<p>This thesis addresses computer game play activities from the perspective of embodied and situated cognition. From such a perspective, game play can be divided into the physical handling of the game and the players' understanding of it. Game play can also be described in terms of three different levels of situatedness "high-level" situatedness, the contextual "here and now", and "low-level" situatedness. Moreover, theoretical and empirical implications of such a perspective have been explored more in detail in two case studies.</p> / Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2008:17.

The growing global affliction of ‘inhumanism’ is shaking our surroundings. Landscapes of resource extraction, agroindustrial production, energy and information circulation, waste management and geopolitical strategies, also known as Operational Landscapes, has made it an urgent necessity to reclaim human agency and accountability to resist environmental and social collapse driven by contemporary capitalist geopolitics and biotechnologies of control. This report utilizes a rural place far north - Gállok, situated in Jokkmokk Municipality, Norrbotten County, as a case study to explore alternative methods of being present on and representing place. Site-writing, as a methodology is used to test as well as to inform the structure of this thesis and its research. Through the site-writings of Gállok a set of acts (I-V ) serves as parallel narratives to the scientific research, emphasizing the importance of each chapter of the report. Gállok was chosen as case to highlight the challenging relationship between a place and its embodiments, to the broader environmental and socio-political context as it potentially faces a completely new and challenging function, as a mining site. The research aims to explore and reveal the impacts that human-orchestrated use of space has on nature, why these impacts occur and how they can be rethought through transdisciplinary approaches. Through the design project, the layers that are part of a place are the layers that are part of Gállok, as a place, are further explored, as how disturbances affect the layers among themselves, to finally speculate on how an increased understanding of the embedded layers and their conditions can influence architecture and urban and regional planning processes. The design project, called The Air We Breathe, focuses on air and its quality as one of the most important common denominators for all life on Earth, yet a system that we, through anthropocentrism, are destroying to our own detriment.  The idea of this essay and the design project is not to provide any solutions, but rather to start a discussion in the matter. The vision is to acknowledge as much as possible given the limited time for the thesis. With a personal goal to explore alternative ways of communicating and representing the findings, this thesis is my way to practice research by design and design by research, using architecture as my main tool.

<p>Cognitive science has traditionally viewed the mind as essentially disembodied, that is, the nature of mind and cognition is neither affected by the ¡Èsystem¡É it is implemented in nor affected by the environment that the system is situated in. But since the mid-1980s a new approach emerged in artificial intelligence that emphasized the importance of embodiment and situatedness and since then terms like embodied cognition, embodied intelligence have become more and more apparent in discussions of cognition. As embodied cognition has increased in interest so have the notions of embodiment and situatedness and they are not always compatible. This report has found that there are, at least, four notions of embodiment in the discussions of embodied cognition: software embodiment, physical embodiment, biological embodiment and human(oid) embodiment.</p>

<p>The situated approach in cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI) has argued since the mid-1980s that intelligent behaviour emerges as a result of a close coupling between agent and environment. Lately, many researchers have emphasized that in addition to the physical environment, the social environment must not be neglected. In this thesis we will focus on the nature of social situatedness, and the aim of this dissertation is to investigate its role and relevance for natural and artificial intelligence.</p><p>This thesis brings together work from separate areas, presenting different perspectives on the role and mechanisms social situatedness. More specifically, we will analyse Vygotsky's cognitive development theory, studies of primate (and avian) intelligence, and last, but not least, work in contemporary socially situated AI. These, at a first glance, quite different fields have a lot in common since they particularly stress the importance of social embeddedness for the development of individual intelligence.</p><p>Combining these separate perspectives, we analyse the remaining differences between natural and artificial social situatedness. Our conclusion is that contemporary socially artificial intelligence research, although heavily inspired by empirical findings in human infants, tends to lack the developmental dimension of situatedness. Further we discuss some implications for research in cognitive science and AI.</p>

The situated approach in cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI) has argued since the mid-1980s that intelligent behaviour emerges as a result of a close coupling between agent and environment. Lately, many researchers have emphasized that in addition to the physical environment, the social environment must not be neglected. In this thesis we will focus on the nature of social situatedness, and the aim of this dissertation is to investigate its role and relevance for natural and artificial intelligence. This thesis brings together work from separate areas, presenting different perspectives on the role and mechanisms social situatedness. More specifically, we will analyse Vygotsky's cognitive development theory, studies of primate (and avian) intelligence, and last, but not least, work in contemporary socially situated AI. These, at a first glance, quite different fields have a lot in common since they particularly stress the importance of social embeddedness for the development of individual intelligence. Combining these separate perspectives, we analyse the remaining differences between natural and artificial social situatedness. Our conclusion is that contemporary socially artificial intelligence research, although heavily inspired by empirical findings in human infants, tends to lack the developmental dimension of situatedness. Further we discuss some implications for research in cognitive science and AI.

Cognitive science has traditionally viewed the mind as essentially disembodied, that is, the nature of mind and cognition is neither affected by the ¡Èsystem¡É it is implemented in nor affected by the environment that the system is situated in. But since the mid-1980s a new approach emerged in artificial intelligence that emphasized the importance of embodiment and situatedness and since then terms like embodied cognition, embodied intelligence have become more and more apparent in discussions of cognition. As embodied cognition has increased in interest so have the notions of embodiment and situatedness and they are not always compatible. This report has found that there are, at least, four notions of embodiment in the discussions of embodied cognition: software embodiment, physical embodiment, biological embodiment and human(oid) embodiment.

The realism of virtual surgery through a surgical simulator depends largely on the precision and reliability of the haptic device. The quality of perception depends on the design of the haptic device, which presents a complex design task due to the multi-criteria and conflicting character of the functional and performance requirements. In the model-based evaluation of the performance criteria of a haptic device, the required computational resources increase with the complexity of the device structure as well as with the increased level of detail that is created in the detail design phases. Due to uncertain requirements and a significant knowledge gap, the design task is fuzzy and more complex in the early design phases. The goal of this thesis is to propose a situated, i.e., flexible, scalable and efficient, methodology for multi-objective and multi-disciplinary design optimization of high-performing 6-DOF haptic devices. The main contributions of this thesis are: 1. A model-based and simulation-driven engineering design methodology and a flexible pilot framework are proposed for design optimization of high-performing haptic devices. The multi-disciplinary design optimization method was utilized to balance the conflicting criteria/requirements of a multi-domain design case and to solve the design optimization problems concurrently. 2. A multi-tool framework is proposed. The framework integrates metamodel-based design optimization with complementary engineering tools from different software vendors, which was shown to significantly reduce the total computationally effort. 3. The metamodeling methods and sampling sizes for specific performance indices found from case studies were shown to be applicable and usable for several kinds of 6-degrees-of-freedom haptic devices. 4. The multi-tool framework and the assisting methodology were further developed to enable computationally efficient and situated design multi-objective optimization of high-performing haptic devices. The design-of-experiment (DOE) and metamodeling techniques are integrated with the optimization process in the framework as an option to solve the design optimization case with a process that depends on the present system complexity. / <p>QC 20171108</p>

In the recent decades, alternative notions regarding the role of symbols in intelligence in natural and artificial systems have attracted significant inter- est. The main difference of the so-called situated and embodied approaches to cognitive science from the traditional cognitivist position is that symbolic repre- sentations are viewed as resources, similar to maps used for navigation or plans for activity, instead of as transparent stand-ins in internal world models. Thus, all symbolic resources have to be interpreted and re-contextualized for use in concrete situations. In this view, one of the primary sources of such symbolic resources is language. Cognitivism views language as a vessel carrying informa- tion originally located in the processing mechanisms of the individual agents. Situated approaches, on the other hand, view language both as a communicative mechanism and as a means for the individual agents to enhance and extend their cognitive machinery, by e.g. better utilizing their attentional resources, or mod- ifying their perceptual-motor means. Taking inspiration from these ideas, and building on multi-agent models developed in other fields, the field of language evolution developed models of the emergence of shared resources for communi- cation in a community of agents. In these models, agents with various means of categorization and learning engage in communicative interactions with each other, using shared signs to refer either to pre-given meanings or entities in a situation. In order to avoid falling into the same mentalist pitfalls as cognitivism in the design of these models, such as the stipulation of an inner sphere of mean- ings for which communicative signs are mere labels, the role of communication should be viewed as one of the social coordination of behavior using physically grounded symbols. To this end, an experimental setup for language games, and a robotic model for agents which engage in such games are presented. The setup allows the agents to utilize shared symbols in the completion of a simple task, with one agent instructing another on which action to undertake. The symbols used by agents in the language games are grounded in the embodied choices presented to them by their environment, and the agents can further use the symbols created in these games for enhancing their own behavioral means. The learning mechanism of the agents is similarity-based, and uses low-level sensory data to avoid the building in of features. Experiments have shown that the establishment of a common vocabulary of labels depends on how well the instructors are trained on the task and the availability of feedback mechanisms for the exchanged labels.

This thesis addresses computer game play activities from the perspective of embodied and situated cognition. From such a perspective, game play can be divided into the physical handling of the game and the players' understanding of it. Game play can also be described in terms of three different levels of situatedness "high-level" situatedness, the contextual "here and now", and "low-level" situatedness. Moreover, theoretical and empirical implications of such a perspective have been explored more in detail in two case studies. / <p>Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2008:17.</p>

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