On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action

“In terms of the distinction between epistemic and pragmatic actions introduced by Paul Maglio and David Kirsh (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994), actions of “ trying out ” are epistemic actions — doubling as pragmatic in retrospect when the outcome happens to be approved and accepted.”

“Performing the action during imitation, however, allows the learner to partially offload that mental transformation onto the external environment (e.g., by rotating the objects), thereby reducing working memory demands (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“To test whether people use epistemic actions, in which action offloads a mental process such as rotation, Kirsh and Maglio (1994) conducted research on the video game Tetris.”

“Two such support functions were epistemic action [Kirsh and Maglio 1994] and”

“, explorative) actions [63] and the prominent phenomenologically driven conceptualisation of “where the action is” [28].”

“Kirsch and Maglio [32] distinguish between two types of actions: pragmatic and epistemic.”

“Manipulating the spatial arrangement of objects can help externalize the cognitive demands in problem solving [ 13 , 27].”

“For example, Kirsh and Maglio (1994) examined this behavior in Tetris players who often physically rotate zoids (i.e., stimulus rotation in-the-world) as a means of facilitating zoid identification rather than relying solely on an internal solution (e.g., mental rotation) to achieve this goal.”

“Kirsh and Maglio [23] showed that screen space can support internal computation in so-called epistemic actions—actions that serve no other purpose than to facilitate thought—in the video game Tetris.”

“For instance, a classical paper on cognitive scaffolds distinguishes between actions that break down complex informational and problem spaces (epistemic actions) from actions that directly achieve a goal (pragmatic actions) (Kirsh and Maglio 1994).”

“It may be said that their hand movements constituted a form of problem solving or epistemic action (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“These apparently self-reflective, epistemic actions (Kirsh, 1996; Kirsh & Maglio, 1994) are particularly useful in advance of activity when one’s attention might be occupied with other matters.”

“3 For a host of other examples, see Laland et al. (2000), Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman (2003).”

“Finally, we summarize and discuss our main points.”

“, Adelmann & Zajonc, 1989; Laird, 1984; Neumann, Förster, & Strack, 2003; Niedenthal, 2007; Zajonc & Markus, 1984), as most psychological theories previously assumed. The earlier research did not present itself under the “embodiment” term but is directly relevant. Valins’s (1966) classic work showed how the manipulati…”

“…as actions that ease or optimize cognitive tasks by reducing the memory load required to perform a task (space complexity); by simplifying the computational processing procedure (time complexity); and by minimizing the probability of error outcomes (success probability) (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“…each of which may directly issue, at differing time-scales, calls both to other inner processes and to outwardlooping ‘epistemic acts' that harvest new information, or call upon new information-transforming operations, just-in-time to keep the process rolling (see (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994)).”

“Such online situated cognition often involves making fast plans to act on the environment under time pressure, so humans have learned to off-load information to the environment and access it when needed in order to manage mental load (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“Some theorists focus on small scale systems comprising a single embodied agent interacting with a cognitive artifact (Clark 2008; Kirsh and Maglio 1994), or two people interacting with each other, thereby forming a transactive memory system (Sutton et al. 2010; Wegner 1995).”

“This is an example of what Kirsh and Maglio (1994) refer to as an epistemic action, that is, a physical action (in”

“This type of display-based interactive behavior has been observed in various tasks in which display states were constantly changing due to on-going interactions between the human and the environment ( Kirsh & Maglio, 1994; O’Hara & Payne, 1998).”

“Because of the co-located feedback children can engage in epistemic action [15], and we observed this type of interaction in our study.”

“They are physical actions that make mental computation simpler, faster, or more reliable [25].”

“These exploratory actions can give rise to new apparent structures that in turn create new affordances for interaction, and so on (Kirsh and Maglio 1994; Loader 2012; Schwartz and Martin 2006).”

“With regards to the latter rehabilitation technique, empirical research has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness, even indicating its superiority over conventional physio-therapy (e.g., Lundblad et al. 1999).”

“Only through physical prototyping and testing can you discover unexpected phenomena [22-24].”

“For example, the user expecting only pragmatic actions would set a goal first, and perform the minimal motor action to reach the goal (Fitzmaurice 1996; Gibson 1962; Kirsh and Maglio 1994).”

“To achieve this, agents engage in some interactions that serve an epistemic rather than pragmatic purpose, i.e., epistemic actions (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994).”

“Segmenting a level is useful metacognitive or ‘epistemic action’ (Kirsh and Maglio 1994) that facilitates cognition in challenging settings.”

“Awell-known example in this respect is a study by (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994) in which participants have to rotate and flip falling block shapes quickly to make them fit with the surface and the blocks they fall on.”

“We see a parallel to experienced Tetris players tactic of rotating a piece in order to see, rather than mentally simulate, its fit to the landscape [16].”

“Kirsch [57], for example, distinguishes epistemic actions, which help people think and learn from the world, from pragmatic actions, which change the state of the world.”

“Furthermore, we knew that some undo or erase events could lead to false alarms – they might sometimes indicate epistemic actions [14] rather than usability problems.”

“Similarly, Kosslyn’s (1980) computational model of imagery included an analog spatial array that gave metric properties to thoughts, but the array did not represent any invisible or dynamic components like a push or pull.”

“In particular, the use of the mouse pointer as a marker has the hallmarks of what Kirsch and Maglio (1994) called an “epistemic action”: an external physical action that serves an internal cognitive function.”

“This account focuses on memory o ffl oading, but it has been extended in two ways: (1) to show how processing, particularly mental rotation, is lowered using external manipulations that serve as ‘epistemic actions’ (Kirsh, 2010; Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“(This is also why “4E” thought emphasizes active perception [115,116] and micro-generative stimulations of the environment [117].”

“Situated cognition theory, in contrast, has extensively studied cognitive artifacts (Norman 1993; Kirsh and Maglio 1994; Hutchins * Richard Heersmink richard.heersmink@gmail.com 1 Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia 1995; Clark and Chalmers 1998), but also has not…”

“[45] used Kirsh and Maglio’s [46] notion of epistemic and pragmatic actions to analyze children’s problem-solving strategies on a jigsaw puzzle task: Epistemic actions are those which change the nature of the problem-solving task, whereas pragmatic actions bring one physically closer to a goal.”

“Sometimes, they allow us to perform cognitive tasks that we would otherwise not be able to perform at all (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“Following Kirsh and Maglio (1994), they call such actions epistemic actions .”

“Experts have acquired a form of imagination that prompt them to re-draw diagrams and calculate with them, performing epistemic actions (Kirsh and Maglio 1994).1 This imagination derives from our interaction 1 Kirsh and Maglio distinguish between pragmatic actions, i.e.‘‘actions performed to bring…”

“DC has discussed how structures in the environment could be made part of the cog- nitive system to lower processing load, for instance, in the process of landing an aircraft (Hutchins, 1995a) or playing Tetris (Kirsh & Maglio,1994).”

“The design environment and materials serve to support not only pragmatic action (Kirsh and Maglio 1994) – manipulating things to carry out a specific task – but also epistemic action – exploring and understanding the situation at hand through action and manipulation of materials.”

“The classic example involves a user manipulating pieces in the computer game Tetris; not to solve the task at hand but to better understand how rotated pieces look (Kirsh and Maglio 1994).”

“Kirsh calls this modification “epistemic” action, which he contrasts with “pragmatic” action which is taken to solve a problem directly[15].”

“The famous Tetris game has been used to investigate the differences in the actions humans perform from a cognitive perspective [15].”

“In Tetris, human-computer aggregates rely on both goal-directed actions and epistemic actions that use the world to simplify cognitive tasks (Kirsh and Maglio 1994).”

“One can assume simpler theories have to be redescribed in terms of more complex ones but not abandoned given their representational efficiency or pragmatic function (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994) in some contexts.”

“Presence emerges out of interaction with the environment under the condition that the perceived sensory patterns match memorized sensory cues and thus convey a meaning.”

“While previous work suggests the benefits of physical manipulation for learning [9; 12], and offers some insight into interaction around tabletops, particularly the effect of position and orientation [e.g. 17] and awareness [6] on collaboration and participation, they tell us little about the…”

“Actions may facilitate active perception to uncover hidden information or simplify information processing in sensory pathways ( Kirsh & Maglio, 1994; Nolfi & Marocco, 2002).”

“Kirsh and Maglio (1994) showed that skilled Tetris players rotate falling blocks on-screen rather than mentally.”

“In this example, deliberate or inadvertent actions on the part of the player (i.e., re-configuring letter tiles) produce environmental changes that prompt novel meanings and cognitive operations (Clark, 1997; Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“In some cases, the overt loop is recruited for planning and thinking, too, such as for instance when Tetris players rotate blocks to better decide where to place them (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994).”

“The perception-action loop can also help uncover hidden information, as demonstrated by Kirsh and Maglio [ 7 ].”

“Epistemic action refers to “exploratory” motor activity, where users would get the final stage through performing a lot of physical actions evenwith no specific goal [33,34].”

“For instance, in the video game Tetris, experts rotate shape ‘‘zoids” manually rather than mentally to discover where the zoid best fits (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“This is, in fact, often the kind of scenario selected for analysis by those working in distributed cognition: Kirsh and Maglio’s Tetris, for example ( Kirsh and Maglio 1994 ).”

“It is therefore very likely that there is a strong link between eyemovements and the cognitive processes involved in solving the task (see [9] for a detailed analysis).”

“The analysis also includes a pragmatist element (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994; Ormerod, 2006; White, 2006b; Locke et al, 2008) in the sense that an abductive approach was pursued where alternative counterfactual explanation played a key role in the development of the framework.”

“Some researchers name the action referred to in the last half of the above phrase as “epistemic action” compared to “pragmatic action” (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”