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About

Horst Hendriks-Jansen is a groundbreaking theorist whose work challenges the foundational assumptions of cognitive science. His primary research areas span situated robotics, ethology, developmental psychology, and the philosophy of mind, with a particular focus on how intelligent behavior emerges from dynamic, embodied interactions with the environment rather than from internal mental representations. His major contribution, articulated in his seminal book *Catching Ourselves in the Act* (1996), which has accumulated over 285 citations, is a comprehensive framework that rejects the traditional cognitive science orthodoxy of formal task-descriptions and computational implementation. Instead, Hendriks-Jansen argues for an explanation of mind rooted in "situated activity," "interactive emergence," and evolutionary history—drawing on insights from robotics and ethology to show how thought and behavior arise organically from an organism’s ongoing engagement with its world. In a notable extension of this work, he applied his embodied, dynamic, and historical perspective to the epistemology of autism (1997), offering a novel explanation that moves beyond purely cognitive or representational accounts. Hendriks-Jansen’s work remains essential reading for anyone interested in alternative, non-representational approaches to intelligence, consciousness, and human development.