Directive Minds: How Dynamics Shapes Cognition

Abstract

The future progress of cognitive science looks set to involve ever-increasing efforts to anchor research to the real world poles of sensing and acting. Thus anchored, time, world and body emerge as significant players in the cognitive arena. How could we ever have forgotten them? —A. Clark 1995, 101 In the cognitive sciences, we currently witness a “pragmatic turn” 1 away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a paradigm that focuses on understanding the intimate relation between cognition and action. Such an “action-oriented” paradigm has earliest and most explicitly been developed in robotics, and has only recently begun to have a notable impact on cognitive psychology and neurobiology. The basic concept is that cognition should not be understood as a capacity of deriving world-models, which then might provide a “database” for thinking, planning, and problem solving. Rather, it is emphasized that cognitive processes are not only closely intertwined with action but that cognition can actually best be understood as “enactive,” as a form of practice itself. Cognition, on this account, is grounded in a prerational understanding of the world that is based on sensorimotor acquisition of real-life situations. The goal of this chapter is to explore possible implications of such a “pragmatic turn” for cognitive neuroscience. In addition to reviewing major conceptual components of this new framework, I will discuss neurobiological evidence supporting this notion. Specifically, I will relate this new view to recent findings on the dynamics of signal flow in the nervous system and on encoding dimensions of neural activity patterns. As I will argue, new vistas on the “meaning,” the functional roles, and the presumed “representational” nature of neural processes are likely to emerge from this confrontation. 8