According to the extended cognition hypothesis (henceforth ExC), there are conditions under which thinking and thoughts (or more precisely, the material vehicles that realize thinking and thoughts) are spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that the external (beyond-the-skin) factors concerned are rightly accorded fully-paid-up cognitive status. According to functionali...

Active externalism (also known as the extended mind hypothesis) says that we use objects and situations in the world as external memory stores that we consult as needs dictate. This gives us economies of storage: We do not need to remember that Bill has blue eyes and wavy hair if we can acquire this information by looking at Bill. I argue for a corollary to this position, which I call 'internal...

Over recent decades, our philosophical and scientific understanding of cognition has changed dramatically. We went from conceiving humans as the sole truly cognitive species on planet to endowing several organisms with capacities, considering brains exclusive seat extending faculties entire physical body beyond. That could extend beyond organism’s is no doubt one most controversial hypotheses. ...

Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the view that the human mind need not be in the human head. To speak more carefully, they defend the view that the material vehicles 1 of cognition can be spread out across brain, body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself. Critics of this view (which has become known as the ‘extended mind hypothesis’, henceforth EM) have pointed to the supposed...

Some types of species exploit the external environment to support their cognitive processes, in the sense of patterns created in the environment that function as external mental states and serve as an extension to their mind. In the case of social species the creation and exploitation of such patterns can be shared, thus obtaining a form of shared mind or collective intelligence. This paper exp...

An influential theoretical perspective differentiates in humans an explicit, rule-based system of category learning from an implicit system that slowly associates different regions of perceptual space with different response outputs. This perspective was extended for the 1st time to the category learning of nonhuman primates. Humans (Homo sapiens) and macaques (Macaca mulatta) learned categorie...

The probabilistic approach to cognition has become an established approach in recent decades. Cognition is better viewed as solving probabilistic, rather than logical, inference problems; i.e. cognition is better understood in terms of probability theory, rather than in terms of logic. This article presents a cognitive architecture used to govern a robot probabilistically. The design and implem...

Language is coordination. Pursuing this, the present Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition challenges two widely held positions. First, the papers reject the claim that language is essentially ‘symbolic’. Second, they deny that minds (or brains) represent verbal patterns. Rather, language is social, individual, and contributes the feeling of thinking. Simply, it is distributed. Elucidating th...

Over the past decade, a growing body of research has detailed persistent changes to neuroelectric indices of cognition in amateur and professional athletes with a concussion history. Here, we review the relevant neuroelectric findings on this relationship while considering the duration from the last concussive event. Collectively, the findings support a negative relation of concussive injury to...

Connecting a physiological model to a cognitive architecture presents an attractive option to better simulate a wide range of human behavior. This connection should facilitate both the effects of physiology on cognition (e.g. hunger and decision-making), and the effects of cognition on physiology (e.g. autonomic responses to memory featuring particularly aversive stimuli). To add physiology to ...