The Dynamics of Embodied Cognition

Abstract

Historically cognition was understood as the result of processes occurring solely in the brain. Recently, however, cognitive scientists and philosophers studying "embodied" or "situated" cognition have begun emphasizing the role of the body and environment in which brains are situated, i.e. they view the brain as an "open system". However, these theorists frequently rely on dynamical systems which are traditionally viewed as closed systems. We address this tension by extending the framework of dynamical systems theory. We show how structures which appear in the state space of an embodied agent differ from those that appear in closed systems, and we show how these structures can be used to model representational processes in embodied agents. We focus on neural networks as models of embodied cognition.

Towards a computational theory of experience

“…Finally, the above system, just as any other closed dynamical system, cannot realize experience (Fekete, 2010;Hotton and Yoshimi, 2010). Rather, only systems that can interact with their surroundings can.…”

Extending Dynamical Systems Theory to Model Embodied Cognition

“…In this article, we generalize our previous work (Hotton & Yoshimi, 2010) on the subject, where our focus was on technical matters faced by the embodied research community. The main issue we addressed there was the fact that embodied cognition studies ‘‘open’’ interactions between agents and their environments, but often rely on dynamical systems, as traditionally defined, which are in a certain sense closed.…”

“…We describe an intermediate position in the embodied cognition debate, using a class of mathematical objects that we have called ‘‘open dynamical systems’’ (see Hotton & Yoshimi, 2010). An open dynamical system has a dynamical system to model an agent and a dynamical system to model an environment with an embodied agent.…”

Identifying mental states from neural states under mental constraints

“…It should be mentioned that there are other notable proposals to study mappings between mental states and brain states in a formally developed and empirically applicable way; for instance, the approaches suggested by Balduzzi & Tononi [25,26] or by Hotton & Yoshimi [27,28]. Their detailed relation to contextual emergence remains to be explored in future work.…”