Sune Vork Steffensen

Human Interactivity: Problem-Solving, Solution-Probing and Verbal Patterns in the Wild

This chapter presents an interactivity-based approach to human problem-solving in the wild. It introduces the notion of ‘interactivity’, here defined as sense-saturated coordination that contributes to human action. On this view, interactivity is an ontological substrate that can be studied as interaction, as cognition, or as ecological niche production. While the chapter theoretically argues in favour of a unified, trans-disciplinary approach to interactivity, it turns its attention to the cognitive ecology of human problem-solving. It does so by presenting a method of Cognitive Event Analysis, that leads to a detailed analysis of how a problem in the wild is being solved. The analysis addresses the cognitive dynamics of how two persons in a work setting reach an insight into the nature of a problem. These dynamics include the spatial organisation of the workplace, the interbodily dynamics between the two participants (especially in relation to gaze and the manual handling of papers), and verbal patterns that prompt them to simulate how the problem appears to a third party. The chapter concludes that human problem-solving is far less linear and planned than assumed in much work on the topic. Rather that problem-solving, it appears as solution-probing in real-time. The cognitive trajectory to a viable solution is thus self-organised, unplanned, and on the edge of chaos.

Cognitive Events in a Problem-solving Task: A Qualitative Method for Investigating Interactivity in the 17 Animals Problem

ABSTRACT Outside the cognitive psychologists laboratory, problem-solving is an activity that takes place in a rich web of interactions involving people and artefacts. This interactivity is constituted by fine-grained action–perception cycles, and it allows a reasoners comprehension of the problem to emerge from a coalition of internal and external resources. Taking an ecological approach to problem-solving, this paper introduces a qualitative method, Cognitive Event Analysis, for studying the fine-grained interactivity between a problem-solving agent and his/her environment. To demonstrate the potential of this method, it is used to study a single subject solving the so-called 17 Animals problem using a material model. The fine-grained procedure allows tracking the solution to a serendipity that was brought about because of the participants aesthetic considerations and a change in her perceptual figure-ground configuration. While a qualitative single-case method cannot prove specific models of problem-solving, it questions prevalent mentalist models, and it generates new hypotheses on insight problem-solving, because it allows the researcher to attend to outliers and to variability on a fast and fine-grained between-measurement timescale.

Insight with hands and things

Two experiments examined whether different task ecologies influenced insight problem solving. The 17 animals problem was employed, a pure insight problem. Its initial formulation encourages the application of a direct arithmetic solution, but its solution requires the spatial arrangement of sets involving some degree of overlap. Participants were randomly allocated to either a tablet condition where they could use a stylus and an electronic tablet to sketch a solution or a model building condition where participants were given material with which to build enclosures and figurines. In both experiments, participants were much more likely to develop a working solution in the model building condition. The difference in performance elicited by different task ecologies was unrelated to individual differences in working memory, actively open-minded thinking, or need for cognition (Experiment 1), although individual differences in creativity were correlated with problem solving success in Experiment 2. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the prevailing metatheoretical commitment to methodological individualism that places the individual as the ontological locus of cognition.

Meaning Emergence in the Ecology of Dialogical Systems

Abstract This article is an empirically based theoretical contribution to the investigation of meaningmaking in the ecology of human interaction and interactivity. It presents an ecological perspective on meaning-making that pivots on how agents pick up information directly in their organism-environment-system; i.e. as an activity that does not presuppose inner cognitive operations. We pursue this line of thought by presenting an analysis of how a doctor and a nurse make a decision about a specific medical procedure (catheterisation) based on meaning-making activity. As we do not see meaning as a linguistic (symbolic) or a cognitive (representational) phenomenon external to an agent/user, but as emergent in coordinated interaction, we zoom in on how the practitioners recalibrate the organism-environmentsystem by shift ing between a multi-agentive mode and an individual mode. We use Cognitive Event Analysis to investigate how the agents oscillate between being a multi-agent-system with shared, tightly coordinated agency and a loosely coupled dialogical system where the individuals bring forth an understanding based on their professional backgrounds and expertise. On this view, an ecological approach to meaning-making takes a starting point in how local interaction is constrained by previous events, emergent affordances in the environment, and real-time inter-bodily dynamics. Accordingly, meaning-making is seen as a joint activity emerging from the system’s coordinative actions rather than as a result of individual interpretation of symbolic content.

The Emergence of the Subject

Following Karl Marx (Grundrisse) and J~rgen D~r (1973:45), one can distinguish between a phenomenons genetic and constitutive conditions. 1 The genetic conditions are the conditions under which the phenomenon is produced, and the constitutive conditions are the conditions under which the phenomenon is re-produced. Historical studies, including the study of the history of linguistic ideas, have both as object, since it is equally important to ask how and why a given phenomenon has arisen, as to ask how it is/has remained, i.e. why it has not disappeared. However, the trend within the history of linguistics tends to focus on the genetic conditions. In this paper I will follow this trend and investigate the genetic condition for the emergence of the subject notion in modern European grammar. The subject notion, as a theoretical term in modern linguistics, is the object of my Ph.D. thesis and the whole investigation of as well the genetic as the constitutive conditions will later appear as Steffensen forthcoming b. I sketch four phases in the development of the subject notion. I will explain these four phases with reference to the following theoretical positions:

Human Interactivity: Problem-Finding, Problem-Solving, and Verbal Patterns in the Wild

This chapter presents an interactivity-based approach to human problem-solving in the wild. It introduces the notion of ‘interactivity’, here defined as sense-saturated coordination that contributes to human action. On this view, interactivity is an ontological substrate that can be studied as interaction, as cognition, or as ecological niche production (section “Human Interactivity”). While the chapter theoretically argues in favour of a unified, anti-disciplinary approach to interactivity, it turns its attention to the cognitive ecology of human problem-solving. It does so by presenting a method of Cognitive Event Analysis (section “From Interactivity to Cognitive Events”), that leads to a detailed analysis of how a problem in the wild is being solved (section “The Invoice Case”). The analysis addresses the cognitive dynamics of how two persons in a work setting reach an insight into the nature of a problem, including the spatial organisation of the workplace, the interbodily dynamics between the two participants (especially in relation to gaze and the manual handling of papers), and verbal patterns that prompts them to simulate how the problem appears to a third party. The chapter concludes that human problem-solving is far less linear and planned than assumed in much work on the topic. Rather than problem-solving, it appears as solution-probing in real-time. The cognitive trajectory to a viable solution is thus self-organised, unplanned, and on the edge of chaos.

Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity

Abstract Human language is extraordinarily meaningful. Well-spoken or well-written passages can evoke our deepest emotions and elicit all manner of conscious and subconscious reactions. This is usually taken to be an insurmountable explanatory challenge for ecological approaches to cognitive science, the primary tools of which concern coordination dynamics in organism-environment systems. Recent work (Pattee, H. H. & J. Rączaszek-Leonardi 2012. Laws, Language, and Life. Dordrecht: Springer) has made headway in describing the meaningfulness of linguistic units — the kind of meaning that we perceive as mediated by specific symbols — within an ecological framework, by building an account based on Howard Pattee’s conceptualization of symbols as physical, replicable, historically-selected constraints on the dynamics of self-organizing systems (Pattee, H. H. 1969. How does a molecule become a message?. Developmental Biology 3(supplemental). 1016; Pattee, H. H. 1972. Laws and constraints, symbols and languages. In C. H. Waddington (ed.), Towards a Theoretical Biology, 248–258. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). In order to propose an “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning, this paper takes the following steps: first, it rejects the view of linguistic meaning as fully independent from organism-environment interactions, as exemplified by formal approaches in philosophical semantics. Second, it presents a cutting-edge example of an ecological approach to symbols, namely Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2009. Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. Pragmatics and Cognition 17(3). 653–676. DOI:10.1075/pandc.17.3.09ras; Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2016. How does a word become a message? An illustration on a developmental time-scale. New Ideas in Psychology 42, Supplement C: 46–55. DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.001) version of Pattee’s symbols-as-constraints model. Third, it reviews and critiques a recent attempt (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., I. Nomikou, K. J. Rohlfing & T. W. Deacon. 2018. Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology 30(1). 39–73) to integrate the symbols-as-constraints model with Terrence Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: W. W. Norton and Company; Deacon, T. W. 2011. The symbol concept. In M. Tallerman & K. R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 393–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press) semiotic view of symbols, arguing that the properties ascribed to linguistic symbols, both by Deacon and very widely throughout the cognitive sciences, are not properties of individual instances of linguistic action. Rather, they belong to a particular mode of description that draws generalizations across the phenomenological experience of many language users. Finally, it lays out the core components of a novel “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning. On this view, human beings engage in constant, hyper-flexible entrainment and enskillment that produces tremendous perceptual sensitivity to vocal and acoustic patterns. This sensitivity enables us to coordinate our in-the-moment behavior with large-scale behavioral patterns within a larger population, and to compare our own actions to those large-scale patterns. Thus, the most important contribution made by an interactivity-based approach is that it accounts adequately for the role played by population-level behavioral patterns in the control of short-timescale, here-and-now linguistic actions. In so doing, it offers the grounds for an ecological account of rich linguistic meaning.

Multiscale movement coordination dynamics in collaborative team problem solving

During collaborative problem solving (CPS), coordination occurs at different spatial and temporal scales. This multiscale coordination should play a functional role in facilitating effective collaboration. To evaluate this, we conducted a study of computer-based CPS with 42 dyadic teams. We used cross-wavelet coherence to examine movement coordination, extracted from videos, at several scales, and tested whether the observed coordination was greater than expected due to chance and due to task demands. We found that coordination at scales less than 2s was greater than chance and at most scales (except 16s, 1m, and 2m), was greater than expected due to task demands. Lastly, we observed that coherence at .25s and 1s scales was predictive of performance. However, when including relative phase, our results suggest that higher in-phase movement coordination at the 1s scale was the strongest predictor of CPS performance. Further, we used growth curve modeling to examine how movement coordination changes across the duration of the task and whether this is moderated by CPS performance. We found that coordination over the duration of the CPS task is quadratic (a U shape) and that better performing teams have higher coordination with a shallower curve. We discuss these findings and their relevance to understanding how low-level movement coordination facilitates CPS.