On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action

“Actions whose job is to improve or transform information rather than achieve immediate practical ends are sometimes called ‘ epistemic actions ’ [Kirsh and Maglio 1994].”

“The unique contribution which Kirsh and Maglio’s article (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994) made to cognitive science, and which has thus far not been related to the philosophy of emotions, is the insight that not all actions are necessarily pragmatic in their function.”

“This strategy has much in common with the notion of ‘epistemic action’ in which a problemsolving agent initiates actions to restructure the problemsolving environment in a manner that simplifies subsequent problem-solving operations [7].”

“For example, in their study of Tetris playing, Kirsh and Maglio (1994) distinguish between the pragmatic acts involved in moving the pieces to form patterns, and the epistemic actions involved in moving the pieces in an exploratory manner to see whether patterns are available.”

“3 An approach that focused less on overall Tetris performance and more on details of game play was taken by Kirsh and Maglio (1994) and Maglio and Kirsh (1996) to advance the general (i.”

“Besides, relying on the literature (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994) the study posited that the epistemic actions facilitated by the rich interface offloaded the designers’ mental cognition partly into the physical world, thus letting them have freer mind to create more design ideas.”

“Kirsh and Maglio (1994), for example, compared the performance of subjects playing Tetris who were allowed to physically rotate blocks to fit them into the slots with players who were forced to mentally rotate them.”

“Kirsh and Maglio (1994) have argued that these kinds of “ epistemic actions ” facilitate spatial cognition in Tetris , making it easier for players to complete the game — in ecological terms this suggests that the environment affords puzzle solving.”

“For example, Kirsh and Maglio (1994) found that experienced players of Tetris often rotated the Tetris pieces on the computer screen rather than mentally rotating them.”

“In four experiments, we systematically investigated two predictions that follow from Maglio and Kirsh’s epistemic action hypothesis ( Kirsh & Maglio, 1994; Maglio, 1995): specifically, (a) that additional previews prime memory effectively in Tetris, and (b) that these previews increase capacity so much that the benefi…”

“13Epistemic actions have been characterized by Kirsh and Maglio (1994) as “actions performed to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally” in contrast to pragmatic actions, which are “actions performed to bring one physically closer to a goal.”

“…is “externalized” or off-loaded to the environment, as in the case of using a computer (or even an abacus) to do maths, or rotating Tetris pieces to aid in deciding where to place them (the latter was indeed an early example of “epistemic action” in the literature, cf. Kirsh and Maglio 1994).”

“16 For the concept of epistemic action see Kirsh and Maglio (1994) and the discussion in Clark and Chalmers (1998).”

“Borrowing Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) distinction, we can say that there are two categories of action in sports: pragmatic Table 4 Protocol excerpt and EUM labels illustrating an occurrence of the typical executory sequence “Vary strokes to maintain effectiveness””

“One common claim for tangible interfaces is that they can provide scaffolding and structures for external cognition, by allowing users to offload information on to the physical arrangement of the tangible objects [10].”

“This specific action reduces the memory involved and the probability of error in mental computation[24].”

“[30, 36]).”

“our limited working memory systems can be altered completely when we can symbolically represent the different elements of the task, giving us new ways of interacting with the problem, organising and reorganising its components in what Kirsch and Maglio (1994) term “epistemic actions”.”

“In their influential paper, Kirsh and Maglio (1994) distinguished between two kinds of action: pragmatic and epistemic.”

“Aligning a map with the referent space is an epistemic action, defined by Kirsch and Maglio as an action in which an agent manipulates objects in the environment with the goal of acquiring information [33].”

“(Kirsh & Maglio, 1994: 545; emphases in original) Seen from this point of view, the usual experimental approach in brain function imaging studies is unable to capture relevant aspects of agent–environment interactions.”

“Or consider David Kirsh and Paul Maglio’s research on “epistemic actions” [32] which highlights a similar kind of environmental “offloading” or “outsourcing”: proficient players of the computer game Tetris use button presses to rotate the figures on the screen rather than rotate them mentally because it is cognitively…”

“…resource——pen and paper, say——transforms and alters the informational structure of the local environment so as to appropriately augment and aid the completion of cognitive tasks: enabling faster, more efficient and more reliable processing of information (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994, p. 515).”

“Active engagement can serve epistemic functions and information search can often even be nested within pragmatic actions that impact the world (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).7 Furthermore, incipient action may suggest creative pathways and “actionables,” as in Napoleon’s famous dictum “first we engage,…”

“Kirsh and Maglio (1994) famously showed that subjects perform better in the video game Tetris when they actively manipulate blocks than when they perform these operations in their heads.”

“Our study suggests that an important component of performing spatial memory tasks efficiently may be the generation of eye movement strategies which minimize the load on internal cognitive resources (Clark 1997; Kirsh and Maglio 1994; Hodgson et al. 2000).”

“Research from Kirsh and associates suggests that in everyday life people usually perform some simple actions that change or adapt their environment in order to assist them to perform more complex activities (see Kirsh and Maglio 1994; Kirsh 1996; Hollan et al. 2000).”

“(non-neural) structures, in terms of her actions with, and/or navigation in, those external structures (Chandrasekharan and Nersessian 2015; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Hutchins 2014; Kirsh 2010; Kirsh and Maglio 1994).”

“The term is derived from the distinction between epistemic and pragmatic action developed by Kirsh and Maglio (1994) .”

“Under this theme, Antle distinguishes between the ‘Role of Actions in Embodied Cognition’ and ‘Epistemic and Pragmatic actions’ (drawing on the work of Kirsh & Maglio [19]).”

“Finally, the “epistemic activity” included actions aiming to support mental computations or uncover information that is hidden (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994), such as sampling the cards and counting.”

“Epistemic actions are actions which humans take with the intent of facilitating cognition, for instance first structuring the physical environment before starting to work (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“This type of epistemic action [11] was frequently observed just prior to the participants specifying a dimension.”

“Active tokens could be lifted from the workspace and held, placed, or exchanged with other users to support varying styles of epistemic cognition [67]. for manipulation in a conventional spreadsheet, or to a wall-scale display for presentation use.”

“studied ‘epistemic action’, which they define as actions that are not required as part of the goal task but which provide an advantage for intermediate mental processing [58].”

“A popular example of these so-called epistemic actions is rotating a piece of the Tetris game so to decide where to put it more easily and with less cognitive load (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“The authors build on the ideas of Kirsh and Maglio (1994) of epistemic actions that alter the world so as to aid and augment cognitive processes such as recognition and search.”

“We thus can see elements of " epistemic action " [Kirsh and Maglio 1994], and of John using the world as a representation of itself, fluidly switching and cross referencing between two views.”

“Epistemic gestures are exploratory movements to acquire haptic or tactile information; see also (Kirsh, 1995; Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“81 For Kirsh and Maglio, epistemic actions are physical external actions that an agent performs to change their own computational state in order to make such brain computations easier, faster, or more reliable.”

“In this way ‘best’ or ‘good enough’ can be defined by pragmatic qualities such as whether the materials are interesting, useful, straightforward and so on (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994).”

“This argument was consistent with research done by Larkin and Simon (1987), Norman (1993), Kirsh and Maglio (1994), Kirsh (1995), and Scaife and Rogers (1996).”

“The fact that so much of the model derives from basic ACT-R mechanisms supports the idea that participants tend to use well-practiced perceptual and memory-based processes when they can, to avoid using more complicated procedures (e.g., Kirsh and Maglio, 1994 ).”

“Rather it highlights that epistemic actions are readily achievable in the digital domain, a suggestion supported by Kirsh’s seminal work introducing the concept using a traditional (and purely virtual) version of the Tetris video game [15].”

“They suggest that the complex interplay between epistemic action (actions used to understand the object) and pragmatic action (actions used to explain object functionality) caused this [22].”

“That is, players were performing calculations outside of the brain, using their hands, the screen, and the computer’s calculating apparatus to extend their own minds.(8) This process of active, two-way interaction with an external system that supplements the brain’s capabilities is known as coupling.”

“In contrast to these traditional views, the situated mind approach emerges based on the theses of Kirsh and Maglio (1994) and Hutchins (2006), who explain that there is a constitutive, and not only causal, link between the mind, the body, and the world.”

“…cognition frameworks emphasized a non-pragmatic foundation for action under the notion of ‘epistemic action’: action is not only ‘pragmatic’ but it is also ‘epistemic,’ in the sense of being able to elicit information from the environment that would otherwise be unattainable (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994).”

“Krueger (2011), for instance, has discussed some of the basic mechanisms, in particular gesture, body posture, and facial expression, in the context of extended cognition and argues for seeing these mechanisms as an interactive form of shared action-space management of embodied agents (“we-space” management).”

“According to Kirsh and Maglio (1994), pragmatic actions are those aiming to bring one physically closer to a goal, whereas epistemic actions pursue to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally.”

“Cash-based play enabled players to engage in epistemic (Kirsh and Maglio 1994) or other self-management actions like entering the venue carrying only as much as they were willing to lose.”

“In this sense Kirsh and Maglio [29] distinguish actions into two categories, namely pragmatic actions and epistemic actions.”

“Expert human players exhibit (information-seeking) epistemic action ‘in abundance almost from the moment a piece enters the screen’ (Kirsh and Maglio 1994: 524).”

“In (1-e) – (1-g), private navigation actions are performed, which here are both epistemic actions (changing the environment to change perceptual state) as well as pragmatic actions (task level actions that potentially advance towards the goal), in the sense of Kirsh and Maglio (1994).”