1,721,032 research outputs found
Embodied Bounded Rationality.
No full textThere is little doubt that one of Simon’s key contributions throughout his scientific career - if not the main one - was rooting the notion of bounded rationality in cognitive psychology (Simon, 1976). He called his notion of bounded rationality in the cognitive psychology realm ‘cognitivism’ (Haugeland, 1978), an approach, also known as the ‘information-processing’ approach, which he contributed to affirming together with his colleague Allen Newell starting in the mid-1950s. According to cognitivism, cognition works through the internal (i.e. mental) manipulation of representations of the external environment accomplished through referential ‘symbols’ (e.g., Newell & Simon, 1972). Connecting Simon’s theory of cognition to his theory of rationality is the notion that cognition works in a way that is necessary and sufficient for intelligent behavior (what is known as the ‘physical symbol system hypothesis’, see Newell & Simon, 1976). The idea that results from integrating Simon’s view of cognition with his view of bounded rationality is that rationality is a “process and product of thought” (Simon, 1978) in which the internal bounds of reason (Simon, 1955) adapt to the external bounds of the environment (Simon, 1956) in a disembodied fashion. In this picture, in fact, there is no place for flesh and blood. Patokorpi (2008) has emphasized that there is an inner tension in Simon’s thought, as on the one hand he was a strong advocate for a realistic approach to the bounds of rationality while, on the other hand, he represented them through the ‘unbounded’ power of digital computation and the metaphor of computers. This inner tension, which did not simply concern Simon’s thought but an entire generation of cognitive scientists, would have huge consequences in the history of cognitive psychology. In the early 1990s, Newell and Simon’s physical symbol system hypothesis was questioned when the ‘embodied robots’ designed by Rodney Brooks proved able to simulate simple forms of intelligent behavior by externalizing most of cognition onto the physical properties of environments, thus dispensing with abstract symbolic processing (Brooks, 1991). This is just one instance from the recent history of cognitive science pointing to the fact that while bounded rationality remains a pivotal notion in behavioral economics and economic psychology, new theoretical views and massive experimental evidence in cognitive science have led to supersede cognitivism and its abstract representation of cognition (Wallace et al., 2007). Contemporary cognitive psychology emphasizes that cognition is ‘embodied’, as it constitutively depends on body states, on the morphological traits of the human body, and on the sensory-motor system (see, e.g., Wilson, 2002). As such, it can be said to introduce another ‘bound’ to human cognition, able to integrate the internal bounds represented by cognitive limitations and the external bounds of task environments: the human body. In this paper, we argue that, in so far as the human body represents a new bound for human cognition, it can also have an important role in the re-conceptualization of bounded rationality. Since the new approach of embodied cognition is so recent, it is still rather plural and variegated, and as such far from a stable synthesis (for reviews on the issue of conceptual pluralism in embodied cognition see the classic Wilson, 2002; for more recent reviews, see Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Clark, 2008; Kiverstein & Clark, 2009). Without the pretension to be exhaustive, here is a list of classic books on the idea that the body is a constitutive part of cognition: Varela, Thompson, & Rosch (1991); Clancey (1997); Clark, (1997); Lakoff & Johnson (1999); Rowlands (1999); Shapiro (2004); Gallagher (2005); Pfeifer & Bongard (2006). As a matter of terminology, although different labels have been used to identify and distinguish different views of embodiment, we will refer to them all by means of the common synthetic label ‘embodied cognition’ (Calvo & Gomila, 2008; Shapiro, 2014)
Bounded rationality, enactive problem solving, and the neuroscience of social interaction
No full textThis article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decision making, which stems from the subjective expected utility theory of Savage (1954) that itself extended the analysis by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). On this view, the cognitive psychology of decision making precisely reflects the conceptual structure of formal decision theory. This article shows that there is an alternative way to understand decision making by recovering Newell and Simon’s account of problem solving, developed in the framework of bounded rationality, and inserting it into the more recent research program of embodied cognition. Herbert Simon emphasized the importance of problem solving and differentiated it from decision making, which he considered a phase downstream of the former. Moreover according to Simon the centre of gravity of the rationality of the action lies in the ability to adapt. And the centre of gravity of adaptation is not so much in the internal environment of the actor as in the pragmatic external environment. The behaviour adapts to external purposes and reveals those characteristics of the system that limit its adaptation. According to Simon (1981), in fact, environmental feedback is the most effective factor in modelling human actions in solving a problem. In addition, his notion of problem space signifies the possible situations to be searched in order to find that situation which corresponds to the solution. Using the language of embodied cognition, the notion of problem space is about the possible solutions that are enacted in relation to environmental affordances. The correspondence between action and the solution of a problem conceptually bypasses the analytic phase of the decision and limits the role of symbolic representation. In solving any problem, the search for the solution corresponds to acting in ways that involve recursive feedback processes leading up to the final action. From this point of view, the new term enactive problem solving summarizes this fusion between bounded and embodied cognition. That problem solving involves bounded cognition means that it is through the problem solver’s enactive interaction with environmental affordances, and especially social affordances that it is possible to construct the processes required for arriving at a solution. Lastly the concept of enactive problem solving is also able to explain the mechanisms underlying the adaptive heuristics of rational ecology. Its adaptive function is effective both in practical and motor tasks as well as in abstract and symbolic ones
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
