Broad Research Program My philosophical research aims to develop a general theory of pragmatic embodied epistemology. Pragmatic embodied epistemology is the philosophical investigation of the possibility conditions and normative principles for embodied agents to represent their world and to utilize the representations in their interactions with the world. Pragmatic embodied epistemology differs...

Accepting the perspectives of others often provides people with novel cues for discovering and solving problems. However, human cognitive limitations and differences in attitude between people make this difficult. In this study, a psychological experiment was conducted to examine how blank thought balloons emitted from an embodied agent encourages perspective sharing between a user and an embod...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether embodied experiences with LEGO robotics can build elementary school students’ understanding of and interest in science learning. Previous studies have shown that many children do not enjoy learning about science; they often find it very difficult to learn (Johnstone, 1991; Millar, 1991). We developed a curriculum incorporating embodied experience...

To effectively support interaction with humans, embodied agents should be implemented using cognitively plausible models such as task models. Even so, these embodied systems should not bear the entire burden for making domain-specific interactions cognitively tractable for humans. Further, embodied systems need not model their users directly; only the necessary and relevant consequences of user...

The role of the body in the generation of behavior is a topic that has sparked the attention of many fields from philosophy to science and more recently robotics. We address the question of how an embodied agent should be modeled in order to change the traditional dualist approach of creating embodied agents. By looking at behavior generation as a shared process between mind and body, we are ab...

Over the past decade, theories of embodied cognition have become increasingly influential with research demonstrating that sensorimotor experiences are involved in cognitive processing; however, this embodied research has primarily focused on adult cognition. The notion that sensorimotor experience is important for acquiring conceptual knowledge is not a novel concept for developmental research...

People often try to discover and solve problems by accepting others' perspectives in daily life. In computersupported environments, a user should be able to accept the perceived mental perspective of an embodied agent in the same way. In this study, mental perspective change by body-orientation correspondence between a user and an embodied agent was examined through a psychological experiment. ...

The thesis of embodied cognition has developed as an alternative to the view that cognition is mediated, at least in part, by symbolic representations. A useful testing ground for the embodied cognition hypothesis is the representation of concepts. An embodied view of concept representation argues that concepts are represented in a modality-specific format. I argue that questions about represen...

In recent years, research on embodied cognition has inspired a number of studies on multimedia learning and instructional psychology. However, in contrast to traditional research on education and multimedia learning, studies on embodied learning (i.e., focusing on bodily action and perception in the context of education) in some cases pose new problems for the measurement of cognitive load. Thi...

Over the last decades a divide seems to have emerged in the cognitive sciences between embodied and symbolic approaches to language understanding. Embodied approaches argue that language comprehension requires activation of our experiences with the world, whereas symbolic approaches argue that language comprehension relies on interdependencies of words. The current paper argues that language co...