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Skilled Embodiment in Emergency Medicine

Abstract This paper applies a multiscalar interactivity perspective in the study of how healthcare professionals enact skilled embodiment in ways that allow them to animate their rich environment during task performance. However, in focusing on interactivity, we are not only interested in the characteristics of embodiment as they are enacted in the here-and-now. While task performance involves not only the whole body (as a multi-sensory organ), but a historical, skilled body that affects the ecology in which a person is embedded, action-perception must be viewed as direct and distributed. That is, habitual performance and skilled embodiment emerge in coordination with lived experience and real-time affordances for action. Specifically, this paper investigates two real-life cases of how patients and medical staff engage in interactivity through rich embodiment including languaging. From an interactivity perspective, the first case indicates a novice doctor’s inability to pick up relevant information in the emergency medicine ecology. The outcome can be crucial and span patient dissatisfaction, erroneous results, and generally insufficient, and unsatisfactory healthcare. The second case provides a counterexample and illustrates how novice doctors can be supported in picking up task-relevant information as they can rely on other team members’ skilled embodiment. The article concludes that an interactivity perspective has implications not just for model-building in linguistics, semiotics and the cognitive sciences but also for practice where educational initiatives adopt the epistemologies behind such linguistic, communicative and cognitive models.