TY - CHAP

T1 - Thinking with friends

T2 - embodied cognition and relational attention in friendship

AU - Emmeche, Claus

PY - 2017

Y1 - 2017

N2 - Can research in situated and embodied cognition inform the study of interpersonal relations like friendship? And conversely, can friendship studies from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives inspire research in cognitive science? These are the guiding questions for this chapter. Compared to cognition in animals, human cognition is situated in environments of cultural and societal systems, so the formation of a human self as a cognitive and emotional agent is a process involving distinct levels of embodied cognition, here called animate, anthropic and societal. Analysing friendship as a social cognitive phenomenon, and bringing together observations and concepts from interdisciplinary studies of interpersonal relationships allows for a notion of relational attention to be developed. At least for some forms of friendships, the agents not merely attend to common interests; their perception is shared, mediated by the very relationship as an embodied activity of distributed cognition. An important example of this is collaboration in science and art, as when friends or colleagues work close together to solve problems or develop new forms of creative expression.

AB - Can research in situated and embodied cognition inform the study of interpersonal relations like friendship? And conversely, can friendship studies from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives inspire research in cognitive science? These are the guiding questions for this chapter. Compared to cognition in animals, human cognition is situated in environments of cultural and societal systems, so the formation of a human self as a cognitive and emotional agent is a process involving distinct levels of embodied cognition, here called animate, anthropic and societal. Analysing friendship as a social cognitive phenomenon, and bringing together observations and concepts from interdisciplinary studies of interpersonal relationships allows for a notion of relational attention to be developed. At least for some forms of friendships, the agents not merely attend to common interests; their perception is shared, mediated by the very relationship as an embodied activity of distributed cognition. An important example of this is collaboration in science and art, as when friends or colleagues work close together to solve problems or develop new forms of creative expression.

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-1-62273-100-8

SP - 47

EP - 58

BT - Cognitive Science: Recent Advances and Recurring Problems

A2 - Adams, Frederick

A2 - Pessoa Jr. , Osvaldo

A2 - Kogler Jr. , João Eduardo

PB - Vernon Press

ER -