structures and timings of participation. Ecological psychology seems to have adequate theoretical tools to understand perception and action in engagement. Due to its radical empiricist roots, it is concerned not with individual mind cognizing an independent world, but, rather with relations, the primary of which is the relation between the organism and its environment. Dynamical systems tools used by ecological psychology are able to capture the complexity and multi-scalar nature of engagements, while the recognition of the ubiquitous environmental structures orient researchers towards description of the world in terms of standing patterns of behavior emergent from, and, in turn, constraining co-action. Enactivism can complement this understanding by foregrounding human experience as an omni-present relatum in every perception and action. Our own movement is felt in its “kineasthetic livelines” and the various nature of engagements can be distinguished on the basis of our first- and second-person experience. In my talk I would like to point to the promise of integrating these two approaches for the study of mind and cognition arising in human interaction, and point to the most urgent challenges that face development of the concrete methods to capture experience in engagement.

For more information see: Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi.