The book is structured into two parts. Each author first introduces the situated cognitive approach from their respective sensory domains (vision, audition, olfaction, gustation). The second part is the collective effort to derive methodological guidelines respecting the ecological validity of experimental investigations while formulating operational answers to applied questions (such as the sensory quality of environments and product design).
This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners dealing with sensory experiences and anyone who wants to understand and celebrate the cultural diversity of human productions that make life enjoyable!
Mirroring Chapter 5, this chapter relates the personal approach and development of young scientists (both authors as Ph.D. candidates) reconsidering their scientific and musical categories in order to explore musical experience, managing multidisciplinary research, balancing the principles of scientific research and experiential knowledge not formalized along the lines of scientific methods, and trying to deal with the opposition between common sense meaning and expert knowledge. This personal approach within such a didactic book is deliberate in that it attemps to illustrate a scientific process in action, and not only to give freezed data and results.
The research in olfaction presented here was first developed within the paradigm elaborated by Rosch and Lloyd (1978) in psychology and by Berlin and Kay (1969) in linguistic anthropology. This research was decisive in our theoretical evolution1 and in the development of alternative concepts and methods to study olfactory experience (and sensory experience in general) both in everyday life situations, in expert professional practices as well as in experimental conditions. The exploration of olfactory experience requires us to consider sensory experience as embodied, multisensory, and cultural i.e. situated and critically invested with symbolic, social and emotional values. Olfactory experience is also, as other sense modalities, constrained by the material and technological development as well as the diverse cultural practices involving smells and odors. It also critically imposes to reconsider the epistemological grounding of the relations between language and cognition and invites to position psychological investigations accounting for humanities and social sciences (mainly anthropology and history).
This chapter follows vision, audition and olfaction in part because this reflects the chronological order in which these topics were addressed within our research group. Taste, more than the other senses, prevents us from exclusively relying on the analytical distinction of the five senses grounded in the physiology of the receptors, and allows us to validate our semiotic and holistic situated cognition approach of exploring the senses.
This chapter enters into dialogue with its counterpart, Chapter 1, pointing to advances from the classical cognitivist position to a situated approach to cognition. We develop upon the consequences of this shift towards sensory experiences presented in Chapters 2 to 8. This chapter can also be read on its own in that it summarizes what we have learned from case studies in previous chapters, and then reconsiders important concepts to account for the specificities of sensory experiences as a psychological reality. We further provide empirical guidelines for empirical explorations, further detailed in Chapter 10.
The book is structured into two parts. Each author first introduces the situated cognitive approach from their respective sensory domains (vision, audition, olfaction, gustation). The second part is the collective effort to derive methodological guidelines respecting the ecological validity of experimental investigations while formulating operational answers to applied questions (such as the sensory quality of environments and product design).
This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners dealing with sensory experiences and anyone who wants to understand and celebrate the cultural diversity of human productions that make life enjoyable!
Mirroring Chapter 5, this chapter relates the personal approach and development of young scientists (both authors as Ph.D. candidates) reconsidering their scientific and musical categories in order to explore musical experience, managing multidisciplinary research, balancing the principles of scientific research and experiential knowledge not formalized along the lines of scientific methods, and trying to deal with the opposition between common sense meaning and expert knowledge. This personal approach within such a didactic book is deliberate in that it attemps to illustrate a scientific process in action, and not only to give freezed data and results.
The research in olfaction presented here was first developed within the paradigm elaborated by Rosch and Lloyd (1978) in psychology and by Berlin and Kay (1969) in linguistic anthropology. This research was decisive in our theoretical evolution1 and in the development of alternative concepts and methods to study olfactory experience (and sensory experience in general) both in everyday life situations, in expert professional practices as well as in experimental conditions. The exploration of olfactory experience requires us to consider sensory experience as embodied, multisensory, and cultural i.e. situated and critically invested with symbolic, social and emotional values. Olfactory experience is also, as other sense modalities, constrained by the material and technological development as well as the diverse cultural practices involving smells and odors. It also critically imposes to reconsider the epistemological grounding of the relations between language and cognition and invites to position psychological investigations accounting for humanities and social sciences (mainly anthropology and history).
This chapter follows vision, audition and olfaction in part because this reflects the chronological order in which these topics were addressed within our research group. Taste, more than the other senses, prevents us from exclusively relying on the analytical distinction of the five senses grounded in the physiology of the receptors, and allows us to validate our semiotic and holistic situated cognition approach of exploring the senses.
This chapter enters into dialogue with its counterpart, Chapter 1, pointing to advances from the classical cognitivist position to a situated approach to cognition. We develop upon the consequences of this shift towards sensory experiences presented in Chapters 2 to 8. This chapter can also be read on its own in that it summarizes what we have learned from case studies in previous chapters, and then reconsiders important concepts to account for the specificities of sensory experiences as a psychological reality. We further provide empirical guidelines for empirical explorations, further detailed in Chapter 10.