Poddiakov A.N. Workshop on cognition: “Pinks and Greens” game in enactivism paradigm with multifactorial interactions of participants

A technique “Pinks and Greens” was designed for a cognitive psychology workshop on embodied cognition. It is a game with multifactorial interactions and transformations of the participants with green marks into the participants with pink marks, and vice versa. It is created in the tradition of “live chess”: several participants from the class are solving logical problems in the environment “Pinks and Greens” according to its existing rules, being the space-distributed elements of this environment. The rest of the group is watching. The players are given tasks for cooperation and competition. The preliminary results are the following: 1) The participants believe that the problems are solved easier, when “looking from the outside” than when being in the environment; 2) The participants in some moves solve a problem in visual-active dimension, moving physically to different positions of the playing field and focusing on the result obtained; 3) The participants note the difficulties of shifting between the roles in the case of “transformations”. The game allows the participants to feel and realize themselves in unity of various qualities: a) as a logical element of the environment, which is capable of taking two values (“pink” or “green); b) as a member of a team, who discusses the possibilities and defends their decision in front of others; c) as an object of another participant’s decision; d) as an embodied subject, who moves in physical space and occupies positions in it relative to other participants; e) as a subject, who changes their thinking tasks to the opposite ones. Various aspects of the game can be discussed at a workshop: from purely logical and game-theoretic, individual and socio-psychological to philosophical.

Key words: cognition, embodied cognition, enactivism, workshop, game with multifactorial interactions

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to the students, who participated in the workshop and gave him feedback on the game.

For citation: Poddiakov, A.N. (2023). Workshop on cognition: “Pinks and Greens” game in enactivism paradigm with multifactorial interactions of participants. New Psychological Research, No. 1, 30–45. DOI: 10.51217/npsyresearch_2023_03_01_02