Body-World Coupling, Sensorimotor Mechanisms, and the Ontogeny of Social Cognition

Abstract

When closely examined, several biological mechanisms reveal themselves as implementing a physical and dynamical two-way link or coupling between the organism and the world. In these cases, some mechanisms' components can either physically cross the body-world boundary or are brought by the organism's motor actions onto specific sensory surfaces. As with any biological phenomenon, the historical contingencies of these sensorimotor activities generate plastic changes within the organism, that in turn determine its capacities at any given time. Body-world coupling instances are evident in examples that we will describe later, such as breathing, sensori-motor activities, and others. In the present piece, we attempt to position social cognitive phenomena as the result of the mechanisms involved in the organism's coupling history with its world. This coupling constitutes one of the cornerstones of the so called 4E approach to cognition (Newen et al., 2018), from which we will also draw concepts and distinctions in our effort to relate coupling mechanisms with social phenomena. Even though reviewing the 4E approach to cognition escapes the scope of the present piece, we can briefly state that the 4E cognition framework wants to bring multiple approaches together under a sole emblem. It understands cognition as a natural phenomenon, embodied in the biophysics of the body which is embedded both phylo-and ontogenically into the animal's ecological niche. To the 4E approach, cognition is also opportunistic and promiscuous as can be extended toward the world with objects both material (e.g., technology) and conceptual (e.g., institutions). Finally, the 4E approach thinks cognition as intended for action in an ongoing interactional sense-making process; an enactive phenomenon. The 4E cognition framework owes its current form to several landmark work such as the "enactive approach" (Varela et al., 2017), the "distributed cognition branch of cognitive science" (Flor and Hutchins, 1991;Hutchins, 1995), and the "extended mind" proposal (Clark and Chalmers, 1998), among others.Despite decades of conceptual development of the 4E approach and its diverse subfields, there are many questions regarding its particular implications for neuroscience (e.g., how can neuroscientists can actually implement the 4E approach directly into their research agendas? Is one-person neuroscience necessary?, etc.) (Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012;Willems and Francken, 2012). As experimental neuroscientists interested in the interactional nature of cognition, we would like to extract the mechanistic implications of the 4E approach: components, activities, and processes (What?, How?, When?), their context (When?, How?) and their weights (How important?). Epistemologically, we concur with the view that conceives mechanisms as models of the phenomena to explain and consider the building of mechanistic models a fundamental explanatory aim of neuroscience (Craver, 2007). Without a mechanistic picture of the ways in which the 4Es constitute and/or affect cogniti...

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