The role of body and environment in cognition

The role of body and environment in cognition

Author: Dermot Lynott

Publisher: Frontiers E-books

Published: 2014-08-25

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 2889192628

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Recent evidence has shown many ways in which our bodies and the environment influence cognition. In this Research Topic we aim to develop our understanding of cognition by considering the diverse and dynamic relationship between the language we use, our bodily perceptions, and our actions and interactions in the broader environment. There are already many empirical effects illustrating the continuity of mind- body-environment: manipulating body posture influences diverse areas such as mood, hormonal responses, and perception of risk; directing attention to a particular sensory modality can affect language processing, signal detection, and memory performance; placing implicit cues in the environment can impact upon social behaviours, moral judgements, and economic decision making. This Research Topic includes papers that explore the question of how our bodies and the environment influence cognition, such as how we mentally represent the world around us, understand language, reason about abstract concepts, make judgements and decisions, and interact with objects and other people. Contributions focus on empirical, theoretical, methodological or modelling issues as well as opinion pieces or contrasting perspectives. Topic areas include, perception and action, social cognition, emotion, language processing, modality-specific representations, spatial representations, gesture, atypical embodiment, perceptual simulation, cognitive modelling and perspectives on the future of embodiment.


The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition

The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition

Author: Lawrence Shapiro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-29

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 1317688651

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Embodied cognition is one of the foremost areas of study and research in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject and essential reading for any student and scholar of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts: Historical underpinnings Perspectives on embodied cognition Applied embodied cognition: perception, language, and reasoning Applied embodied cognition: social and moral cognition and emotion Applied embodied cognition: memory, attention, and group cognition Meta-topics. The early chapters of the Handbook cover empirical and philosophical foundations of embodied cognition, focusing on Gibsonian and phenomenological approaches. Subsequent chapters cover additional, important themes common to work in embodied cognition, including embedded, extended and enactive cognition as well as chapters on empirical research in perception, language, reasoning, social and moral cognition, emotion, consciousness, memory, and learning and development.


Enactive Cognition in Place

Enactive Cognition in Place

Author: Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 3031202821

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This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life and cognition, from the perspective of enactive cognitive science. Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro offers an unprecedented interpretation of the central claims of the enactive approach to cognition, supported by contemporary works of ecological psychology and phenomenology. The enactive approach conceives cognition as sense-making, a phenomenon emerging from the organizational nature of the living body that evolves in human beings through sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic interactions with the environment. From this standpoint, Sepúlveda-Pedro suggests incorporating three new theses into the theoretical body of the enactive approach: sense-making and cognition fundamentally consist of processes of norm development; the environment, cognitive agents actually interact with, is an active ecological field enacted in their historical past; and sense-making occurs in a domain consisting of multiple normative dimensions that the author names enactive place.


Cognition Beyond the Brain

Cognition Beyond the Brain

Author: Stephen J. Cowley

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-03-28

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 3319491156

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This book challenges neurocentrism by advocating a systemic view of cognition based on investigating how action shapes the experience of thinking, placing interactivity at its heart. This systemic viewpoint makes three main claims. First, that many elaborate cognitive skills like language, problem solving and human-computer interaction (HCI) are based in sense-saturated coordination or interactivity. Second, interactivity produces a tightly woven scaffold of resources, some internal to the agent and others external, that elevates and transforms thinking. Third, human agents entwine brains, bodies and their surroundings as they manage multi-scalar dynamics. This new edition continues to demonstrate how a systemic perspective casts a productive light on thinking in applied domains such as crime scene analysis, the use of information technology in construction, and computer-meditated trusts and presents new studies on the cognitive ecology of the web, multi-scalar temporal and organisational cognition and the importance of interactive material engagement in digital architecture. Authors use various scales of the systemic viewpoint to illustrate how bodies and artefacts shape thinking, but in all cases the experience of materiality is meshed with activity that involves the world beyond the body. Cognition Beyond the Brain is a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners and graduate students within the fields of Computer Science, Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences.


Human Body Perception from the Inside Out

Human Body Perception from the Inside Out

Author: Günther Knoblich

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-01-05

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 9780195178371

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As the general notion of cognition has recently broadened to include its embodied nature, researchers' accounts of perception have increasingly come to include the body's special status as a window on the world and to accommodate the specific perceptual requirements for identifying, interpreting, and interacting with other bodies. This volume presents a comprehensive overview of the rapid progress that has been made in understanding the human body and its relationship to perception. It will help to unify the relevant research from several independent areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and facilitate the development of an integrated framework for the study of human-body perception.


Beyond the body? The Future of Embodied Cognition

Beyond the body? The Future of Embodied Cognition

Author: Guy Dove

Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 2889197972

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Embodied cognition represents one of most important research programs in contemporary cognitive science. Although there is a diversity of opinion concerning the nature of embodiment, the core idea is that cognitive processes are influenced by body morphology, emotions, and sensorimotor systems. This idea is supported by an ever increasing collection of empirical studies that fall into two broad classes: one consisting of experiments that implicate action, emotion, and perception systems in seemingly abstract cognitive tasks and the other consisting of experiments that demonstrate the contribution of bodily interaction with the external environment to the performance of such tasks. Now that the research program of embodied cognition is well established, the time seems right for assessing its further promise and potential limitations. This research topic aims to create an interdisciplinary forum for discussing where we go from here. Given that we have good reason to think that the body influences cognition in surprisingly robust ways, the central question is no longer whether or not any cognitive processes are embodied. Instead, other questions have come to the fore: To what extent are cognitive processes in general embodied? Are there disembodied processes? Among those that are embodied, how are they embodied? Is there more than one kind of embodiment? Is embodiment a matter of degree? There are a number of specific issues that could be addressed by submissions to this research topic. Some supporters of embodied cognition eschew representations. Should anti-representationalism be a core part of an embodied approach? What role should dynamical models play? Research in embodied cognition has tended to focus on the importance of sensorimotor areas for cognition. What are the functions of multimodal or amodal brain areas? Abstract concepts have proved to be a challenge for embodied cognition. How should they be handled? Should researchers allow for some form of weak embodiment? Currently, there is a split between those who offer a simulation-based approach to embodiment and those who offer an enactive approach. Who is right? Should there be a rapprochement between these two groups? Some experimental and robotics researchers have recently shown a great deal of interest in the idea that external resources such as language can serve as form of cognitive scaffolding. What are the implications of this idea for embodied cognition? This research aims to bring together empirical and theoretical work from a diversity of perspectives. Subtitling is one of the most important disciplines in the history of social sciences, with the help of cognitive psychology. Researchers are encouraged to submit papers to discussing the future of embodied cognition, methods, models, or theories.


Beyond the Brain

Beyond the Brain

Author: Louise Barrett

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-03-22

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0691165564

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When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world.


How the Body Knows Its Mind

How the Body Knows Its Mind

Author: Sian Beilock

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 145162669X

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"Takes you inside the amazing science of how the body affects the mind, and shows how to use that wisdom to live smarter and maximize what your body teaches your mind"--


Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment

Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment

Author: Yann Coello

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1317616758

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This two-volume set provides a comprehensive overview of the multidisciplinary field of Embodied Cognition. With contributions from internationally acknowledged researchers from a variety of fields, Foundations of Embodied Cognition reveals how intelligent behaviour emerges from the interplay between brain, body and environment. Covering early research and emerging trends in embodied cognition, Volume 1 Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment is divided into four distinct parts, bringing together a number of influential perspectives and new ideas. Part one opens the volume with an overview of theoretical perspectives and the neural basis of embodiment, before part two considers body representation and its links with action. Part three examines how actions constrain perception of the environment, and part four explores how emotions can be shaped and structured by the body and its activity. Building on the idea that knowledge acquisition, retention and retrieval are intimately interconnected with sensory and motor processes, Foundations of Embodied Cognition is a landmark publication in the field. It will be of great interest to researchers and advanced students from across the cognitive sciences, including those specialising in psychology, neuroscience, intelligent systems and robotics, philosophy, linguistics and anthropology.