Implementable theory of mind, culture and activity - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Implementable theory of mind, culture and activity

Why?

To implement computer models of human creativity, learning and problem solving

e.g. story generation program

To inform design of systems to support learning and knowledge working

e.g. tutoring system

Vygotsky and Cognitive Science(Frawley,1997, MIT Press)

“Why should the social and computational mind go together?”

They often study the same problems

Context, creativity, development, consciousness, metacognition

They complement each other

Cognitive science needs a rich theory of mind in society
Sociocultural theory would benefit from an implementable theory of mind

Each can be read in terms of the other

There is nothing intrinsically noncomputational about sociocultural mind, and nothing inherently asocial about machines.
“Vygotsky proposed a protocybernetic account of mental processes”

Sociocomputationalism

About how the world is in the computational mind
Binding between an organism and the world affords unified stretches of experience (‘the world in the mind’)
The world itself is not the model, but rather the effectively computed world
The focus of sociocomputationalism is on how the world affords effectively computed activity
Not all aspects of the world are sociocomputationally effective. The effective aspects have a role in the language for processing.
“Sociocomputationalism is an account of the details of the opportunistic environmental control of thinking by certain aspects of language”

Sociocomputationalism (my interpretation)

A cybernetic not a symbolic computational theory
About external and internal constraint, interaction, dynamic control, and how the external is internalised
Language as mediation for (self and social) regulation

Language for mediation

Visibility

Lesion visible

Location

Cortical grey matter

Cerebral white matter

Periventricular

Margin

Graded

Shape

Irregular

Interior pattern

Unstructured heterogeneous

Size

Large

Intensity

Hyperintense

Other signs

Mass effect

Metarepresentation (Frawley)

Metaconsciousness is higher-order thought but not a data-structure, not a representation of another representation, but rather an awareness of a representation as a representation, originating in the socio-cultural resources for reflexivity, chiefly speech.
Two aspects to metarepresentation: content and bracketing
Content: a language to describe and refer to thought
Bracketing: a decoupling of the primary representation from reality into an imaginary situation (e.g. “this pencil is like a spacecraft”)
Autism is bracketing without content – a language for thought (perhaps overdeveloped) with a disrupted language of thought.

Socio-computational architectures (Frawley)

Need an architecture that “might accommodate explicit, self-reflexive focusing”
One that gives a role to higher thinking not as problem solving per se but as its management.
Central role to contextualised control of thought – both internal and external contextualisation

Conversation Theory(Gordon Pask)

A domain independent theory of the processes of coming to how
Not a theory of cognition, but of interaction, theory construction and communication
Derived from cybernetics
Radical constructivist epistemology
The cybernetic theory of conversations.
A conversation is the minimum necessary structure to enable learning

Radical constructivism

Systems theory, concerned with the coupling of organisms and environment
Radical constructivists “have taken seriously…the concept of knowledge as an adaptive function”
Cognition enables us to cope with the world of experience (rather than providing an “objective” representation of an external world)
Cognition as an evolutionary, self-organising process
Members of a species create shared ecological niches and consensual domains of interaction and communication.
The “models” an organism constructs as a result of adaptation are tacit.
“Gaining knowledge” is not the storing of representations, but the process of “coming to know”

Radical constructivism and language

Conversation is not the exchange of knowledge, but the process of becoming informed about each other’s “informings”
The “coordination of coordinations of coordinations”
Higher level coordinations are “tokens” for lower-level coordinations, (objects and events), which are themselves tokens for stabilities of sensori-motor activity and “structural coupling” with the environment

Pask’s contribution

Distinction between “psychological (p-) individuals” and “mechanical (m-) individuals”
There is no one to one correspondence between m- and p- individuals.
Consciousness is a property of a p-individual (a system that may potentially “know with itself”) not an m-individual.
The participants in a conversation are p-individuals. The conversation itself is a p-individual.
A conversation is the minimum necessary system (p-individual) that can learn

Conversation TheoryG. Pask (1975) ‘Minds and media in education and entertainment: some theoretical comments illustrated by the design and operation of a system for exteriorizing and manipulating individual theses’, in R. Trappl and G. Pask (eds.) Progress in Cybernetics and Systems Research IV, Wiley.

L language able to accommodate commands, questions, instructions

Mind organization expressed in L which, if set in motion, gives rise to thought, feeling or behaviour [very broad definition of mind! - includes e.g. theatre scripts, manifestos]

Medium processor in which a mind is realized (including brains, computing machines, machinery of theatrical production, political parties)

Individual the activity or motion permitted by an L nameable and personally pronominalized chunk of mind, such that, if it is realized and executed, its motion comprises a (logically) coherent set of beliefs. (Personalities, characters in plays, socio-political factions, if realized and executed in brains, actors, collections of brains, yield people, enactments of characters, cultures)

Pask – Distributed Cognition in Action

“There is no need to see minds as neatly encapsulated in brains connected by a network of channels called ‘the media’ ... I am inviting the reader to try out a different point of view; namely the image of a pervasive medium (or media) inhabited by minds in motion. Thus, media are characterized as computing systems, albeit of a peculiar kind. In our present state of knowledge it seems prudent to regard the media as heterogeneous, and rendered modular by the existence of specially unrestricted regions (brains, for example) capable of acting as L processors (though I have a hankering to imagine these regions are ultimately determned by programmatic rather than concrete localization). It is surely true that rather powerful computerized systems greatly reduce the differentiation of the medium and coalesce the specially unrestricted nodules, so that ‘interface barriers’ are less obtrusive than they used to be.”

Organisms

Media

Individuals

Communcation

as channels of communication

as program sharing and linguistic interaction

between individuals. Medium (M) as shading

Rescher’s two-cycle model

Why?

Metaphysical assumptions

Theoretical interpretations

Conceptual systems

How?

Models

Methods

Procedures

Application

Correction by coherence

Pragmatic correction

Conversational framework (after Pask)

Facility for mediating agreements

Offers theories and ideas

Re-describes theories

Teacher demonstrates or elicits models and problem solutions

Learner acts to build models and solve problems

Why questions and responses

Offers conceptions and explanations

Re-describes conceptions

Sets goals

Adjusts model

Teacher demonstrates or elicits models and problem solutions

How questions and responses

Acts

Modifies actions

Facility for practical model building

and problem solving

The inception of a spontaneous concept can usually be traced to a face-to-face meeting with a concrete situation, while a scientific concept involves from the first a ‘mediated’ attitude towards its object.

Vygotsky, Language and Thought (cited in Laurillard)

Exteriorising agreements

“In research (and in effective tutorial operations, also) understanding must be exteriorized for observation... To exteriorize an understanding means to establish a multilevel agreement between [individuals] A, B ... with respect of a topic T. ... The concrete equipment in which A and B model derivations [agreements] ... is also a medium. The composite medium couples the media, namely brain(s), in a conversation designed to elicit understanding.”

External Representations (Pask)

“It seems clear that there must be great advantages in providing both participants with an external representation of the subject matter through which topics can be identified and discussed. In this way, explanation can be initiated by either participant.”

External Representations

An external representation is a construct that

a) mediates conversation on a topic

b) is invested with meaning [models agreements]

A full learning conversation

Conversation about the how and why of a topic
Conversation about the how of learning (for example discussing study skills and reflecting on experiences as a learner)
Conversation about purposes, the why of learning, where the emphasis is on encouraging personal autonomy and accepting responsibility for one’s own learning

The complexity of coming to know(Laurillard)

For learning to success, the student must:

Apprehend the structure of the discourse
Interpret the forms of representation
Act on descriptions of the world
Adjust actions to fit the task goals
Adjust descriptions to fit the topic goal
Reflect on the cycle of goal, action, feedback

For Pask, understanding a topic means that the learner can ‘teachback’ the topic by providing both non-verbal demonstrations and verbal explanations of ‘how’ and ‘why’