Like the closely related concept of emotion, affect has been subject to a wide variety of theoretical explanations (see ‘Emotion’). These include definitions supported by empirical evidence and philosophical definitions without empirical confirmation, such as the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In the 1960s, psychologist Silvan Tomkins argued that affect implied the biological component of human emotions that are genetically transmitted. He described nine primary affects that can be distinguished by their expression and intensity. However, others have developed differing definitions of the term. For example, Giovanna Colombetti uses ‘affect’ as a broad umbrella term which encompasses emotion, moods and feelings. She argues that the human mind and body are always already affective. Because Colombetti ties affect to meaning and argues that all living systems encounter the world as meaningful, then all living systems are affective.
Colombetti, Giovanna. 2014. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tomkins, Silvan S. 2008. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: The Complete Edition. New York: Springer Publishing Company.
Autonomy is a significant concept for the paradigm of enaction (see ‘Autopoiesis’ and ‘Dynamic Systems Theory’). The general meaning of autonomy is self-governed, as opposed to heteronomy, or other-governed. In terms of systems, as Francisco Varela theorised, autonomous systems are characterised by organisational closure: a set of self-referential processes and relations determines the system. For example, the human body is an autonomous system composed of a number of self-referential processes, including blood circulation. Autonomy does not imply, however, that systems are completely closed off from their environments. As Evan Thompson explains in Mind in Life, an autonomous system is always structurally coupled to its environment and continuously reacts with it, as well as other systems. In contrast to the computational theory of mind, an autonomous system does not have inputs and outputs, but instead work through an ongoing coupling with their environments. Organisational closure and structural coupling also mean that autonomous systems determine their own boundaries, which can be material (as in a cellular membrane) or not.
Varela, Francisco. 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. New York: Elsevier North Holland.
Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coined the term ‘autopoiesis’ as part of their 1973 work Autopoiesis and Cognition. It is the biological expression of autonomy, in which a materially-bounded system has organisational closure, meaning it is self-referential and internally produces conditions for its survival (see ‘Autonomy’). Maturana and Varela claimed that autopoietic systems have several characteristics: they are a network of processes that continuously regenerate themselves through interactions with their environment, and they are self-contained systems. Evan Thompson, in Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind, built on Maturana and Varela’s work, specifically the connection between autopoiesis and cognition. Thompson takes autopoiesis to entail internal self-production in order to interact with the environment, what Varela called structural coupling. With this definition, autopoiesis always includes cognition, a characteristic that Thompson attributes to all living systems.
Maturana, H. R., and F. J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Behaviourism is an approach to analysing human behaviour that generally focuses on environmental factors rather than on evolutionary characteristics. This approach dominated psychology in the middle of the twentieth century. Although they may have different methodologies, behaviourists pursue a general science of human behaviour based on observable phenomena. In this view, the brain responds to external stimuli, resulting in particular social or individual behaviours; the brain could not do too much to resist any kind of conditioning or direction. Belief in these claims made cognitive research essentially unnecessary, until cognitive theories of behaviour began emerging in the 1960s.
Baum, William M. 2017. Understanding Behaviorism: Behavior, Culture, and Evolution. 3rd ed. Oxford: Wiley.
For researchers who seek to challenge Cartesian mind-body dualism, the use of the term bodymind emphasises the complete integration of the brain and body. The body is not separate from the mind, and vice versa.
Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness. London: Vintage.
In order to move through space, navigate obstacles and interact with object, the brain maintains a neural representation of the body in space. This is called the body schema. Through largely unconscious sensory processing, the brain maintains a schema of the body’s position in space (see ‘Proprioception’). As Holmes and Spence point out, the body schema might also include auditory, visual and other sensory information. Using both the body schema and the perception of peripersonal space, the space immediately surrounding the body, we can maintain our place in space and avoid potential obstacles that might suddenly appear.
Holmes, Nicholas P., and Charles Spence. 2004. ‘The body schema and multisensory representation(s) of peripersonal space.’ Cognitive Processing 5: 94–105.
These are two broad explanations of the connection between perception and cognition. Bottom-up, or data-driven, cognition is driven by sensory information, such as when you see a bear moving towards you in the woods. In this approach, processing occurs via the input of sensory information, generally without a higher level of direction. Examples of bottom-up processing include rapid visual identification or quick reaction to a stimulus. Top-down processing, in contrast, involves the application of prior knowledge or conceptual data when interpreting sensory information. Andy Clark’s predictive processing model, for example, includes both modes of processing but emphasises the importance of top-down processing for human prediction (see ‘Predictive Processing’).
Goldstein, E. Bruce. 2005. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Belmont, CA: Thomson.
Cognition includes any and all mental actions and processes, including thought, knowledge and sensory input. In humans, cognition includes things like memory, visual processing, attention, use of concepts, pattern recognition, mental imagery and language. There are a wide variety of approaches to studying human cognition from several scientific fields: biology, psychology, computer science, linguistics and philosophy, for example.
Weisberg, Robert W., and Lauretta M. Reeves. 2013. Cognition: From Memory to Creativity. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Cognitivism emerged within the field of psychology in the 1950s, particularly as a response to behaviourism (see ‘Behaviourism’). Rather than privileging the role of the environment in directing human behaviour, cognitivism supports a computational view of the mind. Under traditional cognitivism, as exemplified by the work of Jerry Fodor, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, mental processes are computational processes. Mental objects, including thoughts, memories and beliefs, are symbolic structures which are then manipulated. In other words, cognitivists believe there are a set of algorithms which order the brain’s activity, like a mathematical equation. Certain inputs (stimuli from outside the brain) result in certain outputs (emotions, bodily responses, etc.).
Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. 1961. ‘Computer Simulation of Human Thinking.’ Science 134: 2011–17.
Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) is a collection of views that composed the dominant cognitive paradigm beginning in the 1950s. It is also called computationalism or the classical computational theory of mind. CTM holds that the mind is a computing system, and mental processes such as reasoning or decision-making are executed like programmes within a computer. The brain uses a symbolic language to carry out these processes, which are completely non-conscious, essentially inaccessible to the mind. One of the most influential versions of CTM was first put forth by Jerry Fodor in the 1970s. Fodor argues that mental states are created through relations between individual minds and mental representations. In this paradigm, the mind didn’t function like a computer; the mind was a computer. The key problems with CTM, especially for enactivists, are the separation of the mind from the materiality of the body and its environment, and the explanatory gap CTM creates by separating cognition from subjective mental experience. CTM was followed by several other cognitive paradigms, including connectionism and enaction.
Fodor, Jerry. 2010. LOT2: The Language of Thought Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pylyshn, Zenon W. 1986. Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Conceptual integration, sometimes called blending, is a vital process for human cognition. As Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner explain in The Way We Think, this theory of cognition holds that blending is a ubiquitous subconscious process necessary for both thought and language. Concepts from two or more spaces or domains are integrated into another space, the space of the blend. Theatrical characters are a useful exemplar of how conceptual blending works. Audiences watching Kenneth Branagh’s performance of Hamlet construct a partial match of concepts of ‘Kenneth Branagh’ with concepts of ‘Hamlet’ in a third mental space. This space then dynamically develops an emergent ‘Branagh-Hamlet’ construct. Blending allows humans to compress any number of distinct behaviours and events into a single moment. As such, blending is an essential part of both viewing and creating a performance. While they are vital to cognition, the processes of conceptual blending take place unconsciously.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
In 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson first published Metaphors We Live By. Their work was a departure from the representationalism of CTM, which holds that language involves a relationship between words and an objectively real world. Instead, Lakoff and Johnson argued that language emerges from embodied experience, especially through metaphors. They maintain that language does not exist separate from human conceptual systems, but is based on those very systems. And, for them, most of our conceptual structures come from metaphors. Lakoff identified a number of image schemas from which metaphors are created; these enable understanding of something through our embodied experience of something else. For example, one of the most common kinds of conceptual metaphors involve spatial organization or orientation, such as understanding future events as ‘up’ or ‘ahead.’ ‘What’s coming up tomorrow?’ exemplifies one version of this conceptual metaphor. Like all conceptual metaphors, it is grounded in embodied experience, namely, that humans look forward as they move forward, and objects appear larger as one moves towards them.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Connectionism is a theory of information processing. In cognitive science, it is also called parallel distributed processing or neural network modelling. Connectionism emerged in the 1980s as a reaction to earlier symbolic systems of cognition. Connectionists sought to model cognitive function in a model similar to the network of the nervous system. Under this paradigm, cognition is explained through neural networks modelled on the changing organisation of neurons in the brain. The more synapses among the neurons, the more ‘weight’ each of them carry in the model. Unlike symbolic models, in connectionism cognitive processing occurs in parallel, or in many units simultaneously. Mental processes emerge from this shifting dynamic of networks and weights. In this model, neural networks are dynamic systems, as the network as a whole responds and adapts to its environment (see ‘Dynamic Systems’).
Bechtel, William, and Adele Abrahamsen. 1991. Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Rumelhart, D. E., and J. L. McClelland. 1986. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Volume 1: Foundations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rumelhart, D. E., and J. L. McClelland. 1986. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Volume 2: Psychological and Biological Models. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The challenge of defining and describing consciousness remains one of the central preoccupations of psychology and cognitive science. Generally, consciousness can be identified either as state consciousness (the ways in which particular mental processes or emotions might be described as conscious) or creature consciousness (the consciousness of a whole organism). Robert Van Gulick describes five types of creature consciousness. The first is sentience, the capacity to sense and perceive the environment, and respond to it. The second is wakefulness, the active use of the capacity for sense and perception. The third is self-awareness: a creature is conscious if it can self-reflect on its mental processes and states. The fourth is qualitative experience, meaning that an organism has consciousness if it has an experiential life, even if we as humans cannot comprehend it. Finally, transitive consciousness is a relation between an organism and some object in its environment of which it is aware. There are a number of theories that seek to explain consciousness, including philosophical, cognitive and neurobiological theories.
Edelman, Gerald M., and Giulio Tononi. 2000. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books.
Van Gulick, Robert. 2012. ‘Consciousness and Cognition.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, edited by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Stephen P. Stich, 19–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Distributed cognition is a specific theoretical approach to human cognition that relies on the idea of the extended mind, which holds that mind and environment are continuously interacting through a series of feedback loops. In other words, according to philosopher Andy Clark, the mind is extended into the environment. One of Clark’s classic examples of extended mind involves the completion of a math problem. If one uses a paper and pencil to complete the calculation, in Clark’s view those tools are integral to the cognitive process and so should be considered part of the system’s ‘mind.’ Edwin Hutchins takes a slightly different approach to distributed cognition, exploring the cognitive processes of social and cultural systems, which may also involve the use of tools. Hutchins argues that human cognition is always both cultural and social; it does not occur in a void separated from the social and physical environment. He uses the case study of a group of navy sailors to demonstrate how social and cultural groups can be considered cognitive systems, as cognition is distributed across and among individual minds.
Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) is a mathematical approach used to define and analyse the behaviours of complex systems. DST has been applied in a variety of fields, including cognitive science. As Robert F. Port and Timothy Van Gelder outline in Minds as Motion, DST solves the problem of time that computational or representational theories of cognition do not answer for. Because human cognition occurs in real time, DST offers tools to understand the process as it occurs. J.A. Scott Kelso used dynamic systems to explore how human brains and behaviour are self-organizing. At any given moment, dynamic systems reveal an overall state, and the behaviour of the system can be defined as the change in that state over time.
Kelso, J. A. Scott. 1995. Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behaviour. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Port, Robert F., and Timothy Van Gelder. 1995. Minds as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book.
Embodied cognition is a theory of cognition reaching across a number of different fields. The goal of embodied cognition is to account for the way human minds, bodies and environments interact together. The framework maintains that embodiment is necessary for cognition. Cognitive processes, then, emerge from the coupled systems of organisms and their environments. (See ‘Autonomy,’ ‘Autopoiesis,’ and ‘Conceptual Metaphor.’)
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Shapiro, Lawrence A. 2004. The Mind Incarnate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Emergence is a property of a system in which some characteristics or phenomena are not part of the system’s individual components but emerge from the interactions of components within the system as a whole (see ‘Dynamic Systems Theory’). This concept has long been common in other branches of science, including linguistics and biology, and has recently been explored in cognitive science. Emergence has become especially important to the enaction paradigm (see ‘Enaction’). As Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela argue, the processes essential for human consciousness are not restricted to the brain, but instead spread across the boundaries between the brain, the body, and environment. As such, the neural processes emerge from the interactions between and among the brain-body-environment system.
McClelland, James L. 2010. ‘Emergence in Cognitive Science.’ Topics in Cognitive Science 2: 751–70.
Thompson, Evan, and Francisco J. Varela. 2001. ‘Radical Embodiment: Neural Dynamics and Consciousness.’ Trends in Cognitive Science 5 (10): 418–25.
Emotion is one of the most contested concepts in cognitive science. There remain a number of theories of emotion with significant disagreement among them. The Theory of Basic Emotions (BET) was developed in the 1960s in the work of Sylvan Tomkins, Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen and others. BET holds that emotions are a result of genetically predetermined sets of instructions which create changes in the brain, expression and behaviour. There are seven biologically basic emotions that developed as evolutionary adaptations: fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise and contempt. Under BET, once these basic emotions are activated, their expression is predetermined and cannot be interrupted. Further, these emotions are the same for all humans, regardless of cultural difference. Enactivists take a different approach to emotion, rejecting the Cartesian theory of emotion, which views emotions as physical or bodily sensations that only serve to inform the mind about the body. In this view, which is still common in emotion science, the information sent from the body needs to be cognitively evaluated, which generates a bodily response. In the enaction paradigm, however, emotion is an integral part of both autopoiesis and cognition. Emotion cannot be separated from meaning, as Giovanna Colombetti argues. She explains that emotion is a capacity of a whole organism, not of a separated mind or body. The organism generates meaning as it encounters the world; no evaluative process or cognitive appraisal is necessary to determine a bodily response to stimuli.
Colombetti, Giovanna. 2014. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness. London: Vintage.
C. Daniel Batson identifies eight different ways that cognitive scientists and philosophers have defined empathy. They include the knowledge of another’s internal state, including thoughts and feelings; taking on the posture or physical expression of another; feeling the same emotion that another feels; projecting oneself into another’s place; imagining the feelings and thoughts of another; imagining how one would feel or think in another’s place; feeling distress by another’s suffering and feeling for another’s suffering. Evan Thompson elaborates on the enactivist conception of empathy, which is rooted in phenomenology. Integral to this theory of emotion is the idea of subjectivity, which Thompson argues is always intersubjective. In other words, ‘no mind is an island,’ and human subjectivity necessitates empathetic recognition of both self and other. Therefore, empathy is fundamental to subjectivity and cognition. Drawing on the work of Edith Stein, Thompson explains that empathy is a particular type of open intentionality, one directed towards another’s experience. It includes perception and inference, but empathy cannot be reduced to these functions; instead, empathy entails directly experiencing the other as a person, an intentional being. Thompson identifies four types of empathy: passive or involuntary coupling, imagination or transposition of self into the place of the other, intersubjective understanding and the moral perception of the other as a person.
Batson, C. Daniel. 2009. ‘These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena.’ In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, edited by Jean Decety and William Ickes, 3–15. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
The concept of enaction was first proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosch in their 1991 book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. They positioned this new cognitive framework in opposition to the traditional Computational Theory of Mind. Drawing on foundations in phenomenology and Buddhist meditation, Varela, Thompson and Rosch argued that, rather than being the result of a mind encountering a pre-given environment, cognition entails the coupling of both the environment and the mind. Building on this work, in Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, Stewart, Gapenne and Di Paolo describe the enactive paradigm as composed of three themes. Firstly, enaction connects first-person experience with third-person scientific research; secondly, as a framework it can unite the variety of organisation involved in cognitive science; thirdly, this paradigm focuses on reflexivity, particularly recognising that cognitive scientists themselves engage in cognition when they do their research. While as a paradigm enaction does not preclude other, more specific approaches to cognition, its foundational claim is as follows: the embodied action of a living organism is in a continual reciprocal relationship with the world in which it lives, constituting the organism’s perception and grounding its cognition.
Stewart, John, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel Di Paolo. 2010. Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and the Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Entrainment is the process in which two or more rhythms become synchronised with one another. There are a number of natural occurrences of entrainment, such as crickets chirping in unison or the circadian rhythm of any organism. In humans, entrainment can be either unconscious (the rhythmic coordination of the body’s internal processes) or conscious (dancing or playing music).
Phillips-Silver, Jessica, C. Athena Aktipis, and Gregory A. Bryant. 2010. ‘The Ecology of Entrainment: Foundations of Coordinated Rhythmic Movement.’ Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 28 (1): 3–14.
Exteroception denotes the processes involved in sensing information from the environment or stimuli external to the body. This includes the five traditional senses, as well as organs like the skin that receive sensory information from the environment.
fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, is a non-invasive technique that measures brain activity based on changes in oxygenated blood flow. Because blood flow is directed towards regions of the brain when they are active, an fMRI can detect particular areas of the brain used in particular tasks. It has been one of the most common methods of brain mapping and measuring brain activity since the 1990s.
Imagination entails a mental representation of a thing that is not necessarily present or real. Radu Bogdan defines imagination as ‘the capacity to form and deploy thoughts about nonactual, possible, future, or counterfactual scenarios in a deliberate, self-conscious, effortful, reflective, and introspectively active form of offline processing of information’ (5). Humans typically develop this capacity around the age of four. At this stage, human children can begin to create situations, ideas and concepts that are unconnected to their present. Imagination is closely connected to memory (see ‘Memory’).
Bogdan, Radu J. 2013. Mindvaults: Sociocultural Grounds for Pretending and Imagining. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason.
Interoception involves sensory receptors within the body that enable one to perceive internal stimuli. This includes the movement of organs or muscles, such as stretching, as well as sensations like pain and hunger.
The standard taxonomy of memory distinguishes between declarative and non-declarative memory. Declarative memory entails information that can be consciously recalled or retrieved, and includes both episodic memory (specific episodes that are part of one’s own experience, such as the name of a childhood pet) and semantic memory (information concerned with the world in general, such as the difference between a cat and a dog). Non-declarative or procedural memory, on the other hand, involves remembering how to do something, such as ride a bicycle or use a computer. Recent research within the paradigm of enaction, however, indicates that memory may not function in this way (see ‘Enaction’). For example, Lawrence Barsalou argues that because humans perceive the world as situations rather than individual entities, memory involves creating and recalling simulations, or concepts. New experiences change stored simulations; when encountering a new experience, then, humans retrieve a simulation which helps them determine how to behave in this new situation.
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2009. ‘Situating Concepts.’ In Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, edited by Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, 236–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Squire, Larry R. 2009. ‘Memory and Brain Systems: 1969–2009.’ Journal of Neuroscience 29 (41): 12711–16.
Mirror neurons were first discovered in macaque monkeys by a team of neuroscientists in 1996. Their experimental data indicated a set of neurons, which they termed mirror neurons, that were active both when a monkey performed a particular action and when it observed the same action being performed by another. Since their discovery, many posited the existence of a similar system of mirror neurons in humans, though experimental data on this issue are difficult to maintain due to the complexities of the human brain. However, several scientists have argued for the importance of mirror neurons systems (MNS) in the operations of human emotions and empathy.
Keysers, Christian. 2011. The Empathetic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes Our Understanding of Human Nature.
Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 2008. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Many cognitive psychologies and evolutionary biologists have recognised the importance of play in human cognitive development. A small number of animal species, humans included, engage in play. Typically, play behaviour is marked as a semi-distinct or distinct event separate from other activity. Even when these behaviours mimic actual behaviour, such as young wolves imitating fighting without drawing blood, they serve important evolutionary functions. In humans, play serves to develop social behaviour and increase cognitive flexibility, as Brian Boyd has demonstrated. Boyd concludes that the arts, including performance, developed from the human capacity for play, a characteristic that was (and is) necessary for our evolutionary survival.
Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fagen, Robert. 1995. ‘Animal Play, Games of Angels, Biology, and the Brain.’ In The Future of Play Theory: A Multidisciplinary Inquiry into the Contributions of Brian Sutton-Smith, edited by Anthony D. Pelligrini, 23–44. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Predictive processing (PP) is a model of cognitive activity recently proposed by Andy Clark. Drawing from recent scholarship in embodied cognition, Clark argues that the human brain is engaged in a continuous process of predicting. Perception, then, is a process in which the brain guesses or predicts what is in the environment, refining predictions based on incoming sensory information and memory. Predictive processing joins bottom-up and top-down processing (see ‘Bottom-up processing’). Predictive processing can explain, for example, the jarring experience of sipping a hot drink and tasting coffee instead of tea. If this is the case, then much of what we perceive is determined by the structure of our expectations about it. While Clark believes predictive processing is an extremely significant strategy for cognition, he maintains that it is just one among many.
Clark, Andy. 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Proprioception is the sense of one’s body, including the position of body parts and the sense of effort in movement. In humans, proprioceptors are located in muscles, tendons and joints. Information from these proprioceptors is sent to the brain and integrated into the overall sense of the body’s position and movement. For example, sobriety tests often use proprioception to test for intoxication, as impaired proprioception causes an inability to touch one’s own nose with a finger (because the sense of the body’s position in space is affected).
Representationalism is a general approach in cognitive science and philosophy, closely related to traditional cognitivism (see ‘Cognitivism’). There are many specific representationalist theories that seek to explain cognition. Their basic premise is that humans process external reality via mental representations. In this view, mental states, including thoughts, desires, beliefs and perceptions, are about something external to the mind. All mental processes, such as thinking and imagining, are composed of a series of mental images or representations. The mind can only perceive representations of objects outside of it, never the objects themselves. Critics of this approach suggest that it is an inadequate explanation of consciousness, since it separates mind from perception in a ‘Cartesian theatre.’
Fodor, Jerry A. 1981. Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Theory of Mind (ToM) is an approach in cognition that emphasises the ability of humans to recognise and ascribe mental states to others, and use that information to understand and predict behaviour. Humans develop ToM quite early, as a process that includes developing perception and language. ToM as a branch of cognitive science includes a wide range of approaches and methodologies. Generally, ToM includes two broad groups of theories: theory-theory and simulation-theory. Under theory-theory, or ‘folk psychology,’ a person uses a basic theory of psychology to deduce the mental states of others. Simulation theory, on the other hand, holds that ToM occurs when people mentally simulate the action of another. ToM is distinct from empathy. ToM holds that there is always a separation between the mind of the self and the mind of another; therefore, some activity (either folk psychology or simulation) must be performed in order to ‘read’ the other’s mind.
Goldman, Alvin I. 2006. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wellman, Henry M. 2015. Making Minds: How Theory of Mind Develops. Oxford: Oxford University Press.