Doxological Extended Cognition

Many Christian theologians have proposed a universal knowledge of God implanted in all humans. Thomas Aquinas famously stated that all humans have some knowledge of God, confused though it may be. John Calvin developed this proposition in much more detail and concluded that there is a cognitive faculty in humans, the sensus divinitatis, committed to giving the cognizer knowledge of God. Independent of such theological concerns, a current movement in cognitive science proposes a radical change to the traditional boundaries drawn around the human mind. Proponents of mental extension, such as Andy Clark, argue that the mind extends well beyond the body and should be approached in a much broader conceptual analysis. This essay arises from the conviction that the Extended Mind (EM) framework offers new insights into developing a cognitive understanding of the sensus divinitatis. Drawing in equal parts on current arguments for mental extension and the sensus divinitatis, the essay establishes the compatibility between the two arguments and indicates how an integration of the two can yield significant benefits for both mental extension and the sensus divinitatis: the basing of the sensus divinitatis in a specific cognitive theory that offers explanations of its functions, and the introduction of theism to the EM argument as a potentially useful component in a collaborative cognitive science effort.     

Extended Cognition and Propositional Memory

The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended‐memory cases’ (e.g. Clark & Chalmers 1998); though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended‐memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is as follows: in §1, we argue that an epistemological theory remains compatible with HEC only if its epistemic assessments do not violate what we call ‘the epistemic parity principle’. In §2, we show how the constraint of respecting the epistemic parity principle stands in what appears to be a prima facie intractable tension with mainstream thinking about cases of propositional memory. We then outline and evaluate in §3 several lines of response.     

The Field of Consciousness and Extended Cognition

Extended cognition theorists claim that the definition of cognition can be extended to include not only the brain, but also the body and environment. In a series of works, Mark Rowlands has envisioned a new science of mind that explores the externalism of consciousness and cognition. This paper connects Rowlands’ work with the phenomenology of Aron Gurwitsch. It shows how Gurwitsch’s field of consciousness, in particular his conception of the marginal halo, can provide a distinct, organized way of thinking about extended cognition. A key question considered is from where do cognitive processes project and disclose meanings? By thinking of location as locus—a projecting pathway of points of intentional opportunity—organization in extended cognition becomes organization in a field of consciousness. The marginal halo in the field of consciousness is articulated as this locus of intentionality, what Rowlands (The new science of the mind: from extended mind to embodied phenomenology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010) calls “the noneliminable intentional core”. Problems of cognitive bloat and personal character are addressed in light of the findings. In addition to situating Gurwitsch’s work within the extended mind movement for the first time, this study highlights the importance of the marginal halo, largely neglected in previous Gurwitsch scholarship.     

基于概念外延的用户认知表达-——以智能冰箱的用户认知研究为例

--用户认知具有主观性、模糊性、进化性及多维性等不确定性特点,难以编码与度量。提出以概念外延表达的集合论方法与模糊数学把研究用户认知转换成研究代表它的因素集合;提出用数据驱动的互联网文本挖掘获取因素集,采用TF-IDF与模糊统计求解因素的隶属度,完成用户认知的数学表达,为进一步研究提供数学基础;最后以海信智能冰箱项目进行论证。由于用户认知属于典型的不确定性复杂对象,论文所用方法适用于所有复杂对象的建模与求解。     

Extended Cognition & the Causal‐Constitutive Fallacy: In Search for a Diachronic and Dynamical Conception of Constitution

Philosophical accounts of the constitution relation have been explicated in terms of synchronic relations between higher‐ and lower‐level entities. Such accounts, I argue, are temporally austere or impoverished, and are consequently unable to make sense of the diachronic and dynamic character of constitution in dynamical systems generally and dynamically extended cognitive processes in particular. In this paper, my target domain is extended cognition based on insights from nonlinear dynamics. Contrariwise to the mainstream literature in both analytical metaphysics and extended cognition, I develop a nonstandard, alternative conception of constitution, which I call “diachronic process constitution”. It will be argued that only a diachronic and dynamical conception of constitution is consistent with the nature of constitution in distributed cognitive processes.     

Affect and Cognition

ABSTRACT— One of the greatest puzzles of human nature concerns the poorly understood interplay between affect and cognition—the rational and emotional ways of dealing with the social world around us. Affect is a ubiquitous and powerful phenomenon in our lives, yet research on human affectivity has been neglected until quite recently. This article reviews traditional and contemporary approaches to this issue, and recent theoretical and empirical work exploring the links between affect and cognition is considered. The major achievements and shortcomings of this now-thriving research area are discussed, and the future prospects of psychological research on human affectivity are considered.     

基础认知与社会认知中内隐过程及其脑机制*

认知过程及其脑机制是心理学研究的重要内容。社会认知是人们在社会生活中对他人行为的意图及情感的认识,是人际互动的重要方面,具有深刻的理论和实践意义。本文全面深入地对社会认知和基础认知中自动加工过程进行了研究综述,对基础认知与社会认知的研究方式进行了比较。自动加工过程是社会认知和基础认知中都存在的重要过程,从脑机制研究角度,相关的电生理学指标(如N400等)都可以作为研究的指标来考察社会认知中的自动加工过程。本文从社会认知与基础认知的比较入手,介绍了各种领域的研究方法,特别是事件相关电位技术等认知神经科学研究方法。     

Animal Cognition: The Bridge BetweenAnimal Learning and Human Cognition

Carefully controlled research with animals has demonstrated cognitive capacities for which traditional theories of associative learning cannot account. One example is the symbolic representation of stimuli. If two arbitrary stimuli are associated with a third event, an emergent relation can be shown to develop. A second example is the ability of animals to plan ahead, and to choose whether to plan ahead or not. Although animals have often been used to model drug effects in humans, these models have rarely been used to examine the effects of drugs on cognitive functioning. Furthermore, examination of the effects of drugs on the cognitive behavior of animals may help to identify the nature of the representations underlying the cognition.     

Extended Mind and After: Socially Extended Mind and Actor-Network

The concept of extended mind has been impressively developed over the last 10 years by many philosophers and cognitive scientists. The extended mind thesis (EM) affirms that the mind is not simply ensconced inside the head, but extends to the whole system of brain-body-environment. Recently, some philosophers and psychologists try to adapt the idea of EM to the domain of social cognition research. Mind is socially extended (SEM). However, EM/SEM theory has problems to analyze the interactions among a subject and its surroundings with opposition, antagonism, or conflict; it also tends to think that the environment surrounding the subject is passive or static, and to neglect the power of non-human actants to direct and regulate the human subject. In these points, actor-network theory (ANT) proposed by Latour and Callon is more persuasive, while sharing some important ideas with EM/SEM theory. Actor-network is a hybrid community which is composed of a series of heterogeneous elements, animate and inanimate for a certain period of time. I shall conclude that EM/SEM could be best analyzed as a special case of actor-network. EM/SEM is a system which can be controlled by a human agent alone. In order to understand collective behavior, philosophy and psychology have to study the actor-network in which human individuals are situated.     

Cognition and hearing aids

The perceptual information transmitted from a damaged cochlea to the brain is more poorly specified than information from an intact cochlea and requires more processing in working memory before language content can be decoded. In addition to making sounds audible, current hearing aids include several technologies that are intended to facilitate language understanding for persons with hearing impairment in challenging listening situations. These include directional microphones, noise reduction, and fast-acting amplitude compression systems. However, the processed signal itself may challenge listening to the extent that with specific types of technology, and in certain listening situations, individual differences in cognitive processing resources may determine listening success. Here, current and developing digital hearing aid signal processing schemes are reviewed in the light of individual working memory (WM) differences. It is argued that signal processing designed to improve speech understanding may have both positive and negative consequences, and that these may depend on individual WM capacity.     

Implicit Cognition and Addiction

ABSTRACT— Extensive recent research has begun to unravel the more implicit or automatic cognitive mechanisms in addiction. This effort has increased our understanding of some of the perplexing characteristics of addictive behaviors. The problem, often, is not that substance abusers do not understand that the disadvantages of continued use outweigh the advantages; rather, they have difficulty resisting their automatically triggered impulses to use their substance of abuse. Existing interventions may help to moderate these impulses. In addition, new techniques aimed at directly modifying implicit cognitive processes in substance abuse are being developed.     

Logic and Social Cognition

This article takes off from Johan van Benthem’s ruminations on the interface between logic and cognitive science in his position paper “Logic and reasoning: Do the facts matter?”. When trying to answer Van Benthem’s question whether logic can be fruitfully combined with psychological experiments, this article focuses on a specific domain of reasoning, namely higher-order social cognition, including attributions such as “Bob knows that Alice knows that he wrote a novel under pseudonym”. For intelligent interaction, it is important that the participants recursively model the mental states of other agents. Otherwise, an international negotiation may fail, even when it has potential for a win-win solution, and in a time-critical rescue mission, a software agent may depend on a teammate’s action that never materializes. First a survey is presented of past and current research on higher-order social cognition, from the various viewpoints of logic, artificial intelligence, and psychology. Do people actually reason about each other’s knowledge in the way proscribed by epistemic logic? And if not, how can logic and cognitive science productively work together to construct more realistic models of human reasoning about other minds? The paper ends with a delineation of possible avenues for future research, aiming to provide a better understanding of higher-order social reasoning. The methodology is based on a combination of experimental research, logic, computational cognitive models, and agent-based evolutionary models.     

Musical Probabilities,Abductive Reasoning,and Brain Mechanisms: Extended Perspective of A Priori Listening to Music Within the Creative Cognition Approach

A theory of listening to music is proposed. It suggests that, for listeners, the process of prediction is the starting point to experiencing music. This implies that perception of music starts through both a predisposed and an experience-based extrapolation into the future (this is labeled a priori listening). Indications for this proposal are discussed and defined using perspectives from the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, philosophy, and experimental psychology. Of most importance in this theory is that listening to music constantly interacts with the creative processes.     

Paleolithic Art and Cognition

In this article, I have explored some of the possible relationships between the first appearance of representational art in human history and the early development of human cognition. I argue that most Upper Paleolithic depictions directly represent generalized mental images of their animal subjects rather than percepts or recollected scenes from life and that these images, in turn, are representations of concepts at the basic level of categorization. A common feature of Paleolithic art forms is the salience of parts, and the treatment of parts indicates analytic and synthetic (recombinative) abilities. There are some indications of superordinate categorization. An expansion of conceptual thinking seems to be implied as well as the beginnings of operational thought. The presence and practice of depiction may have had the effect of bringing concepts into consciousness and thus inducing reflection in at least a partially abstract mode.     

Culture and Causal Cognition

East Asian and American causal reasoning differs significantly. East Asians understand behavior in terms of complex interactions between dispositions of the person or other object and contextual factors, whereas Americans often view social behavior primarily as the direct unfolding of dispositions. These culturally differing causal theories seem to be rooted in more pervasive, culture-specific mentalities in East Asia and the West. The Western mentality is analytic, focusing attention on the object, categorizing it by reference to its attributes, and ascribing causality based on rules about it. The East Asian mentality is holistic, focusing attention on the field in which the object is located and ascribing causality by reference to the relationship between the object and the field.