Imagery for interaction: A cognitive ethnography of co-regulating bodies in contact

The present cognitive ethnography explores co-regulative body interaction (Fogel 1993, Semin & Cacioppo 2008) in cultural practices where two persons continuously shape each other`s behavior through motion, touch, sensing and energy transfer. Such "embodied dialogs" produce felt knowledge of one`s own body, the partner, and the whole and require skills that build on complex somatic-cum-conceptual models. To address these facets integratively we will make conversant Tango argentino, Aikido, Feldenkrais Method, and Shiatsu. The micro- ethnographic study investigates action inventories and enactive principles (Fuchs & DeJaegher 2010) underlying typical interaction sequences. The used methods aim at the phenomenological study of embodied gestalts, both in somatic imagery and supporting conceptual imagery, which are assumed to underlie improvisational "vocabulary" as well as regulative mechanisms for situated interaction. Each case study explores the interdependency between (a) body models and their appending habitus, i.e. how the body is conceived in the discipline and how the motor system as well as inner and outer sensoria are shaped for a dialogic sensitivity through apprenticeship; (b) strategies for sensing the partner`s state and conceptual models used for regulation, i.e. perceptual affordances, "homebase" configurations, and perception-directing theories used for sensing or acting on the partner; (c) system designs in which these practices are situated, i.e. constraints making the interaction system functional that are embedded in social rules and cognitive frames commonly used by the discipline. Methodology. We investigate this nexus via gestalt imagery expressed in talk (e.g. metaphors, imagery heuristics, verb semantics), gesture, and sound culled from first- and second-person data. This perspective, unlike most behavioral methods, provides access to subtle or energetic aspects of bodily experience and explicates how imagery from perceptual habits and functional anatomical knowledge, to "good tricks" guides action and structures it "on- the-fly". We deploy a tested empirical method mix. Phenomenological think-alouds and interviews are used to elicit body knowledge and explicate embodied perception and action scaffolds that frequently remain implicit or fleeting (Petitmengin 2006). Body practice diaries and video ethnography methods add to this. Most data is integrated in Atlas.ti coding software, while ELAN software is used for video data. Levels of analysis: At the base level the inquiry investigates (a) the inventory of action elements in skilled practitioners, (b) recognizable configurations between two bodies that create affordances for improvised action and (c) general principles of dynamic imagery that occur across situations. Specifically, imagery is used to dynamically regulate the interaction when practitioners actively explore the partner, their sensing impels action, and a loop of reciprocal causation results. Imagery also defines the constraints that create posture, guide attention, and enhance receptivity for the partner, be it as permanent habitus or as somatic modes of attention (Csordas 1993). A more macroscopic inquiry investigates habitus changes over time (Wacquant 1995) and the conceptual restructuring of gestalt knowledge as expertise grows. Finally, a discipline`s procedural rules provide partly negotiable communication frames for the embodied dialogs and a stable purpose structure that suffuses all prior levels. Image schema based phenomenology. Adapting cognitive linguistic notions, image-schematic gestalts like FORCE, LINK, AXIS, UP-DOWN, BALANCE, CYCLE, PATH (Johnson 1987) are analyzed in their combinations. These constitute apt descriptors for posture, body configurations, directions, energy vectors, attentional scaffolds, and projective regulatory models. To address dynamic co-regulation itself, the study explores how image schema configurations arise that afford one or several actions (Gibson 1979). This is done by a phenomenology of situative triggers, constraints, and alternatives: When improvising, the partner`s body or the configuration furnishes experts with a variety of recognizable image-schematic affordances which they actively seek out. General enabling states add to this, i.e. phenomenological counterparts of attractors (Kelso 1995) that guide a set of specific interactions (e.g. force vectors between the two torsos for partner rapport). For a satisfactory interaction outcome the individual-level affordances and attractors need to be permanently (Tango, Aikido) or temporarily (Shiatsu, Feldenkrais) calibrated between partners through a shared understanding of how the system distributes tasks and what kinds of body signals are relevant cues.

We explored learners and experts skills for participatory sense-making and coregulation in Aikido, Shiatsu, Feldenkrais, and Tango. In essence, all four disciplines require establishing a resonance loop allowing ceaseless reciprocal causation with minimal delay between agents and using, to these ends, structural interpenetration through inter-body muscle chains, etc. (mutual incorporation). Strategically, the topic is of general relevance for the cognitive science of human interaction: In pair dance, martial arts and bodywork the demands of continuous rapport, micro-coordination and complementariness meet with demands of improvisation in the here and now. Our research analyzes how arguably one of the most complex human feats comes about by training and mutually adjusting multiple perceptuo-cognitive skills.Aims. We established a comprehensive paradigm for the context-sensitive study of skilled interaction via tactile, kinesthetic and other senses to supply (a) fine-grained interaction descriptions often at a timescale <1 sec., (b) a theory of dynamic micro-skills in perception, action, and imagery that support joint improvisation, complemented by enabling corporeal habits, and (c) explaining how experts ensure that superindividual emergent coordination patterns are temporarily stable and meaningful. Moreover, our view grounds abstract dynamic systems concepts, i.e. non-linear self-organization, in well-circumscribed embodied skills.Methods. Our cognitive ethnographic study was conducted by practitioner-researchers, who did micro-genetic interviews and think-alouds with learners and experts in their discipline (interviews were repeated to document developments). Dialogic elicitation methods adapted to sensorimotor experience in a forerunner project were employed for this purpose and made applicable to all disciplines. Additionally, four subproject leaders kept a personal practitioners diary to document their own advances in the field, provide further vignettes, and train their introspective skills.General findings. Real-time interaction results in dyadic emergence, which is expertly channelled through micro-coordinated negotiations or inherently guided within short familiar standard coordination tasks up to a decision point for the next choice. Recognizable form in interaction arises thanks to a conglomerate of physiological, sensorimotor, cognitive, and systemic factors that foster biomechanic or interactional self-organization. Hence, skilled interaction means being able to exploit these factors context-intelligently and in balanced ways. Dynamic immediacy in the resonance loop aided by a rich and varied repository of forms and principles allows remaining in flux, minutely coordinated, and poised for novelty as a couple. Base mechanisms. Improvised interaction must seek a real-time fit between multiple constraint systems, e.g. matching motor units with decision points of biomechanic stability. We generated a taxonomy of cognitive mechanisms employed to these ends. Expertly educated attention and the development of so-called smart perceptual mechanisms that capture the functional logic of the discipline at a glance are fundamental to real-time reactivity and fluid interaction. A host of modular steps, rotations, grips, presses, etc., provides the stuff improvisational action is comprised of, as does a variable repertory of composite forms (mini-scripts), internalized nodal decision points of the system, rhythmic and other larger-scale constraints, and knowledge of general dynamic principles a resource especially advanced experts increasingly use by soft-assembling solutions from multiple constraints (greater independency from modular ready-mades). Proper calibrations of gaze, hands, posture, muscle tension, etc., further enable interaction. Individuals taking care of their part (e.g. via good alignment), already prefigure good rapport, establish action-readiness and communication channels. Beneficial dyadic configurations, a grammar of the couple, further strengthen the fluid deployment of the above aspects of the practitioners vocabulary.Dynamic skills. Another aim was to analyze micro-dynamic skills against this background, including dynamic sensory elicitation actions and gradual perceptual specification while acting, generating options at a remove, waiting for triggers for sub-task phase timing, opportunistically exploiting arising rerouting options, actively modulating the other body to optimize reactivity, and many others. The import here is an inventory of good tricks experts possess in using the task dynamics in their own favor. As the project went on, we became interested in complex coalescences of and synergies between micro-skills on a behavioral arc. E.g., requisite relative spacing, particular sensory filters, action techniques, and the right dynamic timing must coalesce for the task to succeed. On the other hand, some solutions exploit simplexity, e.g. keeping good dance axis fulfills many functions at once. Dynamic ordering. In the spirit of recent approaches to participatory sense-making from enactivist scholars dynamic systems theory became a framework for understanding synergies and interaction as self-organizing process with emergent superindividual properties. In fact, advanced practitioners are often experts for synergetic process management, e.g. by balancing of multiple dynamic laws instead of using ready-mades. Bodyworkers, in particular, use a refined systemic understanding of bodies and synergetic transformation strategies to decide which grips, stretches, and presses to use. Dynamic systems theory was also used to define levels of dynamic order in previously collected motion capture data on Tango, including important trade-offs between inner-bodily and configurational dyadic constraints dancers must heed. Comparison. The breadth of the sampled disciplines enabled us to identify factors that globally influence how interaction plays out (system designs): Interaction dynamics depend on the focal aims of a discipline (e.g. esthetics, efficiency, healing, improvisation as a purpose in itself), quickness and external pacing of action, if a longer-term goal is followed, the extent of time, the degree of systemic flexibility and form, if mutual expertise is needed (two experts vs. expert-client couples), if collaborative attitudes exist or not (Aikido is a partly antagonistic skill), and about a dozen other parameters.