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THE DYNAMICS OF EMBODIED COGNITION

Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

and

School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts and UC Merced Center for Computational Biology, University of California at Merced, P. O. Box 2039, Merced CA 95344, USA

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218127410026241Cited by:10 (Source: Crossref)

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.

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