Cultural Artifacts Transform Embodied Practice: How a Sommelier Card Shapes the Behavior of Dyads Engaged in Wine Tasting

Abstract

The radical embodied approach to cognition directs researchers' attention to skilled practice in a structured environment. This means that the structures present in the environment, including structured interactions with others and with artifacts, are put at least on a par with individual cognitive processes in explaining behavior. Both ritualized interactive formats and artifacts can be seen as forms of "external memory," usually shaped for a particular domain, that constrain skilled practice, perception, and cognition in online behavior and in learning and development. In this paper, we explore how a task involving the recognition of difficult sensory stimuli (wine) by collective systems (dyads) is modified by a domain-specific linguistic artifact (a sommelier card). We point to how using the card changes the way participants explore the stimuli individually, making it more consistent with culturally accrued sommelier know-how, as well as how it transforms the interaction between the participants, creating specific divisions of labor and novel relations. In our exploratory approach, we aim to integrate qualitative methods from anthropology and sociology with quantitative methods from psychology and the dynamical systems approach using both coded behavioral data and automatic movement analysis.

Coordinating movements and beliefs: Different facets of doing things together

“…Questions about the relations between MC and goal attainment in JA tasks cannot be easily generalized, as such coordination always occurs in a particular context-what is functional for one kind of task may be dysfunctional for another. In our manual JA task, overall synchrony was positively related to performance, while Rączaszek-Leonardi et al (2019) found a negative relations between synchrony and performance in a sensory recognition task. In other work, Coco et al (2017) observed different relations between synchronization and task performance for wrist and head movements.…”

Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences

“…Aside from the obvious social origin of language [27], and the social constitution of the environment since early cognitive development [5], the awareness that many phenomena are interactively built grounds the increasingly widespread second-person neuroscience [28,29]. In research on language use, cutting-edge approaches investigate dialogue as a form of joint action [30,31], and new tools allow researchers to explore the interactional dynamics underlying language use [32][33][34][35]. Studies show that interaction facilitates abstract thought and problem-solving [6,36,37] and reveal that emotions [38][39][40][41][42] and social interaction [43][44][45] are paramount for abstract concept acquisition and use.…”

Enacting memories through and with things: Remembering as material engagement

“…Caregivers are therefore guides who, little by little, introduce the child to the culturally relevant action formats that they embody during interaction (Kärtner, 2018). Recurrent patterns of activity also involve a non-discursive and enactive normativity : once specific interactive formats become ritualised (Rączaszek-Leonardi et al, 2019), adults expect children to be increasingly capable of engaging with material culture skilfully. Thereby, action becomes ‘subject to normative assessment as better or worse, as more or less correct given the specific demands of the situation’ (Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018: 154).…”