The embodiment of focus: Investigating the impact of leaning behavior on our cognitive state and other's perception of our cognitive state.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emerging literature on embodied cognition highlights the role that the body plays in cognitive and affective processes. We investigated whether different body postures, specifically leaning postures thought to reflect different states of cognitive focus, can impact cognitive focus and task performance. In three experiments we confirmed that different postures are perceived reliably by others to convey distinct and different states of cognitive focus. However, the individuals who actually adopted the postures did not experience any subjective change in cognitive focus nor demonstrate any influence of leaning posture on performance across a range of tasks that varied in their naturalness and complexity. Only by instructing participants to adopt a posture associated with a focused or unfocused cognitive state did an association between performance and posture emerge. These data indicate that changes in one's body do not necessarily yield a reliable change in one's cognitive state, even when (a) those changes in body are reliably perceived by others as inducing a change in cognitive state, and (b) changes in cognitive state lead to robust changes in the body. In light of these findings, we propose two related accounts that point to leaning behavior as being the result of one's increasing need to focus. Thus, rather than influencing cognitive state, leaning behavior may instead reflect the embodiment of one's cognitive state of focus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".