This paper explores the psychological notion of context as cognitive environment that is part of the Relevance Theory framework and describes the way in which such CEs are constrained during the course of conversation as the conversational partners engage in “conversional tailoring”.

This paper discusses the fundamental sense in which the components of an argument should be relevant to the intended audience. In particular, the evidence advanced should be relevant to the facts and assumptions that are manifest in the cognitive environment of the audience. A version of Sperber and Wilson's concept of the cognitive environment is applied to argumentative concerns, and from this certain features of audience-relevance are explored: that the relevance of a premise can vary with (...) the audience; that irrelevant premises can be made relevant; that evidence can be relevant by degrees; and that this notion of relevance will assist the argumentation analyst in the identification and assessment of hidden premises. (shrink)

In order to maximize human performance, defence forces continue to explore, develop, and apply human performance enhancement (HPE) methods, ranging from pharmaceuticals to (bio)technological enhancement. This raises ethical, legal, and societal concerns and requires organizing a careful reflection and deliberation process, with relevant stakeholders. We discuss a range of ethical, legal, and societal aspects (ELSA), which people involved in the development and deployment of HPE can use for such reflection and deliberation. A realistic military scenario with proposed HPE application can (...) serve as a starting point for such an iterative and participatory process. Stakeholders can discuss this application, modify its features, and design appropriate processes around it – for instance, procedures for informed consent. We propose that organizing aspects into these three categories – ethical, legal, and societal – can help involve appropriate interlocutors at different moments: legal aspects with people in strategy or management roles, from the start of a project; ethical aspects with people in operations and medical roles, during development; and societal aspects with people in communication and personnel roles, during deployment. Notably, we developed and discussed this framework and the three aspects in close collaboration with personnel from the military. (shrink)

This study employs an experiment investigating cognitive mapping of fifth-grade children living in a remote village environment, wherein characteristics of the landscape included paths, landmarks, nodes, edges, and districts. Two aspects of analysis were salient in this study. First, important landscape characteristics and their frequency of appearance in the cognitive maps were tabulated and illustrated as a layout map. Second, inaccurate cognitive maps were structurally analyzed to account for any incompleteness, distortions, and augmentation of actual environments (...) found in some map samples. Focus on gender differences in children’s environmental cognition in terms of symbolic representation skills utilized in cognitive mapping is of special interest in this case study. Results confirm Piaget’s theory that older children, aged ten or more, begin to use projective and Euclidean concepts. Furthermore, boys used a greater variety of symbols to represent a particular landscape characteristic, a cultural temple, than did the girls. Finally, we hypothesize that the ‘hunter–gatherer’ social divisions of labor between men and women in the village’s early historical social structure are consequentially related to gender discrepancies in cognitive mapping symbolic representation skills, in non-English-speaking children. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Effective communication relies on the use of rhetorical devices and strategies to make ideas present in the minds of an audience. By employing the concept of cognitive environments, we can use the visual analogy of making an idea “present” to its fullest effect, empowering our rhetorical skills and helping influence audience reception. In this article, the author argues that while cognitive environments do indeed provide a significant and important conceptual tool for understanding and anticipating an audience’s experiences, (...) beliefs, and knowledge, a more robust sense of agreement is necessary. The article proposes the concept of a topos that serves as a shared meeting place within cognitive environments within which both author and audience contribute their background assumptions to find common ground and commonalities in interpretations. It is in figuring the topos effectively that cognitive environments can be more accurately and effectively mapped onto each other, and breaches between such environments can be productively bridged. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology is widely understood as involving an integration of evolutionary theory and cognitive psychology, in which the former promises to revolutionise the latter. In this paper, I suggest some reasons to doubt that the assumptions of evolutionary theory and of cognitive psychology are as directly compatible as is widely assumed. These reasons relate to three different problems of specifying adaptive functions as the basis for characterising cognitive mechanisms: the disjunction problem, the grain problem and the (...) class='Hi'>environment problem. Each of these problems can be understood as arising from incommensurate characterisations of the nature and role of 'the environment' in the two approaches. Purported solutions to the problems appear to require detailed information concerning the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness), with the disjunction problem placing the lowest requirement, the environment problem placing the highest requirement, and the grain problem placing an intermediate one. In each case, such information is not likely to be forthcoming, because it may require iterating through successively more distant EEA's with no principled stopping point. This produces a dilemma for evolutionary psychology - either to solve these apparently insoluble problems, or to attempt to avoid them but in doing so forego detailed evolutionary constraints on cognition. (shrink)

Purpose: The aim of this research was to test whether Hong Kong science students would prefer a learning environment based on critical constructivism and whether a closer preferred-actual fit to such an environment would be associated with better learning outcomes. Method: The participants were 149 Hong Kong secondary school Chemistry students aged 16--19 years. They completed actual and preferred forms of a Chinese version of the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey and measures of self-efficacy and intrinsic value of (...) their Chemistry course. Their Chemistry examination scores were also obtained at the end of the course. Findings: Analysis showed that these students would prefer their Chemistry classrooms to be more personally relevant, to allow students more say and to share more control, and to encourage more negotiation with their teacher. Regression surface analysis showed that congruence of person environment fit did not influence examination results but was associated with greater valuing of the course and higher student self-efficacy. Research implications: Further research with a wider sampling from Hong Kong and elsewhere and focusing on other subject areas will be necessary to assess the generalizability of these findings. Practical implications: It seems that educational reforms based on critical constructivist principles may be of value in non-Western contexts. Original value: Educational reforms in Hong Kong and elsewhere currently are based on traditional constructivist principles. But this is the first research to support a more radical approach in what is usually regarded as a relatively conservative Asian educational context. (shrink)

The human being is an imitative animal. This statement, or description, resonates across time and cultures. Its familiarity derives from its repetition. It has, in terms appropriate to this discussion, a memetic quality. What Aristotle says is that "imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns first by imitation". The proof for this, Aristotle goes on to explain, lies in (...) the pleasure derived from imitation. And if pleasurable, it is natural; we are naturally imitative creatures.Among our imitative practices is the social practice of argumentation with all its rhetorical... (shrink)

Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition (...) they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed. (shrink)

In October 2011, the “2nd European Network for Cognitive Systems, Robotics and Interaction”, EUCogII, held its meeting in Groningen on “Autonomous activity in real-world environments”, organized by Tjeerd Andringa and myself. This is a brief personal report on why we thought autonomy in real-world environments is central for cognitive systems research and what I think I learned about it. --- The theses that crystallized are that a) autonomy is a relative property and a matter of degree, b) increasing (...) autonomy of an artificial system from its makers and users is a necessary feature of increasingly intelligent systems that can deal with the real-world and c) more such autonomy means less control but at the same time improved interaction with the system. (shrink)

How should scientists carve up cognition to generate good predictions, explanations, and models of cognition? This chapter argues that cognitive categories should be constructed the same way that biological categories are: in terms of homology. The chapter adapts a developmental account of trait identity from evolutionary-developmental biology to make sense of the notion of “cognitive homology.” The consequence is that both brain structures and the organism’s ongoing interactions with the environment are crucial for individuating cognitive homologies, (...) and thus for cognitive ontology. (shrink)

At the beginning of the third millenium the aspect of truth comes out to be especially topical. The greatest interest is risen by existentialistic and social aspects of the truth issue. Their correlation studying is the most productive way to research the aspect of truth. An individual life passes under certain circumstances, one of them being social reality. Presence of other people, necessity of communication and correlation of individual and social substances allows emphasizing a social side of the truth aspect. (...) The notion of truth is shaped under condition of intersubjectivity or within the process of social subjects interaction. On the one hand it provides a possibility to take the truth as an objectively existing phenomenon, on the other hand it transfers individual valuables and strivings into generally significant field. So Truth is destined to stay one of the most important and notional for a person concepts (despite of post-modernism attempts not to use it basically), as it legitimates a universal principle of common valuables availability for all people on the earth. (shrink)

In their scholarly target article, Gilead et al. explain how abstract mental representations and the predictive brain enable prospection and time-traveling. However, their exclusive focus on intrapsychic capacities misses an important point, namely, the degree to which mind and brain are tuned by the environment. This neglected aspect of adaptive cognition is discussed and illustrated from a cognitive-ecological perspective.

In 1955, Egon Brunswik presented a paper in which he argued that neglect of the environment and over emphasis of the organism was the major downfall of cognitive psychology. His critiques have largely been ignored and research is discussed that demonstrates the same organismic- asymmetry Brunswik detailed in 1955. This research is discussed in attribution terms since experimental psychologists make behavioral attributions. This organismic-asymmetry has resulted in a body of research that is guilty of the fundamental attribution error. (...) Brunswik's theory of representative design, proposed to address organismic-asymmetry, is discussed and contrasted with calls for ecological validity. Although calls for ecological validity are well intentioned, they lack any systematic theory of the environment and fall significantly short of Brunswik's ideal. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Cognition means different things to different psychologists depending on the position held on the mind-matter problem. Ecological psychologists reject the implied mind-matter dualism as an ill-posed theoretic problem because the assumed mind-matter incommensurability precludes a solution to the degrees of freedom problem. This fundamental problem was posed by both Nicolai Bernstein and James J. Gibson independently. It replaces mind-matter dualism with animal-environment duality -- a better posed scientific problem because commensurability is assured. Furthermore, when properly posed this way, a (...) conservation law is suggested that encompasses a psychology of transactional systems, a biology of self-actional systems, and a physics of interactional systems. For such a solution, a theory of cognition for goal-directed behaviour is needed. A sketch is supplied for how such a theory might be pursued in the spirit of the new physics of evolving complex systems. (shrink)

The organism-in-its-environment is recognized as the basic unit of analysis when dealing with living beings. This paper seeks to define the fundamental implications of the concept of the organism-in-its-environment in terms of the biosemiotic concept of human distributed cognition. Human distributed cognition in a biosemiotic context is defined as the ability of a self-referencing organism-in-its-environment to interact with its environment to satisfy its physiological and social needs to survive and sustain itself. The ontogenetic development of the (...) organism-in-its-environment serves as the backdrop to discover the implications of distributed cognition that have general applicability in organisms, but in this paper, are made relevant to human beings. (shrink)

Here, a distinguished group of international contributors examines what we know about, feel, and hope to accomplish in real-world environments.

Humans, like all organisms, have evolved to survive in specific environments, while some elect or are forced to live and work in extreme environments. Understanding cognition as it relates to environmental conditions, we use 4E cognition as a framework to explore creativity in extreme environments. Our paper examines space arts as a case study through the history, present practices, and future possible arts in the context of humans beyond the Kármán boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere. We develop a proposed taxonomy (...) of space arts, based on prior taxonomies, and provide specific exemplars of space art developed by artists in space or for use by astronauts in space. Using examples of space art since the birth of the space age, we discuss 1) how human survival in extreme environments requires investment in the space arts, driven by consideration of all biopsychosocial factors and 2) how new scientific and engineering discoveries could be consequences or examples of creative thinking driven by artists in the various types of space art. We conclude by discussing possible benefits of space art, future research applications, and advocate that all space actors, government or private, involve artists in all projects beyond the Kármán Boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere. (shrink)

The 360° medium, an immersive dome-based video projection environment (immersive dome environment (IDE)) also called ‘fulldome’, is often seen as an old concept of a traditional planetarium setting. This article invites the reader to look at it as a unique, hybrid media format, which opens new ways of perception.

Search can be found in almost every cognitive activity, ranging across vision, memory retrieval, problem solving, decision making, foraging, and social interaction. Because of its ubiquity, research on search has a tendency to fragment into multiple areas of cognitive science. The proposed topic aims at providing integrative discussion of the central role of search from multiple perspectives. We focus on controlled search processes, which require a goal, uncertainty about the nature, location, or acquisition method of the objects to (...) be searched for, and a method for sampling through the search environment. While this definition of search is general and applicable to different domains, the specific mechanisms in the search process will likely differ. The goal of this issue is to compare and contrast how these search processes are similar and differ in different cognitive activities, with the goal of understanding the general nature of search in terms of the three characteristics stated above. We expect that given its cross-domain nature, the topic on search will be of broad interest to cognitive scientists, including psychologists, behavioral ecologists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, linguists, and sociologists. (shrink)

Clark and Chalmers (1998) have argued that mental states can be extended outside an organism.

Children learn and use various strategies to solve math problems. One way children's math learning can be supported is through their use of and exposure to hand gestures. Children's self-produced gestures can reveal unique, math-relevant knowledge that is not contained in their speech. Additionally, these gestures can assist with their math learning and problem solving by supporting their cognitive processes, such as executive function. The gestures that children observe during math instructions are also linked to supporting cognition. Specifically, children (...) are better able to learn, retain, and generalize knowledge about math when that information is presented within the gestures that accompany an instructor's speech. To date, no conceptual model provides an outline regarding how these gestures and the math environment are connected, nor how they may interact with children's underlying cognitive capacities such as their executive function. In this review, we propose a new model based on an integration of the information processing approach and theory of embodied cognition. We provide an in-depth review of the related literature and consider how prior research aligns with each link within the proposed model. Finally, we discuss the utility of the proposed model as it pertains to future research endeavors. (shrink)

The concept of an altered state of consciousness may be clarified when three major issues are discussed: the phenomenon, its method of induction, and criteria for evaluating the phenomenon. An ASC is a mental state, but it is not clear how such a mental state is related to subjective experience and cognitive functioning. The relationship between the method of induction and the resulting ASC is also unclear at present. Finally, criteria for determining and evaluating the ASC are indistinguishable from (...) the phenomenon itself, leaving the latter ill-defined. These are the basic issues which are addressed in the theoretical formulation here presented. I propose that the cognitive mode distinguishing the normal waking state from an ASC is the mode of meaning employed. (shrink)

The Attention Restoration Theory has been widely cited to account for beneficial effects of natural environments on affect and attention. However, the effects of environment and exercise are not consistent. In a within-subjects design, participants completed affective and cognitive measures that varied in attentional demands both before and after exercise in a natural and indoor environment. Contrary to the hypotheses, a natural environment resulted in lower positive affect and no difference in negative affect compared to an (...) indoor environment. A natural environment resulted in the most improvement for cognitive tasks that required moderate attentional demand: Trail Making Test A and Digit Span Forwards. As predicted, exercise resulted in improved affect and improved executive function. There were no interactions between environment and exercise. These results suggest that ART cannot fully explain the influence of environment on affect and cognition. (shrink)

This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. (...) While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of "institutional rationality" of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data. (shrink)

Children with special educational needs achieve lower educational levels than their peers without special needs, leading to a higher risk of social exclusion in the future. Inclusive education aims to promote learning and to benefit the cognitive development of these students, and numerous research studies have indicated that interactive environments benefit inclusion. However, it is necessary to know how these inclusive environments can positively impact the academic improvement and development of these students' cognitive skills. This article provides a (...) review of the scientific literature from Web of Science, SCOPUS, ERIC, and PsychINFO to understand the impact of interactive environments on the academic learning and cognitive skill development of children with SEN. A total of 17 studies were selected. Those studies showed the effectiveness of interactive learning environments in promoting instrumental learning, increasing academic involvement, and improving the cognitive development of children with disabilities. Based on these results, it can be concluded that interaction-based interventions with an inclusive approach nurture the learning and cognitive development of students with SEN. (shrink)

Cognition played a pivotal role in the acceleration of technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution. Growing affluence may have provided favourable environmental conditions for a boost in cognition, enabling individuals to tackle more complex problems. Dynamical systems thinking may provide useful tools to describe sudden transitions like the Industrial Revolution, by modelling the recursive feedback between psychology and environment.

The frequent occurrence of safety accidents is a global problem, and unsafe behavior is the main cause of accidents, which has been unanimously recognized by academia and industry. However, the previous research on unsafe behavior focused on analyzing the linear effects of variables on the results, and it was difficult to systematically analyze the complex mechanism of the results generated by the coupling of each variable. The problem of how to avoid unsafe behavior of construction workers has not been effectively (...) solved. Based on the configuration perspective, on-site observation is organized, 164 construction workers are taken as case samples, the traditional regression analysis method is abandoned, and the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method is used to integrate the theoretical framework of social cognition. From the perspective of psychological cognition and institutional environment, this paper discusses the differential matching of construction workers’ safety attitude, safety motivation, institutional control, safety training, and safety climate, and exploring the causal complex mechanisms that improve unsafe behavior among construction workers. The results show that: The unsafe behavior of construction workers is the result of multiple factors. A single influencing factor does not constitute a necessary condition for the unsafe behavior of construction workers; the path leading to the unsafe behavior phenomenon is not unique. Therefore, the high and unsafe behavior configuration of construction workers is summarized as “psychological cognition scarcity type,” “institutional environment scarcity type,” and “attitude-climate scarcity type”; compared with “psychological cognitive scarcity type” and “institutional environment scarcity type,” “attitude-climate scarcity type” is more likely to cause unsafe behavior of construction workers; a lower level of safety attitude or safety climate is more likely to cause high and unsafe behavior of construction workers; and the non-high and unsafe behavior driving mechanism for construction workers is “comprehensive,” and there is an asymmetric relationship with the driving mechanism of the unsafe behavior of high construction workers. The research conclusions of this paper can help to broaden the theoretical framework of social cognition and provide new ideas and methods for how to improve unsafe behavior. (shrink)

This article presents silence as a cognitive tool to comprehend the environment. Two dimensions of silence are addressed: a natural mechanism and human beings' social and cultural construction. There is a link between these two dimensions because, on the one hand, agents' cognitive strategies based on silence influence how meanings and uses of silence have been constructed. The meanings of silence we use are contextual shapers of silence-based cognitive strategies. Silence is analyzed as a resource for (...) coping with ambiguity: situations perceived as uncertain provoke doubt and confusion because they can be understood differently or suggest different interpretations. These situations can occur in the face of epistemic disruption. The consequence is a transfer of the ambiguity property of these situations to the usual ways of relating to the world and people. The cognitive approach is based here on a semiotic-hermeneutic interpretation of silence from a phenomenological perspective. This accounts for a paradox: even if silence does not exist (the world is acoustic), it is real. The silence experience is a non-inferential cognitive capacity located at the base of perception: a stimulus that suggests a particular gesture as an action different from the usual one to deal with the environment. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Extended Synthesis, ecological information, and biosemiotics are complementary approaches whose engagement will help us explain the organism-environment interaction at the cognitive level. The Extended Synthesis, through niche construction theory, can explain the organism-environment interaction at an evolutionary level because niche construction is a process guided by information. We believe that the best account that defines information at this level is the one offered by biosemiotics and, within all kinds of biosemiotic information available, (...) we believe that ecological information is the best candidate for making sense of the organism-environment relation at the cognitive level. This entanglement of biosemiotics, ecological information and the Extended Synthesis is promising for understanding the multidimensional character of the organism-environment reciprocity as well as the relation between evolution, cognition, and meaning. (shrink)

Restoration involves individuals’ physical, psychological and social resources, diminished by meeting demands of everyday life. Psychological restoration can be provided by specific environments, in particular by natural environments. Research reports a restorative effect of nature on human beings, specifically in terms of the psychological recovery from attention fatigue and restored mental resources previously spent in activities that require attention. Two field studies in two Italian primary schools tested the hypothesized positive effect of recess-time spent in a natural (vs. built) (...) class='Hi'>environment on pupils’ cognitive performance and their perceived restorativeness, using standardized tests. In Study 1, children’s psychological restoration was assessed measuring sustained and selective attention, working memory, and impulse’ control, before and after morning recess-time. Team standardized play-time was conducted in a natural (vs. built) environment, measuring perceived restorativeness after each recess-time. Results showed a greater increase in sustained and selective attention, concentration, and perceived restorativeness from pre-test to post-test after the Natural Environment condition. In Study 2 the positive effect of free-play recess-time in a natural (vs. built) environment was assessed during the afternoon school-time on sustained and selective attention and perceived restorativeness. Results showed an increase of sustained and selective attention after the Natural Environment condition (vs. Built) and a decrease after the built environment break. Higher scores in perceived restorativeness were registered after the Natural (vs. Built) Environment condition. Team standardized and individual free-play recess in a natural environment (vs. built) support pupils’ attention restoration during both morning and afternoon school-time, as well as their perceived restorativeness of recess environment. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in terms of nature’s role both for school ground design or re-design, and for school’s activities organization. (shrink)

This study examines the direct impact of three dimensions of the institutional environment on managerial attitudes toward the natural environment and the direct influence of the latter on the environmental sustainability orientation (ESO) of small firms. We contend that when the institutional environment is perceived by owner–managers as supportive of sound natural environment management practices, they are more likely to develop a positive attitude toward natural environment issues and concerns. Such owner–manager attitudes are likely to (...) lead to a positive and proactive orientation of their firms toward environmental sustainability. The study uses survey data from 166 small manufacturing firms located in three Philippine cities. First, the study develops and tests the measurement models to examine the validity of the constructs representing the firm’s institutional environment, managerial attitudes toward the natural environment and the ESO of firms. Second, the study develops and tests the structural models examining the institutional environment–managerial attitudes–ESO linkages. Multi-sample invariance structural model analysis shows the mediating role of managerial attitudes in the institutional environment–ESO nexus. The findings show that ESO is a construct comprising three dimensions: knowledge of environmental issues, sustainable practices and commitment toward environmental sustainability. The cognitive, regulatory and normative elements of the institutional environment are strongly linked to positive managerial attitudes toward environmental sustainability, which in turn, positively influences the firm’s overall ESO. Managerial attitudes play a mediating role in the institutional environment–ESO linkages. The managerial, practical, research and policy implications of the research findings are discussed. (shrink)

Renewed interest in human space exploration has highlighted the gaps in knowledge needed for successful long-duration missions outside low-Earth orbit. Although the technical challenges of such missions are being systematically overcome, many of the unknowns in predicting mission success depend on human behavior and performance, knowledge of which must be either obtained through space research or extrapolated from human experience on Earth. Particularly in human neuroscience, laboratory-based research efforts are not closely connected to real environments such as human space exploration. (...) As caves share several of the physical and psychological challenges of spaceflight, underground expeditions have recently been developed as a spaceflight analog for astronaut training purposes, suggesting that they might also be suitable for studying aspects of behavior and cognition that cannot be fully examined under laboratory conditions. Our objective is to foster a bi-directional exchange between cognitive neuroscientists and expedition experts by (1) describing the cave environment as a worthy space analog for human research, (2) reviewing work conducted on human neuroscience and cognition within caves, (3) exploring the range of topics for which the unique environment may prove valuable as well as obstacles and limitations, (4) outlining technologies and methods appropriate for cave use, and (5) suggesting how researchers might establish contact with potential expedition collaborators. We believe that cave expeditions, as well as other sorts of expeditions, offer unique possibilities for cognitive neuroscience that will complement laboratory work and help to improve human performance and safety in operational environments, both on Earth and in space. (shrink)

Several canonical experimental paradigms (e.g., serial reaction time task, discrete sequence production task,m×ntask) have been proposed to study the typical behavioral phenomenon and the nature of learning in sequential keypress tasks. A characteristic feature of most paradigms is that they are representative ofexternally-specifiedsequencing—motor tasks where the environment or task paradigm extrinsically provides the sequence of stimuli, i.e., the responses are stimulus-driven. Previous studies utilizing such canonical paradigms have largely overlooked the learning behaviors in a more realistic class of motor (...) tasks that involveinternally-guidedsequencing—where the sequence of motor actions is self-generated or internally-specified. In this work, we use the grid-navigation task as an instance of internally-guided sequencing to investigate the nature of learning in such paradigms. The participants performed Grid-Sailing Task (GST), which required navigating (by executing sequential keypresses) a 5 × 5 grid from start to goal (SG) position while using a particular key-mapping (KM) among the three cursor-movement directions and the three keyboard buttons. The participants performed two behavioral experiments—Single-SG and Mixed-SG condition. The Single-SG condition required performing GST on a single SG position repeatedly, whereas the Mixed-SG condition involved performing GST using the same KM on two novel SG positions presented in a random, inter-mixed manner. In the Single-SG condition, we show that motor learning contributes to the sequence-specific learning in GST with the repeated execution of the same trajectories. In the Mixed-SG condition, since the participants utilize the previously learned KM, we anticipate a transfer of learning from the Single-SG condition. The acquisition and transfer of a KM-specific internal model facilitates efficient trajectory planning on novel SG conditions. The acquisition of such a KM-specific internal model amounts to trajectory-independent cognitive learning in GST. We show that cognitive learning contributes to the learning in GST by showing transfer-related performance improvements in the Mixed-SG condition. In sum, we show the role of cognitive and motor learning processes in internally-guided sequencing and further make a case for using GST-like grid-navigation paradigms in investigating internally guided skill learning. (shrink)

This book describes a novel methodology for studying algorithmic skills, intended as cognitive activities related to rule-based symbolic transformation, and argues that some human computational abilities may be interpreted and analyzed as genuine examples of extended cognition. It shows that the performance of these abilities relies not only on innate neurocognitive systems or language-related skills, but also on external tools and general agent–environment interactions. Further, it asserts that a low-level analysis, based on a set of core neurocognitive systems (...) linking numbers and language, is not sufficient to explain some specific forms of high-level numerical skills, like those involved in algorithm execution. To this end, it reports on the design of a cognitive architecture for modeling all the relevant features involved in the execution of algorithmic strategies, including external tools, such as paper and pencils. The first part of the book discusses the philosophical premises for endorsing and justifying a position in philosophy of mind that links a modified form of computationalism with some recent theoretical and scientific developments, like those introduced by the so-called dynamical approach to cognition. The second part is dedicated to the description of a Turing-machine-inspired cognitive architecture, expressly designed to formalize all kinds of algorithmic strategies. (shrink)

Cognitive integration is a contribution to the embodied, embedded, and extended cognition movement in philosophy and cognitive science and the extended synthesis movement in evolutionary biology— particularly cultural evolution and niche construction. It is a framework for understanding and studying cognition and the mind that draws on several sources: empirical research in embodied cognition, arguments for extended cognition, distributed cognition, niche construction and cultural inheritance, developmental psychology, social learning, and cognitive neuroscience. Its uniqueness rests in its ability (...) to account for a range of cognitive phenomena diachronically across both ontogenetic and phylogenetic time scales as well as synchronically on faster time scales incorporating real- time online bodily interactions with the local environment. Furthermore, it does so by going beyond straightforwardly causal and dynamical descriptions of the phenomena in question to include normative social practices that govern and coordinate the brain- body- environment interactions that form the core of the cognitive integration (CI) framework. The three main pillars of the CI framework are interaction, cognitive practices, and the transformation of cognitive abilities. In this chapter I will outline the framework in terms of its core commitments, provide motivations for these core commitments, and discuss core examples of CI at work. I shall also respond to several recent criticisms of the CI framework. (shrink)

Reveals the diverse ways that cognition was seen as spread over brain, body and world in the 9–17th centuries - The second book in an ambitious 4-volume set looking at distributed cognition in the history of thought - Includes essays on literature, philosophy, law, art, music, medicine, science and material culture - For students and scholars in medieval and Renaissance studies, cognitive humanities and philosophy of mind - Draws out what was distinctive about medieval and Renaissance insights into (and (...) superstitions about) the cognitive roles of the body and environment - Examines how humanities topics are affected by new insights from the cognitive sciences This collection explores how medieval and Renaissance practices and ideas reveal the expression (and suppression) of cognition as distributed across brain, body and world. As many of the texts and practices have influenced later Western European societies and cultures, this book reveals vital stages in the historical development of our attempts to comprehend and optimise the distributed nature of cognition. (shrink)

‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cultural cognition: we believe these approaches offer productive (...) lines of engagement with early modern literary and historical studies.2 The framework arises out of our work in extended mind and distributed cognition.3 The extended mind hypothesis arose from a post-connectionist philosophy of cognitive science. This approach was articulated in Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, and further developed by Susan Hurley and Mark Rowlands, among others.4 The distributed cognition approach arose independently, from work in cognitive anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), the sociology of education and work, and science studies. The principles of distributed cognition were articulated in Hutchins’s ethnography of navigation, Cogni- tion in the Wild,5 and developed by theorists such as David Kirsh and Lucy Suchman.6 These models share an anti-individualist approach to cognition. In all these views, mental activities spread or smear across the boundaries of skull and skin to include parts of the social and material world. In remembering, decision making, and acting, whether individually or in small groups, our complex and structured activities involve many distinctive dimensions: neural, affective, kines-. (shrink)