The Dynamics of Brain– Body–Environment Systems: A Status Report

The history of science can often be characterized as a sequence of revolutions and reactions. The birth of cognitive science can be traced to the cognitive revolution of the mid-20th century, which was a reaction against the behaviorist revolution of the early 20th century. Behaviorism in turn was a reaction to the introspectionist tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More recently, the connectionist revolution was a reaction to some of the symbolic assumptions of the computational core of cognitive science. In the mid-1980s, just as mainstream cognitive science was becoming aware of connectionism, two new ideas appeared on the intellectual landscape: situatedness and embodiment. These were quickly followed in the early 1990s by a third: dynamics. Broadly speaking, situatedness concerns the role played in an agent’s behavior by its ongoing interactions with its immediate environment. Embodiment, in contrast, concerns the role of the physical properties of an agent’s body in its behavior. Finally, dynamical approaches emphasize the temporal dimension of behavior, seeking to apply the concepts and tools of dynamical systems theory to the analysis of agents. Of course, none of these ideas are really new. As is often the case in science, they each had important historical 6