Preparing the books to read every day is enjoyable for many people. However, there are still many people who also don't like reading. This is a problem. But, when you can support others to start reading, it will be better. One of the books that can be recommended for new readers is experience and education. This book is not kind of difficult book to read. It can be read and understand by the new readers.

Experience and Education.

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.

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

The cultural origins of human cognition

EVOLUTION: Of Mice . . .

Kirschner, P. A., Kirschner, F. C., & Paas, F. (2009). Cognitive load theory. In E. M. Anderman & L. H. Anderman (Eds.). Psychology of classroom learning: An encyclopedia, Volume 1, a-j (pp. 205-209). Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference.

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Cognitive Load Theory

1. Mendel's gene 2. The physical gene 3. The behavioural gene 4. The reactive genome 5. Outside the gene 6. The informational gene 7. The evolving gene.

Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction

We outline three very different concepts of the gene—instrumental, nominal, and postgenomic. The instrumental gene has a critical role in the construction and interpretation of experiments in which the relationship between genotype and phenotype is explored via hybridization between organisms or directly between nucleic acid molecules. It also plays an important theoretical role in the foundations of disciplines such as quantitative genetics and population genetics. The nominal gene is a critical practical tool, allowing stable communication between bioscientists in a wide range of fields grounded in well-defined sequences of nucleotides, but this concept does not embody major theoretical insights into genome structure or function. The post-genomic gene embodies the continuing project of understanding how genome structure supports genome function, but with a deflationary picture of the gene as a structural unit. This final concept of the gene poses a significant challenge to conventional assumptions about the relationship between genome structure and function, and between genotype and phenotype.

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Genes in the Postgenomic Era

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How biologists conceptualize genes: an empirical study

Recent theories in cognitive science have begun to focus on the active role of organisms in shaping their own environment, and the role of these environmental resources for cognition. Approaches such as situated, embedded, ecological, distributed and particularly extended cognition look beyond ‘what is inside your head’ to the old Gibsonian question of ‘what your head is inside of’ and with which it forms a wider whole—its internal and external cognitive niche. Since these views have been treated as a radical departure from the received view of cognition, their proponents have looked for support to similar extended views within (the philosophy of) biology, most notably the theory of niche construction. This paper argues that there is an even closer and more fruitful parallel with developmental systems theory and developmental niche construction. These ask not ‘what is inside the genes you inherited’, but ‘what the inherited genes are inside of’ and with which they form a wider whole—their internal and external ontogenetic niche, understood as the set of epigenetic, social, ecological, epistemic and symbolic legacies inherited by the organism as necessary developmental resources. To the cognizing agent, the epistemic niche presents itself not just as a partially self-engineered selective niche, as the niche construction paradigm will have it, but even more so as a partially self-engineered ontogenetic niche, a problem-solving resource and scaffold for individual development and learning. This move should be beneficial for coming to grips with our own (including cognitive) nature: what is most distinctive about humans is their developmentally plastic brains immersed into a well-engineered, cumulatively constructed cognitive–developmental niche.

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Human nature and cognitive–developmental niche construction

The ‘developmental systems’ perspective in biology is intended to replace the idea of a genetic program This new perspective is strongly convergent with recent work in psychology on situated/embodied cognition and on the role of external ‘scaffolding’ in cognitive development Cognitive processes, including those which can be explained in evolutionary terms, are not ‘inherited’ or produced in accordance with an inherited program Instead, they are constructed in each generation through the interaction of a range of developmental resources The attractors which emerge during development and explain robust and/or widespread outcomes are themselves constructed during the process At no stage is there an explanatory stopping point where some resources control or program the rest of the developmental cascade ‘Human nature’ is a description of how things generally turn out, not an explanation of why they turn out that way Finally, we suggest that what is distinctive about human development is its degree of reliance on external scaffolding

Karola Stotz

Papers

Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction

Genes in the Postgenomic Era

How biologists conceptualize genes: an empirical study

Human nature and cognitive–developmental niche construction

How the mind grows: a developmental perspective on the biology of cognition