Extended cognition

Extended cognition is the view that mental processes and mind extend beyond the body to include aspects of the environment in which an organism is embedded and the organism's interaction with that environment. Cognition goes beyond the manipulation of symbols to include the emergence of order and structure evolving from active engagement with the world. As described by Mark Rowlands, mental processes are:

• Embodied involving more than the brain, including a more general involvement of bodily structures and processes.
• Embedded functioning only in a related external environment.
• Enacted involving not only neural processes, but also things an organism does.
• Extended into the organism's environment.

This contrasts with the view of the mind as a processing center that creates mental representations of reality and uses them to control the body's behaviour. The field of extended cognition focuses upon the processes involved in this creation, and subsumes these processes as part of consciousness. which is no longer confined to the brain or body, but involves interaction with the environment. At a 'low' level, like motor learning and haptic perception, the body is involved in cognition, but there is a 'high' level where cultural factors play a role. This view of cognition is sometimes referred to as ‘enaction’ to emphasise the role of interplay between the organism and its environment and the feedback processes involved in developing an awareness of, and a reformation of, the environment.

See also

• Action-specific perception
• Cognitive science
• Computational theory of mind
• Cultural psychology
• Embodied cognition
• Extended mind thesis

• Exocortex
• The Extended Mind (paper)
• Enactivism and embodied cognition
• Mind–body problem
• Situated cognition
• Subject–object problem
• Virtual intelligence, example of a purely embedded cognitive system

External links

• Slides related to a chapter on haptic perception (recognition through touch):

This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Extended cognition", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.