Imperfect Cognitions

Tim Fawns is a Fellow in Clinical Education and Deputy Programme Director of the MSc Clinical Education at Edinburgh Medical School at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2017, and his primary research interests are memory, digital technology and education. In this post, he discusses themes from his recent paper " Blended memory: A framework for understanding distributed autobiographical remembering with photography " in Memory Studies. Recording live music on mobile phones, posting photos of breakfast on social media, taking the same photo six times when a friend with a better camera has already taken it... these are some of the many idiosyncratic photography practices I have encountered during my research into memory and photography, alongside traditional examples of family and holiday pictures. From reading literature from cultural studies, media studies, and human computer interaction, followed by lots of informa...

The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology formed in 2017, with the aim to “promote interaction in Australasia among philosophers and psychologists, broadly construed to include anyone interested in scientific study of the mind”. The ASPP held their inaugural conference at Macquarie University in December 2018, and I was lucky enough to go along. Here’s a little of what I learned there... If you’ve ever been perplexed by the prevalence of a viewpoint or political stance that you don’t share, then you might be wondering: how do we step outside of the epistemic echo chambers in which we find ourselves in our increasingly online world? Kate Devitt and her team at Queensland University of Technology are on the case.  Inspired by the finding that increasing the number and diversity of hypotheses considered can improve decision making, particularly in an organisational and strategic setting, Kate and her team have built an interactive platform which encourag...

Today's post is by Daniel D. Hutto and Anco Peeters. Daniel D. Hutto  (above right) is Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology and Associate Dean of Law, Humanities and the Arts, at the  University of Wollongong.  and member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts. His recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. He is best known for promoting enactive and embodied cognition that is non-representational at root, and for his narrative practice hypothesis about folk psychology. Anco Peeters  (above left) is a doctoral student and tutor at the University of Wollongong. His doctoral project investigates the compatibility of functionalism and enactivism and compares these frameworks in terms of their explanatory power with respect to mind-technology interaction. Attempts to accommodate a range of empirical findings about memory have provoked daring new thinking about what lies at the roots ...

In this post Alex Miller Tate (AMT) interviews John Sutton (JS), pictured below, about his views on a number of research topics, many of which were explored at  the Distributed Cognitive Ecologies of Collaborative Embodied Skill  workshop. AMT: Hello John, and thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed for the Imperfect Cognitions blog! Let’s start with quite a general question: could you please clarify for some of our readers the different research areas that came together at your workshop? JS: Sure! The workshop investigated the intersection of three broad research topics that have interested myself and others for some time. The first is the notion of Collaborative or Joint Action, the second is the Psychology and Philosophy of Skill, and the third is the Embodied and Distributed Cognition paradigm. Lab studies of Joint Action have tended to focus on various kinds of synchrony amongst actors – such as situations where two people who have just met up wil...

This post is by Alex Miller Tate (University of Birmingham), reporting from an event taking place in London at the Institute of Philosophy on 26th May 2017, entitled " The Distributed Cognitive Ecologies of Collaborative Embodied Skill " . Philosophers, psychologists, and others share an interest in how human beings act in the world. In particular, scholars are fascinated by how humans develop and then intelligently deploy complex suites of skills and abilities, successfully engaging with an equally complex and rapidly changing environment. Even more impressively, humans often coordinate their actions with others – synchronising with and complementing the actions of their peers in collaborative endeavours as varied as football games and musical performances. This workshop, organised by John Sutton of Macquarie University , was focused around the investigation of this fascinating topic, with particular emphasis on ways in which our complex, structured, material an...

I’m delighted to join the philosophy department of the University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow working on Project PERFECT as it enters its third year. In recent research I’ve been investigating the nature of the implicit/explicit distinction, and considering whether there is a role for agency when implicit cognition drives behaviour. I was awarded my PhD earlier this year, with a thesis on implicit social bias. It’s previously been argued that implicit cognitions do not express our evaluative agency, and that we cannot be held responsible for their manifestation. I’ve argued that just because some cognition bears some or all of the putative features of the implicit, this is not a reliable heuristic for its exclusion from being considered agential. Agency may involve an interplay between implicit and explicit processes, and whether implicit features count as agential might only be illuminated by zooming out and viewing agency as extended over time, against the back...