GridletGIS was established as a result of a workshop held at the National Institute of Environmental e-Science entitled GridGIS (Cambridge, UK, 15th-16th December 2003). Like minded people came together during one of the break-out sessions in response to the perception that much, if not all, of the emerging field of distributed, and particularly grid, computing is concerned with manipulating la...

Do human beings need rituals? Have they become an obsolete “evolutionary appendix” in the modern world, or are they an indispensable part of the human condition? Right at the start, I wish to adopt a clear stance with regard to this repeatedly controversial discussion in ritual studies: From the perspective of cultural anthropology, I assume that human beings need rituals, that they are an anth...

Recently, some authors have begun to raise questions about the potential unity of 4E (enactive, embedded, embodied, extended) cognition as a distinct research programme within cognitive science. Two tensions, in particular, have been raised: (i) that the body-centric claims embodied cognition militate against the distributed tendencies of extended cognition and (ii) that the body/environment di...

Few would doubt the benefits of exercise on one’s physical well-being. However, the benefits of exercise on one’s mental abilities are not nearly as extolled. More directly, the perspective that our bodies have a significant influence on our minds is still relatively new, though reviews by Rosenbaum (2005) and Madan and Singhal (2012a) suggest that this is beginning to change. This idea is also...

Computationalism is traditionally considered in the context of cognitive science as perhaps the dominant contemporary approach to understand cognition and cognitive phenomena. It consists in application of concepts and methods of theoretical computer science for understanding and (re)constructing phenomena appearing in much broader fields of science, including the natural sciences and also econ...

Citation: Matyja JR and Dolega K (2015) Commentary: The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in mind and brain sciences. Radical embodied neuroscience (REN) aims to respond to the problems of mapping particular cognitive functions to narrowly defined brain regions. Accordingly, the proponents of this approach call for research t...

This publication is composed of three interviews conducted with Jason W. Brown a few years ago. The first is concerned with early influences that shaped his development of a theory of “microgenesis”. The second focuses on evolutionary principles apparent in brain development and mental processes. In the third interview, Brown discusses the internal processual structure of the “mind/brain state”...

We set out to distinguish level 1 (VPT-1) and level 2 (VPT-2) perspective taking with respect to the embodied nature of the underlying processes as well as to investigate their dependence or independence of response modality (motor vs. verbal). While VPT-1 reflects understanding of what lies within someone else's line of sight, VPT-2 involves mentally adopting someone else's spatial point of vi...

Drawing from empirical literature on ecological psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, this article describes a model affect-as-motivation in the intentional bond between organism environment. An epistemological justification for motivating role emotions is provided through articulating perceptual context as embodied, situated, functional, positing salience biasing signal a...