Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the intuitive demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We will advocate an externalism about mind, but one that is in no way grounded in the debatable role of external reference in fixing the contents of our mental states. Rather, we advocate an *active externalism*, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.

The Extended Mind

From the Publisher:
The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we study mind and brain. In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide us. Whereas the mental has been treated as a realm that is distinct from the body and the world, Clark forcefully attests that a key to understanding brains is to see them as controllers of embodied activity. From this paradigm shift he advances the construction of a cognitive science of the embodied mind.

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Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to adaptive success. This target article critically examines this "hierarchical prediction machine" approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. Sections 1 and 2 lay out the key elements and implications of the approach. Section 3 explores a variety of pitfalls and challenges, spanning the evidential, the methodological, and the more properly conceptual. The paper ends (sections 4 and 5) by asking how such approaches might impact our more general vision of mind, experience, and agency.

/pdf/whatever-next-predictive-brains-situated-agents-and-the-epj56cs868.pdf

Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science

The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: (1) cognition is situated; (2) cognition is time-pressured; (3) we off-load cognitive work onto the environment; (4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; (5) cognition is for action; (6) offline cognition is body based. Of these, the first three and the fifth appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on embodied cognition, but it may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims.

/pdf/six-views-of-embodied-cognition-2l6klwi201.pdf

Six views of embodied cognition.

Continual lifelong learning with neural networks: A review.

Life, said the English novelist Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument. Butler's insight-that there are no distinct training and performance modes in development succinctly captures the activity-dependent nature of the developmental process. For example, imagine a baby learning to walk. Although babies spend a great deal of time failing down, getting up, and falling down again, as far as some parents are concerned, their child's walking seems to magically appear de novo one day. Other parents, however, do appreciate the importance of their baby's ups and downs and believe the old saying that practice makes perfect" in the emergence of walking. Butler's insight, however, suggests a third perspective on the emergence of such novel behavior: namely, that there are no practice modes in development-all activity counts in selecting, constructing, and maintaining behavioral outcomes. This fundamental role that self-generated activity plays in the development of all behavioral functions, ranging from motor behavior to perception, cognition, and social behavior, is a central theme of the dynamic systems approach that is masterfully explicated in the recent book by Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith. In this book the authors (both developmental psychologists) apply the principles of nonlinear dynamic systems to motor, perceptual, and cognitive development and the result is a remarkable synthesis and advancement of developmental science. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that this volume offers a revolutionary perspective on the development of cognition and action.

Book review: a dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action by, esther thelen and linda b. smith, cambridge, ma: The mit press, 1994, hardbound, 376 pages, $50.00. isbn 0-262-70059-x

The mechanisms underlying the acquisition of speech-production ability in human infancy are not well understood. We tracked 4–12-mo-old English-learning infants’ and adults’ eye gaze while they watched and listened to a female reciting a monologue either in their native (English) or nonnative (Spanish) language. We found that infants shifted their attention from the eyes to the mouth between 4 and 8 mo of age regardless of language and then began a shift back to the eyes at 12 mo in response to native but not nonnative speech. We posit that the first shift enables infants to gain access to redundant audiovisual speech cues that enable them to learn their native speech forms and that the second shift reflects growing native-language expertise that frees them to shift attention to the eyes to gain access to social cues. On this account, 12-mo-old infants do not shift attention to the eyes when exposed to nonnative speech because increasing native-language expertise and perceptual narrowing make it more difficult to process nonnative speech and require them to continue to access redundant audiovisual cues. Overall, the current findings demonstrate that the development of speech production capacity relies on changes in selective audiovisual attention and that this depends critically on early experience.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/109/5/1431.full.pdf

Infants deploy selective attention to the mouth of a talking face when learning speech

Several theories have stressed the importance of intersensory integration for development but have not identified specific underlying integration mechanisms. The author reviews and synthesizes current knowledge about the development of intersensory temporal perception and offers a theoretical model based on epigenetic systems theory, proposing that responsiveness to 4 basic features of multimodal temporal experience--temporal synchrony, duration, temporal rate, and rhythm--emerges in a sequential, hierarchical fashion. The model postulates that initial developmental limitations make intersensory synchrony the basis for the integration of intersensory temporal relations and that the emergence of responsiveness to the other, increasingly more complex, temporal relations occurs in a hierarchical, sequential fashion by building on the previously acquired intersensory temporal processing skills.

The development of intersensory temporal perception: an epigenetic systems/limitations view.

It has been proposed that young infants are attentive to quantitative variations in stimulation to the exclusion of qualitative ones. To the extent that this is so, young infants should ignore differences between lights and sounds and should instead respond to auditory and visual stimuli as more or less similar depending on their intensity. To examine this hypothesis, a cardia c habituation/dishabituation method with a test for stimulus generalization was employed . Three-weekold infants were repeatedly presented with white-light followed by white-noise stimuli of different intensities. A U-shaped relationship between magnitude of cardiac response and loudness was found. In view of previous findings that without prior visual stimulation a monotonic increase in cardiac response to the same range of auditory stimuli results, this finding of a significant quadratic relationship with loudness suggests that the infants were responding to the auditory stimuli in terms of their similarity to the previously presented visual stimulus. A separate group of infants presented with a more intense visual stimulus exhibited a shift in the intensity at which a minimal cardiac response occurred. Results of a study with adults did not show any systematic relationship between cardiac response and loudness, indicating that unlike infants, adults do not spontaneously make cross-modal matches of intensity. Our perception of the world is based to a

/pdf/cross-modal-equivalence-in-early-infancy-auditory-visual-3vhtn2mdtw.pdf

Cross-modal equivalence in early infancy: Auditory–visual intensity matching.

http://asifg.mycpanel.princeton.edu/publications/pdfs/Lewkowicz&Ghazanfar2009.pdf

David J. Lewkowicz

Papers

Book review: a dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action by, esther thelen and linda b. smith, cambridge, ma: The mit press, 1994, hardbound, 376 pages, $50.00. isbn 0-262-70059-x

Infants deploy selective attention to the mouth of a talking face when learning speech

The development of intersensory temporal perception: an epigenetic systems/limitations view.

Cross-modal equivalence in early infancy: Auditory–visual intensity matching.

The emergence of multisensory systems through perceptual narrowing