In a reenactment, a speaker re-presents or depicts a previously occurring event, often dramatically. In this article we examine the role of gaze in reenactments in conversations from Japanese and American English. Following Goodwin in viewing a reenacted story as ‘a multi-modal, multi-party field of activity’, we show how tellers’ and recipients’ gaze during reenactments is deployed to achieve specific interactional ends. We argue that there are two layers of activities involved in doing reenacting – a) the habitat of the (...) original event; b) the habitat of the reenacting event, including the dynamics of gaining appreciative recipiency – and show how they are interwoven in the joint production of a reenactment. (shrink)

Since the inception of modern approaches to grammar, Japanese ga has been treated as a marker indicating the grammatical relation `subject.' If this is an accurate characterization of ga, then we would expect ga to occur to mark a grammatical category consisting of `A' and `S'. Our examination of the contexts in which ga is actually used in everyday Japanese conversations shows that this expectation is not borne out. Our findings suggest that it is not appropriate to describe ga in (...) terms of a grammatical relation such as `subject', and that ga may be much less a grammatical marker than a discourse-pragmatic one. (shrink)

A theory of the evolution of mind cannot be complete without an explanation of how cognition became representational. Artificial approximations of cognitive evolution do not, in general, produce representational cognition. We take this as an indication that there is a gap in our understanding of what drives evolution towards representational solutions, and propose a theory to fill this gap. We suggest selection for learning and selection for second order learning as the causal factors driving the emergence of innate and acquired (...) forms of representation, respectively. Cognition is commonly viewed as a “black box”—selection works on externally visible behaviour alone, with little regard for implementation structure. Yet even if implementation structure is not constrained by selection on behaviour, implementation structure does affect how easy or difficult it is to make specific modifications to the behaviour. Hence selection for learning can affect the implementation structure of behaviour. Similarly, the implementation structure of learning ability itself is not under direct selection, but selection for second order learning can affect the implementation structure of first order learning. We argue that these indirect selection effects guide evolution towards representational implementations, as structural alignment between implementation structure and environment structure guarantees that simple changes in the environment can be met with simple changes in implementation. We illustrate the theory with examples of computational investigations, and discuss how the theory may help put representational cognition within reach of purely connectionist AI. (shrink)

The Bird Song Diamond project is a series of multifaceted and multidisciplinary installations with the aim of bringing contemporary research on bird communication to a large public audience. Using art and technology to create immersive experiences, BSD allows large audiences to embody bird communication rather than passively observe. In particular, BSD Mimic, a system for mimicking bird song, asks participants to grapple with both audition and vocalization of birdsong. The use of interactive installations for public outreach provides unique experiences to (...) a diverse audience, while providing direct feedback for artists and researchers interested in the success of such outreach. By following an iterative design process, both artists and researchers have been able to evaluate the effectiveness of each installation for promoting audience engagement with the subject matter. The execution and evaluation of each iteration of BSD is described throughout the paper. In addition, the process of interdisciplinary collaboration in our project has led to a more defined role of the artist as a facilitator of specialists. BSD Mimic has also led to further questions about the nature of audience collaboration for an engaged experience. (shrink)