Barbara Montero

Does Bodily Awareness Interfere with Highly Skilled Movement

Abstract It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to ones movement is detrimental.

Proprioceiving someone else's movement

Proprioception—the sense by which we come to know the positions and movements of our bodies—is thought to be necessarily confined to the body of the perceiver. That is, it is thought that while proprioception can inform you as to whether your left knee is bent or straight, it cannot inform you as to whether someone elses knee is bent or straight. But while proprioception certainly provides us with information about the positions and movements of our own bodies, I will argue that it does more than that. Surprising as this may sound, one can proprioceive someone elses movement. To show this, I first present the results of some studies that suggest that in seeing others move, we kinesthetically represent their movement in our bodies. I then argue, by means of an analogy to prosthetic vision, that such ‘kinesthetic vision’ should count as proprioceiving others move.

The perils of automaticity

Classical theories of skill acquisition propose that automatization (i.e., performance requires progressively less attention as experience is acquired) is a defining characteristic of expertise in a variety of domains (e.g., Fitts & Posner, 1967). Automaticity is believed to enhance smooth and efficient skill execution by allowing performers to focus on strategic elements of performance rather than on the mechanical details that govern task implementation (Williams & Ford, 2008). By contrast, conscious processing (i.e., paying conscious attention to ones action during motor execution) has been found to disrupt skilled movement and performance proficiency (e.g., Beilock & Carr, 2001). On the basis of this evidence, researchers have tended to extol the virtues of automaticity. However, few researchers have considered the wide range of empirical evidence which indicates that highly automated behaviors can, on occasion, lead to a series of errors that may prove deleterious to skilled performance. Therefore, the purpose of the current paper is to highlight the perils, rather than the virtues, of automaticity. We draw on Reasons (1990) classification scheme of everyday errors to show how an overreliance on automated procedures may lead to 3 specific performance errors (i.e., mistakes, slips, and lapses) in a variety of skill domains (e.g., sport, dance, music). We conclude by arguing that skilled performance requires the dynamic interplay of automatic processing and conscious processing in order to avoid performance errors and to meet the contextually contingent demands that characterize competitive environments in a range of skill domains.

With infinite utility, more needn't be better

How should a utilitarian act in an infinite world? Faced with the eternity of time, for example, how should he or she choose among actions whose consequences extend infinitely into the future? Similarly, in a world with infinitely many people, how should a utilitarian deliberate in the face of an infinite spectrum of utility values? The philosophical puzzle here is the very meaning of utilitarianism in such worlds; for in an infinite world it may not be possible to apply the utilitarian directive to add up the total utility because the resulting infinite sum may not make mathematical sense. To give one example, i f the happiness of the individuals in a world follows the pattern 1, -2, 3, -4, 5, -6 . . . , then the utilitarian directive to add up the total utility leads to the mathematically meaningless sum 1-2+3-4+5-6..-, which fails to converge to any finite or infinite value. So it is difficult to see how one can assign an overall numerical utility value to this world. A fundamental feature of utilitarianism in finite worlds is that it evaluates worlds in isolation, expressing their overall value in a single number, the total utility sum. Perhaps in the infinite situation we want to assign a more abstract, non-numerical overall utility value to worlds. Once we do this, we can then compare it to other worlds and thereby learn its place in the partial order of flae relative worth of worlds) An action is permissible for a utilitarian, then, i f no alternative leads to a better world. 2 What we need in order to solve the puzzle are general utilitarian guidelines that instruct us how to adjudicate the relative goodness of two infinite worlds. In short, we want to know how to compare worlds with infinitely many bearers of utility. Recently in the philosophical literature, several authors have proposed general principles to do exactly this. 3 One of the most basic suggestions put forth is that i f every

New Inconsistencies in Infinite Utilitarianism: is Every World Good, Bad or Neutral?

In the context of worlds with infinitely many bearers of utility, we argue that several collections of natural Utilitarian principles--principles which are certainly true in the classical finite Utilitarian context and which any Utilitarian would find appealing--are inconsistent.

Physicalism Without Dependence

The physical world, as Ted Honderich points out in his book Actual Consciousness, is almost invariably thought of as necessarily objective. What exactly this means is controversial. However, the rough idea is that there is no aspect of the physical world that can, in principle, be experienced by only one person. As such, physicalism would be refuted by irreducible subjective facts—facts, for example, about what my conscious experience of seeing red is like that cannot be fully conveyed in objective terms about light reflectances, the physiology of color vision and so forth. Athough Honderich pushes against the conception of the physical as inhospitable to private, subjective experience, I argue that he does not go far enough.