Professional Documents
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Juan-Ignacio Pozo
To cite this article: Juan-Ignacio Pozo (2017) Learning beyond the body: from embodied
representations to explicitation mediated by external representations / Aprender más allá del
cuerpo: de las representaciones encarnadas a la explicitación mediada por representaciones
externas, Infancia y Aprendizaje, 40:2, 219-276, DOI: 10.1080/02103702.2017.1306942
culturales. Este artículo asume este enfoque, que requiere un nuevo diseño de
los entornos de aprendizaje, basados en esa experiencia corporal, situados y
con un fuerte contenido emocional, pero también sostiene que aprender desde
el cuerpo será insuficiente si no logramos ir más allá, promoviendo la
explicitación de esas representaciones encarnadas e implícitas por procesos
de supresión, suspensión y redescripción representacional mediados por dife-
rentes tipos de representaciones externas. Pero esa explicitación requiere
también procesos de implicitación, sin los cuales no será posible, literalmente,
la incorporación de los conocimientos adquiridos a la mente encarnada.
Palabras clave: aprendizaje simbólico; cognición encarnada; explicitación;
implicitación; representaciones externas
Psychology locked away in the Chinese room: from the AAA mind to the
EEE mind
In the well-known Chinese room parable from John Searle (1984), a non-speaker
of Chinese exchanges, with the outside, symbols that are void of meaning
according to certain established syntactic rules, thus giving the appearance of
exchanging messages in Chinese, but without actually understanding or learning
any Chinese. Going a step beyond this parable, we can say that cognitive
psychology in general, and the psychology of learning in particular, have lived
for decades locked away in their neat and aseptic laboratories, first introducing
several types of ‘Chinese symbols’ — be it letters, numbers, syllables without
meaning, isolated words or even marks, acoustic signals or geometric or abstract
shapes — to subjects through a tachistoscope, and later to participants via the
computer screen, measuring the time taken to recognize the symbols and then
differentiating or categorizing them along with the errors committed.
Such research, in the tradition initiated by Ebbinghaus’s use of stimuli void of
meaning to study cognitive processes in order to avoid the ‘contamination’ that
might cause the inclusion of some meaningful content for the subject, has
undoubtedly provided considerable knowledge over how the mind works.
However, this knowledge is largely restricted to tasks that are devoid of stimuli
or relevant contexts, both from the point of view of biological adaptation needs
and functions and cultural activities themselves. In fact, there exists a growing
idea that, outside of the Chinese room or these aseptic tasks, the operation of these
different processes (attention, perception, memory, intelligence and, for our pur-
poses in particular, learning) is so contaminated by the content or the tasks’
context that, in fact, the cognitive operation itself is essentially comprised of
those contaminating contents or meanings. It is additionally thought that elim-
inating them seriously alters the image of how the human mind works and,
therefore, of how people learn and of how learning can be supported through
psychological intervention.
Thus, from the perspective of information processing, which dominated psy-
chological research for several decades and sustained what is known today as
cognitive psychology, the mind is understood as a processor of physical symbols.
In the words of Glenberg, De Vega, and Graesser (2008, p. 2), ‘A symbol is a
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 221
and of course also to conceptions and practices over learning and education
(Claxton, 2005).
This dualism, which separates the mind (or, at other times, the soul) from the
body, the internal from the external, reason from emotion, the formal from
informal, the individual from society, etc., is rooted in a history and in philoso-
phical traditions that make it impossible for us to stop here (for example, see
Claxton, 2005, 2015; Porter, 2003). This prohibition of the body, with its sensi-
tivity exacerbated in front of certain stimuli or environments, its proximity to the
concrete world, not only cognitive but also emotional, its needs and preferences
that are not at all arbitrary, its affiliations and its phobias, etc., has begun to crack
confronted with the impetus of what is called embodied cognition, an approach
already extended to the educational field as instructional principles for the design
of learning environments (Black, Segal, Vitale, & Fadjo, 2012; Castro-Alonso,
Ayres, & Paas, 2015; Mayer, 2014) or even of embodied pedagogy (Nguyen &
Larson, 2015). From this perspective, the essence of cognitive activity is no
longer just in the content, in the meaning of the activities and tasks, but resides
mostly in the sense that these activities and tasks have for those who live them, in
the action and experience lived with the mediation of body structures that give
meaning to that cognitive activity rather than in the arbitrary, abstract and amodal
associations between units of information (Glenberg et al., 2008) In opposition to
that dualism, Damasio (1994), from this new approach of the embodied mind,
pointed out that not only is the mind in the body, something that no one doubts,
but above all ‘the body is in the mind’.
Research over different cognitive processes has been progressively influenced
by that body heat. Processes that deal with the supposedly most elemental
functions, or those most attached to the external world and therefore to somato-
sensory activity such as attention or perception, are not the only ones that have
been embodied. Even processes dealing with functions that are called superior or
abstract (thinking, memory, language, understanding and learning) are also impos-
sible to understand outside the framework of the embodied mind (e.g., Calvo &
Gomila, 2008; de Vega, Glenberg, & Graesser, 2008). As shown by Lakoff and
Johnson (1980), it is no longer just that language (for example) is comprised of a
set of metaphors whose origin is the body and action (there are hard and soft
sciences, solid and weak arguments, distant people and strong personalities); it is
that even the cerebral areas that process things such as physical temperature and
‘social heat’ are the same in primates as well as in humans (Claxton, 2015). It is
therefore not surprising that feeling physical heat (holding a cup of hot coffee, for
example) induces warmer or more affectionate judgments when assessing a
stranger’s personality (Williams & Bargh, 2008).
Moving once more from the laboratory to the classroom, the learning of
traditionally abstract disciplines such as mathematics or science, which in their
own way have constituted another type of Chinese room where students are
locked away during school hours, is largely explained today from the embodied
cognition approach, in other words, from the way our body restricts the way in
which we feel and live objects and the relationships between them (e.g., Bautista
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 223
& Roth, 2012; Núñez, 2008; Pozo & Gómez Crespo, 2005; Roth & Lawless,
2002). Not even disciplines emblematic of AAA cultures have been able to resist
the push of this new science of embodied cognition.
This new approach rejects the AAA (Arbitrary, Abstract and Amodal) mind
that Glenberg et al. (2008) referred to for adopting, according to Rowlands (2010),
a new EEEE mind. That new EEEE mind would not only be Embodied, but also
Enactive (based on action rather than on the contemplation of the world),
Embedded (always situated in an environment from which it cannot be separated
without losing its meaning) and Extended (since the mental action would be
extended beyond the brain, not just to the rest of the body, but to the extracorpor-
eal material and symbolic resources in which it is supported). It is from these
ideas that we can trace the main features of this new approach, which opens up
new prospects for the research of learning in specific fields of knowledge.
However, they also allow us to understand some of their limitations. We will
see that in order to understand the mental activity and to promote it through
educational intervention an embodied approach (EEEE) that overcomes restric-
tions of the AAA mind, split or dissociated from the body, will be required. Yet
this embodied mind will also not be sufficient in and of itself if it is not capable of
literally incorporating cultural resources, which in the form of external representa-
tions enable us to go beyond the body. If cognitive activity and learning in school
are not possible within the walls of the Chinese room, they will also not be
possible if we are not able to go beyond the body. We begin our argument for
learning from the body in order to later seek to go beyond it, but without ever
abandoning it, as happens in the AAA approach.
Learning from the body: the embodied nature of our implicit representations
In opposition to studies on verbal learning based on meaningless syllables, lists of
words and associated pairs, those that analysed learning in specific fields of
knowledge (science, mathematics, history, music, etc.) have been predominant
in the last few decades, which has allowed the identification of numerous repre-
sentations specific to those fields that tend to be a product of an implicit learning,
linked more to informal online everyday activity than to formal offline learning.
Many of these intuitive representations, which have been called by various names
(spontaneous concepts, erroneous ideas, implicit theories, etc.), seem to have their
origin in early experiences already evident in babies, at the same time that they
tend to be very difficult to change even with the design of specific instructional
strategies, resulting in an entire field of research around so-called conceptual
change (Vosniadou, 2008, 2013).
The approach of embodied cognition provides a good theoretical framework
for understanding the nature of these intuitive representations that are so ubiqui-
tous and resistant to change in formal learning or academic contexts, since they
would be the result of restrictions that somatosensory structures impose when
interacting with the world in these specific fields. Thus, for example, from the
time they are still in the cradle, babies already represent the fall or movement of
224 J.-I. Pozo
objects in the form of actions and perceptions (Göksun, George, Hirsh‐Pasek, &
Golinkoff, 2013; Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 1999; Spelke, 1984). Given that our
body is very sensitive to weight, force or the perceptible movement of objects,
these ideas have a strong presence in our intuitive physical knowledge. In con-
trast, concepts further away from our embodied or direct sensory experience, such
as volume, pressure, acceleration or Newton’s law of inertia, are very difficult to
incorporate into students’ minds (Sanborn, Mansinghka, & Griffiths, 2013). In the
same way, compared to the kinetic-molecular model that is studied in classrooms
to account for the nature of matter and its changes, our embodied representations
of solids, liquids and gases give rise to a distorted representation, from the
scientific point of view, of the functioning of particles (Pozo & Gómez Crespo,
2005) that students tend to attribute observable macroscopic properties, in such a
way that the particles expand when a gas expands or they adopt the same shape
and colour as the macroscopic objects of which they are a part, which leads some
students to even talk about ‘wet particles of water’.
These intuitive representations have, in fact, a dual nature (Pozo, 2014): they
are embodied as they are constructed from the body’s interactions with objects,
but they are also implicit since they activate without a person being aware that he/
she is using them. In fact, people quite frequently explicitly maintain certain ideas
(formatted in a symbolic code of an AAA nature) whilst they implicitly act and
represent the world according to other representations of an EEEE character,
sometimes even opposed to those that they explicitly manifest. Examples of this
can be found not only in the representation of the physical world, where even
graduates in sciences do not know how to use acquired explicit knowledge to
solve everyday problems (Pozo & Gómez Crespo, 2005), but in intuitive psychol-
ogy itself and in interpersonal relationships, a field in which that ‘dissociation’ is
very common. Numerous studies related to so-called implicit or unconscious
social cognition (Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005) show that in our social inter-
actions we tend to represent ourselves to ourselves and to others according to the
emotional and bodily states that those social situations and contexts induce in us.
These are emotional states that we tend — very often in a biased way — to
attribute to the behaviour of those with whom we interact, rather than recognizing
the contextual stimuli and the bodily states that intercede in those states. Thus, for
example, reading a text while biting a pencil between the lips, which forces a
grimace of a smile, causes us to perceive the protagonist of a story as more
friendly (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988), or having a chance meeting with a
disagreeable person causes us to attribute unfriendly features to the protagonist of
another story. Furthermore, people who have received Botox injections in their
face, which causes a more rigid facial expression, are less able to recognize facial
expressions when looking at photos of strangers’ faces (Hennenlotter et al., 2009).
A dissociation between implicit embodied representations (the somatosensory
states associated with physical actions or emotions) and our explicit knowledge of
them (the attributions or explanations that we give ourselves over the reasons for
these often biased emotional states or physical actions) is therefore very frequently
produced. A similar dissociation is produced in another field particularly linked to
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 225
learning and teaching (Pozo et al., 2006). We know today that both teachers and
students maintain implicit representations over knowledge and its nature and
acquisition, which are closely linked to an intuitive realism that is once again
rooted in our embodied representations and according to which we assume that
the world is as we view it, and learn from it by imitating or copying properties of
reality. However, objectivity in any field is actually an extremely costly and
sophisticated cultural conquest or construction, requiring a lot of instruction
(Claxton, 2015) because it implies overcoming that primary intuitive realism,
supported in a primary cognitive system that neither doubts nor asks questions
(Marcus, 2003), since its goals are more pragmatic than epistemic (Pozo, 2014).
However, the way our body restricts, through action and perception, how we
process information and represent the world in different fields not only generates
alternative conceptions or representations in those fields, but by its very nature has
a functional primacy with regard to explicit knowledge (Claxton, 2005;
Kahneman, 2011; Reber, 1993) based on symbolic or explicit representations
that can be communicated or translated into a symbolic or algebraic code. By
its evolutionary design, from a phylogenetic as well as an ontogenetic perspective,
EEEE online representations are more natural, rapid and effective in the human
mind than the more recent, complex and elaborate AAA offline representations.
We will discuss the foundations of the efficiency and immediacy of the embodied
mind, its representational nature and how the constraints imposed by this nature
promote certain learning experiences while limiting others.
(such as ‘Laura became scared and got out of there’) hinders the fulfillment of an
action plan that is corporeally incompatible with the content of that statement (for
example, approaching to pick something up). We understand language, and the
world, with the entire body. This mind/body split in which a large part of our
culture and cognitive identity has been based does not exist. In the beginning it is
not the Word, or Logos. In the beginning it is the body, and we represent the
world and learn through it.
In this way, whereas in the mind constituted by ‘physical symbols’ representa-
tions are organized in the form of propositions, like a dictionary, in the embodied
mind, knowledge is first and foremost a repertoire of constraints and bodily
actions (Wilson & Foglia, 2015). It is in fact action that characterizes the body.
Our embodied mind is also an enactive mind, a mind in motion. We know that
organisms — or, more generally, systems — require a representational activity,
and with it a capacity for learning, when they need to travel or move around in a
changing environment (Claxton, 2015; Pozo, 2001). The best metaphor for this is
the Ascidia, a marine animal, which when it settles on a rock and does not need to
move itself around anymore, absorbs its own brain (Dennett, 1993).
This idea of the mind in motion or in action has even stronger neuropsycho-
logical support. Just as studies on ‘mirror neurons’ (Iacoboni, 2008; Rizzolatti &
Sinigaglia, 2006) have shown, the perception of apes, and also of humans, is
supported by other neurons, called canonical. In those laboratory studies, the
canonical neurons were activated or fired equally when the monkeys grabbed an
object with their hand and when they saw an object that could be grabbed. In
opposition to the traditional distinction between knowledge and action — or mind
and body — in our culture and between perception and action in scientific
psychology, these studies showed that neither the monkeys nor the people repre-
sented the object itself, but instead the actions that could be performed with it in
the form of a ‘vocabulary of acts’ (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). Therefore, we
understand the world from our represent/action of it (Pozo, 2001), through the
actions that our body can execute. More than just a fixed and closed map of each
object, what we hold in our mind are films, and above all else, action films. But
those embodied representations are the evolutionary answer to the demands of a
concrete environment.
This new mind is not only embodied and enactive, but at any given moment it
is also embedded, situated in a concrete setting. It is not just that the mind and
body cannot be separated, but that the mind and body cannot be separated from
the environment either. Cognitive activity is always situated online in the context
of the real world. And it is not only located in a space, but also within the
parameters of real time (Wilson, 2002). While in soft versions of the embodied
mind the environment is only a framework that divides mental activity (Wilson,
2002), in more radical or hard visions (e.g., Clark, 1997, 2011; Rowlands, 2010)
the environment is part of the mind itself, so that mental activity is not only
unfolded in the brain and in the rest of the body, but even beyond the body in all
cultural objects, mechanisms or resources that make it possible. In this way, as
Rowlands (2010) pointed out, if we accept that mental activity unfolds beyond the
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 227
brain, not only throughout the entire body but even beyond the body, the focus of
the embodied mind, which has received a large part of its empirical support from
research based on the use of neuroimaging, becomes a theoretical antidote against
some growing neuropsychological reductionism, which identifies mind and brain.
If the principle of an embodied mind in the environment or even of just an
embodied mind is assumed, Pinker’s claim (1997, p. 21) that ‘the mind is what
the brain does’, assumed today mostly by cognitive psychology, would no longer
hold true since a large part of mental activity is ‘outsourced’ in not only the
physical environment but above all the cultural one in which the mind is
embedded, either through objects that make it possible (e.g., the stick with
which a monkey manages to remove ants from a tree or with which he breaks
open a piece of fruit), or particularly in the form of cultural mechanisms (e.g.,
external representational systems such as numbers, texts, watches, etc.), which
expand or extend mental functions beyond these primary bodily constraints (Martí
& Pozo, 2000; Pérez Echeverría, Martí, & Pozo, 2010; Pérez Echeverría &
Scheuer, 2009)
Thus, that mind embedded in the environment ends up being an extended
mind or, if wanted, largely externalized. Of course, according to Rowlands (2010),
nobody argues that mental action is conducted without the involvement of the
brain, but what is affirmed is that mental activity does not just take place in the
brain and neither is it just in the body. Much of cognitive activity is discharged
into the environment, so it cannot be studied outside of that context given that our
cognitive activity uses resources from the environment, thus reducing the cogni-
tive load of tasks. According to Clark (1997, 2011), a basic principle for the
design of artificial intelligence systems, and also of the embodied mind, is to not
store or process information in a costly manner if the environment’s structure and
its operations in it can be used as substitutes. In this way, the environment is part
of the cognitive system, so that the unit of analysis, both in the research and the
design of learning environments, should never be the mind itself, not even in its
mind/body version, but the complex system of mind/body/environment, the
extended mind. It is enough to try a multiplication problem that is not very
complex, such as 17 x 14, to understand the need to extend or externalize the
mental activity beyond the body itself to a piece of paper or a calculator. The mind
extends not only beyond the brain, but also beyond the body.
Not all authors are in agreement in assuming that the environment, and
especially culture, are part of mental activity and not just a context in which it
occurs (for example, Wilson, 2002). However, it is difficult to deny that the
environment forms part of mental activity itself, in the sense that it structures
and organizes it, that it does not just externally provide resources for a more
efficient operation. It is not only that our personal memory is today extended or
outsourced to external material objects (Clark, 1997, 2011) in such a way that if
we lose our mobile phone or planner we lose part of our personal memory, but
that those devices of a cultural nature end up formatting or organizing our own
mental activity upon being internalized. Returning to the previous example, it is
not only that we use material objects external to the mind to perform most of our
228 J.-I. Pozo
Therefore, the clock or calendar, just like numbers, written texts or ICT
themselves, are not only instruments or external systems that extend or expand
our sense of time, but they are first and foremost cultural artifacts that trans-
form the way we feel it and live it in our own body. Even though in the
beginning it is the body with its embodied representations, if we want to
understand how these representations affect learning we must pay attention to
not only their EEEE nature and the constraints that this imposes on mental
activity, but also to how this activity can be transformed through the inter-
nalization of these symbolic systems, the Logos. We know that even offline
cognitive or purely abstract activity is based in the body, and that higher
processes or processes of a symbolic nature such as language (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980), which are partly detached from these specific contexts, were
developed from this interaction with the environment based on sensory proces-
sing and motor action. However, we also know that symbolic cognitive activity
based on the internalization of these cultural systems of representation,
although constrained by those embodied origins, may transform the original
EEEE mental functions themselves, without becoming an AAA activity
(Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Human learning, although constrained by the corpor-
eal nature of the mind, allows representations and processes to be acquired that
go beyond those embodied constraints, beyond the body, when internalizing the
activity of external systems of cultural representations into the form of new
mental functions.
transform them not only as objects of knowledge but as mediators of their own
actions.
The Dienes and Perner (1999) model helps in the understanding of what
should be made explicit to access knowledge, whereas other authors have also
focused on identifying different processes through which this progressive expli-
citation takes place. We can in fact differentiate three explicitation processes for
embodied representations with a growing complexity and capacity for transforma-
tion: representational suppression, suspension and redescription (Pozo, 2014).
Representational suppression occurs when a person explicitly and deliberately
inhibits or prevents the activation of an embodied representation with the intention
of activating another alternative representation. The control of our primary repre-
sentations would not be possible without the capacity to entirely or partly inhibit
the embodied representations linked to the context. As Glenberg (1997) pointed
out, without suppression it would not be possible to even remember the past or
anticipate the future, an essential feature of the representations that move beyond
the concrete and situated, and which require somehow inhibiting the present. In
fact, an essential function of explicit processes is softening, by representational
suppression, the strength of sensory impressions, of embodied representations, or
as Donald (2001) stated, to act as an amplifier of the internally generated
representations themselves in order to combat the noise in our minds produced
by the outside world. The control of attention, emotions, social behaviour, etc., is
supported by this basic mechanism of suppression, and is in fact linked to other
typically executive functions of the prefrontal cortex (Goldberg, 2001): ‘Inhibitory
control is a central component of the executive function and is generally focused
on the ability to actively inhibit or delay a dominant response to reach a fixed
goal’ (Morash, Raj, & Bell, 2013, p. 990).
We have all lived the experience of trying to deliberately suppress other
representations in order to be effective in certain contexts, because otherwise
those implicit and embodied representations would interfere with our present
goals. Thus, when we have to perform a complex or forced operation, for
example, a demanding calculation or remembering precise data such as our
car’s licence plate number, we usually close our eyes to avoid the interference
of other stimuli that would reduce our processing capacity. We also sometimes
bite our tongue, or look off to the side in order to avoid the possible temptation
that other alternative representations present to us.
Nevertheless, suppression in and of itself does not transform our embodied
representations. It merely reduces the likelihood that they are activated in a given
context, thus promoting the activation of another explicit representation. The
student that inhibits his/her intuitive, non-Newtonian representation over the
movement of objects to solve a physics problem with algebraic calculation is
not changing his/her intuition, just preventing it from interfering in a given task.
Whoever inhibits the emotional response that the approach of a stranger produces
is not changing his/her representation, but only preventing it from manifesting. In
addition, suppression’s effectiveness is limited since it is a very costly function
from the cognitive point of view. According to Kahneman (2011), suppressing an
232 J.-I. Pozo
idea or thought, not to mention an emotion, requires cognitive effort, forming part
of the explicit mind’s hardworking traits. In fact, continued exercise of that
inhibitory control, of representational suppression, produces what has been called
a ‘depletion of the ego’. Baumeister, Bratlavsky, Muraven, and Tice (1998), in a
series of ingenious experiments, showed that effort to consciously and deliberately
suppress an idea or simple representation, as arbitrary as it may be (for example,
to avoid thinking of polar bears), blocks or impairs the parallel execution of other
explicit cognitive activities, as simple as these may also be (recognizing a person’s
emotional expressions).
In fact, although the suppression mechanism fulfils important cognitive func-
tions with its on/off nature, it is insufficient for stably and durably controlling
embodied representations, whether they be emotional responses (Wenzlaff &
Wenger, 2000), related to the activation of stereotypes (Gawronski &
Bodenhausen, 2006), or alternative conceptions or ideas themselves from students
about scientific phenomena, which as far as we know may not be suppressed or
eliminated in this way as ‘misconceptions’ (Duit, 1999), but should be trans-
formed by more complex explicitation processes. In terms of Dienes and Perner
(1999), we would say that suppression allows the object of the representation to
be changed, but does not construct new attitudes or ways of relating to that object
that transform its representational nature.
A very suggestive proposal as to how this construction of new representational
attitudes occurs with respect to objects, or rather with regard to our embodied
representation of them, is the model of representational suspension developed in
the last work from Ángel Rivière (2003). Unlike suppression or complete inhibi-
tion of a representation, to suspend is ‘to let something go without effect [. . .] to
stop governing something: either the material effects of actions, or literal proper-
ties of the world, or the apparent meaning of an utterance or a symbolic repre-
sentation’ (Riviére & Español, 2003; p. 2). Suspension would therefore imply
partially deleting a representation by substituting any of its components for
another function or signifier, so that in contrast to the suppression mechanism,
suspension leads to a combination or integration of representations and therefore
gives rise to a new representation that was not in the previous cognitive repertoire.
According to Dienes and Perner (1999), a new representation attitude is
generated with suspension. The child who pretends that a fork is a plane, the
student who predicts or anticipates the possible movement of an object through
the gesture of a hand, the teacher who uses a ‘planetary’ metaphor to explain an
atom’s functioning and structure or a computational metaphor to account for the
functioning of human memory, all of these are making use of different types of
representational suspension mechanisms of different complexities (Rivière, 2003).
The suspension of an action generates, according to Rivière (2003), ‘an enactive
symbol’, and the suspension of the complete representation of an event (a candy
bar hidden away in a box) allows the task of the ‘false belief’ to be resolved,
along with access to what has been called ‘theory of the mind’. When a child
imitates an action or a gesture, he is suspending part of this action’s properties to
focus only on those that are most relevant. He is not denying the representation, as
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 233
Organization
Problem-solving potential
Figure 1. Distinctions among four major kinds of external representations. according to Pérez Echeverría and Scheuer (2009).
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo
235
236 J.-I. Pozo
taught through bodily actions and experiences that allow our embodied represen-
tations to be made explicit (Gómez Crespo, 2017; Wright, 2013). Even reading
comprehension can be improved by having students simulate the characters’
actions and experiences in the stories that they read (Glenberg, 2008).
frame of reference, allowing them to travel in space and in time in ways that are
not possible through mimesis, therefore generating new epistemic functions based
on the adoption of different perspectives or propositional attitudes.
geographical map (Postigo & Pozo, 1998) or a drawing (Scheuer, De La Cruz, &
Pozo, 2002, 2010) literacy in the codes that organize these representations is required.
However, unlike traditional educational strategies that consider the command of those
codes as the starting point of learning (Barab & Dodge, 2008), from the perspective of
embodied knowledge these formalizations should serve to representationally rede-
scribe the embodied experiences themselves and thus not only equip them with new
meaning, but above all transcend them.
the circle, or the spiral that travels back and forth between the implicit and the
explicit and vice versa.
Automatization of knowledge
One of the more effective ‘tricks’ of the human mind for resolving very
complex tasks with few resources is automatization, by which cognitive
representations and processes that were initially performed in a controlled
and explicit manner with a high allocation of resources end up implicit thanks
to learning, with no need for planning, deliberation, intention or even very
much attention (Sun, 2012).
Studies that have compared the knowledge of experts and novices in specific
fields of knowledge showed that the experts were not only capable of metacogni-
tively managing and making explicit more knowledge than the novices, but that
they also, in the form of automated routines, made implicit other representations
and actions that the novices had to manage in a controlled or explicit way (Chi,
2006). Automated routines have the advantage of running faster, making fewer
errors and hardly consuming any attention, which frees up resources for other
explicit processes and representations. Experts see further because they have no
need to look closer, demonstrating that the explicit and implicit processes, far
from being dichotomous, are clearly complementary (Pozo, 2014; Sun, 2012).
The processes through which these automated representations are acquired and
made implicit have been studied above all in the area of learning cognitive and
motor skills, but they can also be extended to other types of representations
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 241
Condensation of knowledge
Given its limited capacity for information processing, another ‘trick’ that the
human mind has for confronting complex tasks is to condense information
units into packages or patterns that fire together, with a consequent reduction of
the task’s cognitive demand. They are the famous chunks (Simon & Kaplan,
1989), which allow skilled chess players to codify very complex positions
(Chase & Simon, 1973) in only a few seconds or which allow medical experts
to recognize a disease’s symptom pattern (Norman, Eva, Brooks, & Hamstra,
2006). In this way knowledge, which according to the representational rede-
scription model from Karmiloff-Smith (1992) becomes more accessible to other
representations and more flexible when it is made explicit, is newly condensed
into patterns of routine actions that are inflexible, yet very effective in their
activation.
This implicitness by the condensation of representations not only lightens the
cognitive demand of routine tasks, which would otherwise require each one of its
components be made explicit separately, but also facilitates the use of representa-
tional systems, such as those just described that would otherwise be very costly
from a cognitive point of view. It is not by chance, as we have already pointed
out, that the evolution of these cultural systems of representation (writing, num-
bers, but also maps and even ICT) shifts towards a progressive omission or
concealment of many of its components that tend to condense and thus to become
implicit (Martí, 2017). The generalization of these cultural devices requires that
they adapt to the constraints of the human mind, giving rise to a mutual construc-
tion of mind and culture, in which not only culture, as we have seen, reconstructs
the mind, but that the human cognitive system itself constraints and thus recon-
structs culture (Pozo, 2001). Therefore, the ergonomic design of cultural systems
requires that these make many of its components implicit upon condensing them,
so that they then ‘run’ better in the human mind. To do that, the user of that
system must infer or complete that which has been hidden or condensed in
notation (Martí, 2017; Pérez Echeverría et al., 2010).
242 J.-I. Pozo
Martí (2017) illustrates this condensation process with several examples taken
from the numerical notation system. For example, writing the figure 352 requires
understanding how the system represents the notational position, hiding part of the
information contained in its verbal expression, so children that have not yet
achieved that implicitness will write 300,502 (Scheuer, Sinclair, De Rivas, &
Christinat, 2000). Similar difficulties arise for condensing collected information
into tables (Martí, 2009, 2017), maps (Postigo & Pozo, 1998) or sheet music
(Bautista et al., 2009). In fact, as we have seen, implicit information in notation
(that which has been hidden or condensed) is more difficult to process because it
must be inferred from the information and explicit markings. Only when learners
manage to make these inferences implicitly are they able to undertake conceptual
and more complex processing levels. We can say that, in this situation, the user of
an external representation implicitly assumes certain representational features of
the code, which become representationally transparent, become implicit. Or if
preferred, they become ‘naturalized’.
Naturalization of knowledge
Another restriction that our embodied mind imposes on knowledge construc-
tion is the assumption of a certain implicit, intuitive realism (Claxton, 2005;
Pozo, 2014, 2016), for which we tend to attribute constraints imposed by our
own mental representations to the outside world. These constraints become
largely transparent. The same happens with most of our cultural representa-
tions. They become transparent (Wertsch, 1991), are taken for granted or are
made implicit through a process of naturalization (Pozo, 2014). Burke (2000,
p. 118 of the Spanish translation), with the image of a leafy tree that the
Renaissance used to represent knowledge, said that ‘the image of the tree
illustrates a central phenomenon in cultural history: the naturalization of the
conventional or the presentation of culture as if it were of nature, of the
invention as if it were a discovery. This involves denying that social groups
are responsible for classifications, which reinforces cultural reproduction and
resists innovation’.
This implicitation by naturalization process is very common in cultural
learning, for example, when acquiring stereotypes that ‘naturalize’ the char-
acteristics of persons belonging to different social groups, or in the form of
attitudes or cultural beliefs that are taken as being ‘natural’ or universal, as the
Moscovici model (1976) reflects when referring to the process of ‘objectifica-
tion’ of these social representations. This naturalization also takes place in the
learning of external systems of representation, so that they are no longer
assumed as conventional systems but as natural representations, in such a
way that a large part of their transformative properties becomes opaque for
their users. We assume that time is what watches measure, or that writing is a
simple transcription of the spoken language, or that zero is one number more
when it is a very burdensome construction in cultural history.
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 243
between the contexts in which each one of these subsystems or minds would
function (I, the AAA mind to the laboratory; you, the EEEE mind to the real
world), but of studying how both minds are constructed and mutually support
each other. In this paper we have tried to show how that mutual construction
requires the consideration of explicitation as well as implicitation processes,
the ying and the yang of cognitive activity. Only understanding how both
forms of mental activity are related through external cultural representations
can we understand how both types of representations function in these separate
worlds in which psychology, and more generally culture, have made them live.
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 245
autores, ocupan un lugar más o menos central en este enfoque. Como ya hemos
visto, se trata ante todo de una mente encarnada, cuya función esencial es
controlar y regular la acción de un cuerpo que restringe su actividad. Por tanto,
no puede ser una mente arbitraria, abstracta ni amodal porque el cuerpo no lo es.
Tal vez quien mejor haya expresado esta idea es Antonio Damasio (1994, p. 213
de la trad. cast., énfasis del autor) en El error de Descartes: ‘Si lo primero para lo
que se desarrolló evolutivamente el cerebro es para asegurar la supervivencia del
cuerpo propiamente dicho, entonces, cuando aparecieron cerebros capaces de
pensar, empezaron pensando en el cuerpo. Y sugiero que para asegurar la super-
vivencia del cuerpo de la manera más efectiva posible, la naturaleza dio con una
solución muy efectiva: representar el mundo externo en términos de las modifi-
caciones que causa en el cuerpo propiamente dicho’.
Por tanto, el contenido básico, y el significado primordial, de nuestras repre-
sentaciones implícitas serían las respuestas corporales a los cambios energéticos
que se producen en el ambiente, lo que restringiría no solo procesos básicos,
ligados claramente a esas restricciones corporales, como la percepción o la
atención, sino también el resto de los procesos cognitivos, que estarán sujetos
igualmente a esas mismas restricciones primordiales, incluidos aquellos que
suelen considerarse superiores, como el lenguaje (Glenberg, 2008) o el pensa-
miento (Kahneman, 2011). Así, por ejemplo, la comprensión del lenguaje se basa
en una representación encarnada de su contenido (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002), ya
que procesar un enunciado determinado (como ‘Laura se asustó y se alejó de allí’)
entorpece la realización de un plan de acción incompatible corporalmente con el
contenido de ese enunciado (e.g., acercarse para coger algo). Comprendemos el
lenguaje, y el mundo, con todo el cuerpo. No existe esa escisión mente/cuerpo en
la que se ha basado buena parte de nuestra cultura e identidad cognitiva. En el
principio no es el Verbo, ni el Logos. En el principio es el cuerpo y nos
representamos el mundo y aprendemos a través de él
De esta forma, mientras que en la mente constituida pos ‘símbolos físicos’, las
representaciones se organizaban en forma de proposiciones, como un diccionario,
en la visión corporeizada el conocimiento es ante todo un repertorio de restric-
ciones y acciones corporales (Wilson & Foglia, 2015). Porque lo que caracteriza
al cuerpo es la acción. Nuestra mente encarnada es también una mente enactiva,
una mente en movimiento. Sabemos que los organismos — o más en general los
sistemas — requieren una actividad representacional, y con ella una capacidad de
aprender, cuando necesitan desplazarse o moverse en un entorno cambiante
(Claxton, 2015; Pozo, 2001). La mejor metáfora de ello es la Ascidia, un animal
marino, que cuando se deposita sobre una roca y no necesita moverse más
fagocita su propio cerebro (Dennett, 1993).
Esta idea de la mente en movimiento o en acción tiene incluso un fuerte apoyo
neuropsicológico. Tal como han mostrado los estudios sobre las ‘neuronas espejo’
(Iacoboni, 2008; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006), la percepción de los simios, y
también la de los humanos, se apoya en otro tipo de neuronas, llamadas
canónicas. En aquellos estudios de laboratorio, las neuronas canónicas se activa-
ban o disparaban por igual cuando los monos agarraban un objeto con la mano y
252 J.-I. Pozo
cuando veían un objeto que podía ser agarrado. Frente a la distinción tradicional
entre conocimiento y acción en nuestra cultura — entre mente y cuerpo — y entre
percepción y acción en la psicología científica, estos estudios mostraban que los
monos, y también las personas, no se representaban tanto el objeto en sí como las
acciones que podían hacer con él, en forma de un ‘vocabulario de actos’
(Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). Conocemos por tanto el mundo a partir de nuestra
represent/acción de él (Pozo, 2001), mediante las acciones que nuestro cuerpo
puede ejecutar. Más que un mapa fijo y cerrado de cada objeto lo que tenemos en
mente son películas, y sobre todo películas de acción. Pero esas representaciones
encarnadas son la respuesta evolutiva a las demandas de un ambiente concreto.
Y es que esta nueva mente no solo es encarnada y enactiva, sino que en cada
momento está encajada (embedded) en un ambiente concreto, situado. No es ya
solo que no se puedan separar la mente y el cuerpo, sino que tampoco se puede
separar la mente/cuerpo del entorno. La actividad cognitiva está siempre situada,
on line, en el contexto del mundo real. Y no solo está situada en un espacio, sino
también en los parámetros de tiempo real (Wilson, 2002). Mientras en las
versiones más light de la mente encarnada, el entorno es solo un contexto que
articula la actividad mental (Wilson, 2002), en visiones más radicales (e.g., Clark,
1997, 2011; Rowlands, 2010) el entorno es parte de la propia mente, de forma que
esa actividad mental no se despliega solo en el cerebro, y en el resto del cuerpo,
sino incluso más allá del cuerpo en todos los objetos, dispositivos o recursos
culturales que la hacen posible. De esta forma, como señala Rowlands (2010), si
aceptamos que la actividad mental se despliega más allá del cerebro, no sólo por
todo el cuerpo, sino incluso más allá del cuerpo, el enfoque de la mente encar-
nada, que ha recibido buena parte de su apoyo empírico de las investigaciones
basadas en el uso de neuroimágenes, se convierte en un antídoto teórico contra el
creciente reduccionismo neuropsicológico, que identifica mente y cerebro. Si se
asume el principio de una mente encajada en el entorno, o aun solo de una mente
encarnada, la afirmación de Pinker (1997, p. 21), según la cual ‘la mente es lo que
hace el cerebro’, asumida hoy mayoritariamente por la psicología cognitiva,
dejaría de ser cierta, ya que buena parte de esa actividad mental se ‘externaliza’
en el entorno no solo físico sino sobre todo cultural en el que esa mente está
encajada, ya sea por medio de los objetos que la hacen posible — por ejemplo, el
palo con el que el mono logra extraer las hormigas de un árbol o con el que parte
un fruto — como sobre todo en forma de dispositivos culturales, por ejemplo de
sistemas externos de representación (números, textos, relojes, etc.), que amplían o
extienden las funciones mentales más allá esas restricciones corporales primarias
(Martí & Pozo, 2000; Pérez Echeverría, Martí, & Pozo, 2010; Pérez Echeverría &
Scheuer, 2009)
Así, esa mente encajada en el entorno acaba siendo una mente extendida o si
se quiere en buena medida externalizada. Por supuesto, como señala Rowlands
(2010), nadie sostiene que la acción mental se realice sin la participación del
cerebro, sino que lo que se mantiene es que la actividad mental no tiene lugar solo
en el cerebro y ni siquiera en el cuerpo. Buena parte de la actividad cognitiva se
descarga en el entorno, por lo que no puede estudiarse fuera de ese contexto, ya
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 253
que nuestra actividad cognitiva usa recursos del entorno reduciendo así la carga
cognitiva de las tareas. Según Clark (1997, 2011), un principio básico para el
diseño de sistemas de inteligencia artificial, y también de la mente encarnada, es
no almacenar ni procesar información de forma costosa si se puede emplear la
estructura del entorno y sus operaciones en él como sustitutos. De esta forma, el
entorno es parte del sistema cognitivo, por lo que la unidad de análisis, tanto en la
investigación como en el diseño de entornos de aprendizaje, no debería ser nunca
la mente en sí misma, ni siquiera en su versión mente/cuerpo, sino el sistema
complejo mente/cuerpo/entorno, la mente extendida. Basta intentar una
multiplicación no muy compleja, como por ejemplo 17 x 14, para entender la
necesidad de extender o externalizar la actividad mental más allá del propio
cuerpo, a un papel o una calculadora. La mente se extiende no solo más allá del
cerebro sino también más allá del cuerpo.
No todos los autores están de acuerdo en asumir que ese entorno — y en
especial la cultura — es parte de la actividad mental y no solo un contexto en el
que esta tiene lugar (e.g., Wilson, 2002). Sin embargo, es difícil negar que ese
entorno forma parte de la propia actividad mental, en el sentido de que la
estructura y organiza y no solo de que aporta externamente recursos para un
funcionamiento más eficiente. No es solo que nuestra memoria personal esté hoy
extendida o externalizada en objetos materiales externos (Clark, 1997, 2011), de
forma que si perdemos el teléfono móvil o la agenda perdemos parte de nuestra
memoria personal, sino que esos dispositivos de naturaleza cultural acaban con-
formando u organizando nuestra propia actividad mental al ser internalizados.
Volviendo al ejemplo anterior, no es ya que utilicemos objetos materiales externos
a la mente para realizar la mayor parte de nuestros cálculos, es que esos mismos
cálculos son en sí mismos objetos o actos culturales, simbólicos, que al ser
interiorizados se convierten en auténticas prótesis que modifican nuestra actividad
mental. Durante miles de años, la mente humana no pudo multiplicar ni dividir,
pero tampoco leer o escribir, todos ellos inventos culturales muy recientes en
términos evolutivos, que al incorporarlos, en un sentido literal, a la mente,
transforman sus funciones representacionales.
Esta idea de que esas extensiones de la mente, esencialmente culturales, se
convierten en prótesis que transforman a la propia mente encarnada tiene por
supuesto un fuerte sabor vygotskiano, al asumir que la mente encarnada no solo
está encajada o extendida, en una especie de simbiosis, en un entorno físico sino
sobre todo en una cultura que la transforma y que por tanto constituye un nuevo
sistema complejo, el sistema mente/cuerpo/cultura. Esa simbiosis o construcción
mutua entre mente y cultura ha sido desarrollada con bastante detalle, y de un
modo muy sugestivo, por Merlin Donald (1991), quien, apoyándose en datos
arqueológicos, neurológicos y psicológicos, propuso que la mente humana co-
evolucionó con la cultura, de forma que pueden distinguirse cuatro estadios o
mentalidades en esa evolución conjunta. El primer sistema de representación,
compartido con otras muchas especies, se basaría en acciones y procedimientos
que permitirían codificar secuencias de sucesos, por lo que sería, según Donald
(1991) una mente episódica, muy cercana a esta mente encarnada, ya que se
254 J.-I. Pozo
nuevas, sino que se requiere reconstruirlas desde sus cimientos. Para ello se
precisan, además de la supresión y la suspensión representacionales, procesos
que den cuenta de la adquisición de nuevos sistemas representacionales.
Karmiloff-Smith (1992) propuso un proceso de redescripción representacio-
nal, que explicaría la forma en que nuestras representaciones implícitas, de
naturaleza encarnada, se convierten en representaciones plenamente explícitas.
En este modelo, la conversión de una representación implícita en conocimiento
implica un proceso de cambio que afectaría no solo a los objetos representados y a
la actitud mantenida con respecto a ellos, sino a la propia naturaleza de los
sistemas representacionales, a lo que podríamos llamar la ‘agencia representacio-
nal’, en términos de Dienes y Perner (1999).
La redescripción plena implicaría traducir una representación a un nuevo
código o formato, con mayor potencia representacional (Karmiloff-Smith,
1992). En un primer nivel de explicitación, la representación se traduciría o
reescribiría a códigos no formalizados, de naturaleza icónica o mimética, y que,
por tanto, como sugiere Donald (1991), seguirían usando el cuerpo como soporte
representacional. En un segundo nivel, la representación se explicitaría por medio
de lenguajes plenamente formalizados y por lo tanto más alejados de esas
restricciones corporales, aunque nunca del todo. No se trata ya de inhibir o
suprimir un objeto de conocimiento y sustituirlo por otro, ni tampoco de suspen-
der algunas de las actitudes representacionales que mantenemos con respecto a él,
sino de establecer un nuevo sistema de relaciones entre representaciones, de
elaborar una nueva teoría.
Un rasgo muy interesante del modelo de Karmiloff-Smith (1992) es que
postula que el acceso a esas representaciones plenamente explícitas no suprime
ni elimina los niveles representacionales previos y, en especial, las representa-
ciones encarnadas que están en el origen de ese proceso de redescripción repre-
sentacional, un supuesto coherente con la pluralidad representacional (Pozo &
Gómez Crespo, 1998;Pozo, Gómez Crespo, & Sanz, 1999; Vosniadou, 2007) que
recogen la mayor parte de las investigaciones sobre el cambio conceptual, que
muestran la dificultad, si no la imposibilidad, de abandonar las representaciones
intuitivas cuando se adquieren nuevos conocimientos científicos (Duit, 1999;
Pozo & Gómez Crespo, 1998).
Pero el modelo de Karmiloff-Smith (1992), aunque ofrece un marco desde el
que comprender la progresiva transformación de las representaciones implícitas y
encarnadas en representaciones explícitas y simbólicas, haciendo honor a su
carácter neopiagetiano se centra en la acción cognitiva del sujeto y no tiene
apenas en cuenta la mediación de esos códigos y formatos, de naturaleza cultural,
en la transformación de esa mente primaria encarnada (Pozo, 2001, 2014). Sin
embargo, esos dispositivos culturales, en forma de sistemas externos de
representación, parecen desempeñar una función esencial en esos procesos de
explicitación que permiten a esa mente, inicialmente encarnada, ir más allá de sus
restricciones primordiales (Andersen et al., 2009; Brizuela & Gravel, 2013; Martí,
2017; Martí & Pozo, 2000; Pérez Echeverría, Martí, & Pozo, 2010).
260 J.-I. Pozo
Figura 1. Dimensiones características de las representaciones externas según Pérez Echeverría and Scheuer (2009).
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo
265
266 J.-I. Pozo
considerar las relaciones entre esos dos tipos de sistemas mentales en términos de
lo que Mesarovic, Macko, y Takahara (1980) denominan jerarquías estratificadas,
sistemas complejos. Estos sistemas se caracterizan por establecer diferentes
niveles o estratos dentro de un sistema (en este caso el sistema mente/cuerpo/
entorno), pero sobre todo porque las relaciones establecidas entre los niveles
permiten no solo diferenciarlos sino también integrarlos.
En cada nivel el funcionamiento del sistema está restringido por la operación
de los niveles inferiores, pero la verdadera comprensión o significado de esos
niveles inferiores solo se puede obtener de los análisis más molares de los niveles
superiores. De esta forma, mientras las representaciones encarnadas restringirían
el contenido y el funcionamiento de las representaciones explícitas y simbólicas,
estas a su vez tendrían por función reconstruir los contenidos y funciones de esa
mente más primaria por procesos de explicitación, de supresión, suspensión y
redescripción representacional. No se trataría por tanto solo de diferenciar los
contextos en que funcionaría cada uno de esos subsistemas o mentes (yo, la mente
AAA al laboratorio; tu, la mente EEEE al mundo real) sino de estudiar cómo
ambas mentes se construyen y apoyan mutuamente., En este trabajo hemos
intentado mostrar cómo esa mutua construcción requiere considerar tanto los
procesos de explicitación como los de implicitación, el ying y el yang de la
actividad cognitiva. Solo comprendiendo cómo ambas formas de actividad mental
se relacionan a través de las representaciones culturales externas podremos com-
prender cómo funcionan ambos tipos de representaciones en esos mundos sepa-
rados en los que la Psicología, y más en general la cultura, las ha hecho vivir.
Acknowledgements / Agradecimientos
This work is part of the Research Project ‘Conceptions and Uses of External
Representations in Learning and Teaching’, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de
Economía, Industria y Competitividad within the Convocatoria de Proyectos i+d
Excelencia (EDU2013-47593-C2-1-P), of which the author is the principal researcher.
A large number of the ideas collected here have been developed within the framework
of the research seminars for this project and would not have been possible without the
discussions that took place with the people who participated in these seminars,
especially María Puy Pérez Echeverría, Yolanda Postigo, Asunción López Manjon,
Amalia Casas-Mas, Ruth Campos and Carlos de Aldama. I wish to also thank the
numerous debates and exchanges that were had with Eduardo Martí and Merce
García-Mila within the framework of this same project. / Este trabajo es parte de
la investigación ‘Concepciones y usos de las representaciones externas en el apren-
dizaje y la enseñanza’, financiada por el Ministerio de Economía, Industria y
Competitividad dentro de la Convocatoria de Proyectos i+d Excelencia (EDU2013-
47593-C2-1-P), de la que el autor es investigador principal. Buena parte de las ideas
aquí recogidas han sido desarrolladas en el marco de los seminarios de investigación
de dicho Proyecto y no hubieran sido posibles sin las discusiones habidas con las
personas que han participado en dichos seminarios, especialmente María de Puy
Perez Echeverría, Yolanda Postigo, Asunción López Manjón, Amalia Casas-Mas,
Ruth Campos y Carlos de Aldama. Quiero agradecer también los numerosos debates
e intercambios habidos con Eduardo Martí y Merce García-Mila en el marco del
mismo Proyecto.
Learning beyond the body / Aprender más allá del cuerpo 271
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. / Los autores no han referido
ningún potencial conflicto de interés en relación con este artículo.
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