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Autopoietic enactivism (AE) is a relatively young but increasingly influential approach within embodied cognitive science, which aims to offer a viable alternative framework to mainstream cognitivism. Similarly, in biology, the nascent field of biosemiotics has steadily been developing an increasingly influential alternative framework to mainstream biology. Despite sharing common objectives and clear theoretical overlap, there has to date been little to no exchange between the two fields. This paper takes this under-appreciated overlap as not only a much needed call to begin building bridges between the two areas but also as an opportunity to explore how AE could benefit from biosemiotics. As a first tentative step towards this end, the paper will draw from both fields to develop a novel synthesis – biosemiotic enactivism – which aims to clarify, develop and ultimately strengthen some key AE concepts. The paper has two main goals: (i) to propose a novel conception of cognition that could contribute to the ongoing theoretical developments of AE and (ii) to introduce some concepts and ideas from biosemiotics to the enactive community in order to stimulate further debate across the two fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the extended conscious mind thesis (ECM), the physical basis of consciousness is not confined exclusively to the brain, but extends beyond it via sensorimotor dynamics. ECM is enjoying growing support among philosophers inspired by developments in enactive and embodied cognitive science. ECM has obvious parallels with the extended mind thesis (EM), according to which the physical basis of cognition is likewise not confined to the brain. However, EM’s originator and most prominent defender, Andy Clark, argues that EM theorists can and should reject ECM, and offers an alternative internalist account, which admits a causal but non-constitutive role for sensorimotor dynamics. In this paper, I examine how well this claim fits with some of the key commitments of EM, and the implications for the EM theorist who wishes to deny ECM. I argue that Clark’s position – ECM-rejecting EM – is untenable, and defend the ECM interpretation of sensorimotor dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The enactive approach is usually associated with a revolutionary project that aims to transform in a radical way our understanding of mind and cognition. Bold theoretical moves such as the rejection of cognitive representations or the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, among other enactive ideas, justify this perception. Nonetheless, when we assume a broader historical perspective, including the long cybernetic tradition that preceded the emergence of cognitive sciences, the image of the enactive approach looks different. Put in the context of the paradigmatic shift that took place between first-order and second-order cybernetics, especially in the case of Maturana’s autopoietic theory, the enactive paradigm, so I will try to show in this work, appears rather like a conservative or revisionist project. Better said, it appears as a slightly hybrid paradigm, wherein original and progressive elements coexist with revisionist components. The paper aims to offer an alternative interpretation of the enactive approach and contribute to a better understanding of its identity as a research program, its present and its possible future challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Notions of embodiment, situatedness, and dynamics are increasingly being debated in cognitive science. However, these debates are often carried out in the absence of concrete examples. In order to build intuition, this paper explores a model agent to illustrate how the perspective and tools of dynamical systems theory can be applied to the analysis of situated, embodied agents capable of minimally cognitive behavior. Specifically, we study a model agent whose ‘nervous system’ was evolved using a genetic algorithm to catch circular objects and to avoid diamond-shaped ones. After characterizing the performance, behavioral strategy and psychophysics of the best-evolved agent, its dynamics are analyzed in some detail at three different levels: (1) the entire coupled brain/body/environment system; (2) the interaction between agent and environment that generates the observed coupled dynamics; (3) the underlying neuronal properties responsible for the agent dynamics. This analysis offers both explanatory insight and testable predictions. The paper concludes with discussions of the overall picture that emerges from this analysis, the challenges this picture poses to traditional notions of representation, and the utility of a research methodology involving the analysis of simpler idealized models of complete brain/body/environment systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews two main strategies for dealing with the threat posed by radically enactive/embodied cognition to traditional cognitive science. Both strategies invoke action oriented representations (AORs). They differ in emphasizing different features of AORs in their attempt to answer the REC threat – focusing on their contents and vehicles, respectively. The first two sections review the central motivations and rationales driving the ‘content’ and ‘format’ strategies in turn and raise initial concerns about the tenability of each. With respect to the ‘content’ strategy, these worries ought to make us suspicious about the explanatory value of positing AORs. Although the ‘format’ strategy has a way of answering this concern, it raises a more fundamental worry about the motivation for even believing in AORs in the first place. Although these worries cast doubt on the feasibility of invoking AORs as a means of dealing with the REC threat, they do not constitute conclusive reasons for eliminating AORs altogether. There are other, stronger reasons for supposing that we should. The third section provides a sketch of a master argument, developed elsewhere, which makes that case in full dress fashion. The final section – ‘Resurrection?’ – considers and rejects the possibility that AORs might be resurrected, even if it is agreed that the master argument cited in the third section succeeds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover, even many of the paradigm’s “lower-level” insights into embodiment and situatedness appear to be amenable to a functionalist reinterpretation. In this review, I show on the basis of the recently published collection of papers, Enaction, that the paradigm of enaction has (a) a unique foundation in the notion of sense-making that places fundamental limits on the scope of functionalist appropriation; (b) a unique perspective on higher-level cognition that sets important new research directions without the need for the concept of mental representation; (c) a new concept of specifically human cognition in terms of second-order sense-making; and (d) a rich variety of approaches to explain the evolutionary, historical, and developmental origins of this sophisticated human ability. I also indicate how studies of the role of embodiment for abstract human cognition can strengthen their position by reconceiving their notion of embodiment in enactive terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents a clarification to the use of models in understanding minimally cognitive behaviors. Way in which a minimally cognitive agent could be developed; Relationship between decision and action; Complexities in characterizing representations in a dynamical system.

Present a perspective to the idolized models of minimally cognitive behavior presented by Randall Beer. Reliance of the models on the maximum apparent diameter of an object to perform the discrimination; Use of variability between evaluations and noise; Method use in cognitive science and steps that should be taken to better formalize the design process.

This article tries to offer a different perspective on the issue of what it means for some physical structure to be a representation. In the first sections, it will be shown how and why this issue is still far from settled. This will be done by emphasizing the—what I will call—metaphysically promiscuous character of representation. For although representations are typically assumed to be some sort of physical objects or structures, on closer inspection, the notion of representation is used in such a variety of ways that its fundamental metaphysical status is far from obvious. Proceeding from these observations, it will be argued that, even though "representation" pre-theoretically indeed often picks out objects, their representational status is best not understood in terms of their physical properties or their causal-functional profile. It will be argued that, what it means for some physical structure to be—as a matter of fact—a representation, only first becomes intelligible in relation to certain socio-normative practices in which the cognitive capacity to relate to something as something it is not is prescriptively called upon. Moreover, an answer to the oft-heard question of what makes something (i.e., some physical object or structure) a representation is readily available, provided we take into account certain cognitive abilities, as well as a socio-normative context in which these abilities are normatively regulated. It will be concluded that at the fundamental metaphysical level, the phenomenon of representation is best understood as a triadic relation which involves, but does not reduce to, certain physical objects or structures. Finally, this socio-normative account of representation will be compared with two dominant notions of representation within cognitive science: symbolic representation and S-representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the rejection of representationalism in the article by Randall Beer on the idolized models of minimally cognitive behavior. Dynamical explanations of the coupled brain-body-environment system; Inclusion of the explanatory level than a description of the agent/environment systems in terms of differential equations; Implications of the concept of cognitive science.

"Minimal cognition" is used in certain sectors of the cognitive sciences to make a kind of ontological claim that may be unique in the biological sciences: that a function operating in organisms living today is not a fully fledged version of that function (the nature of which remains unspecified), but, rather, exhibits the minimal requirements for whatever it is, properly conceived. Evidence suggests that elsewhere in the life sciences, deployment of minimizing qualifiers relative to a biological function appears largely restricted to two scenarios: first, attenuated functioning and, second, evolution of the function, real or synthetic. The article argues that "minimal cognition" and "proto-cognitive" were introduced at the turn of this century by cognitive researchers seeking to learn directly from evolved behavior, ecology and physiology. A terminological straitjacket imposed on the central object of cognitive science at its beginning necessitated the move. An alternative terminology is proposed, based on a phyletically neutral definition of cognition as a biological function; a candidate mechanism is explored; and a bacterial example presented. On this story, cognition is like respiration: ubiquitously present, from unicellular life to blue whales and every form of life in between, and for similar reasons: staying alive requires it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental challenge for enactive theory and other radical varieties of non-representational "E cognition" is to reconceive the end-directed character of cognitive activity in naturally emergent but also experientially adequate terms. In short, it is necessary to show how cognitive activity is motivated. In this article, I present a preliminary analysis of the nature of motivation and the challenge that it presents to cognitive science. I make the case that a theory of motivation is a critical desideratum for dynamical theories of cognition, especially insofar as they understand cognition as a self-organized and "soft assembled" process. Finally, I propose that a branch of ecological psychology that conceives of cognition as a special variety of "dissipative adaptation" offers a promising framework for confronting this challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this theoretical review article, our primary goal is to contribute to the post-cognitivist understanding of learning to perceive and perceiving as learning, by discussing a framework for perception and perceptual learning initiated by James J Gibson, and extended by Eleanor J Gibson and others. This Ecological Psychology has a coherent set of assumptions based on the concept of mutualism between the perceiving organism and its surroundings, and the idea of affordances as action possibilities of the surround that are perceptible by the organism. At the same time, Ecological Psychology, broadly construed, consists of different perspectives that take different routes to address questions related to the core concepts of perceptual learning. In this article, we focus on three theoretical stances within Ecological Psychology on the issue of perceptual learning: that of Eleanor J Gibson, the current theory of direct learning by Jacobs and Michaels, and the "organicist" approach based on ideas of organicist biology and developments in evolutionary biology. We consider perceptual learning as embedded in development and evolution, and we explore perceptual learning in more depth in the context of tool use and language development. We also discuss the relation between Ecological Psychology and Enactivism on the nature of perception. In conclusion, we summarize the benefits of Ecological Psychology, as a robust but still developing post-cognitivist framework, for the study of perceptual learning and cognitive science in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enactive turn in cognitive science fundamentally changes how questions about experience and behaviour are addressed. We propose that there exists a suite of core concepts within enaction that are suited to the characterisation of many kinds of intentional subjects, including and especially animals, plants, collectivities and artefacts. We summarise some basic concerns of enactive theory and show how the common illustration of the single cell ascending a chemotactic gradient serves as a focus point for discussion of important topics such as identity, perspective, value, agency and life-mind continuity. We also highlight two important deficits of this example: the cell is ahistorical and asocial. Historicity and sociality are defining characteristics of living beings and are addressed within enactive theory by the concepts of structural coupling and participatory sense-making, respectively. This strongly biological framework is to be distinguished from scientific psychology which is, we argue, necessarily anthropomorphic. We propose a constrained bio-enactive framework that remains true to its biological foundations and that would allow us to negotiate consensus-based understanding in contested domains, where incompatible value systems enacted by competing systems are in conflict. A consensual ‘we’ is, we contend, a matter of negotiation, not of fixed essence. A bio-enactive framework may serve as a jumping off point for consensus-based discussion within contested domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an answer to the question: What is the function of cognition? By answering this question it becomes possible to investigate what are the simplest cognitive systems. It addresses the question by treating cognition as a solution to a design problem. It defines a nested sequence of design problems: (1) How can a system persist? (2) How can a system affect its environment to improve its persistence? (3) How can a system utilize better information from the environment to select better actions? And, (4) How can a system reduce its inherent informational limitations to achieve more successful behavior? This provides a corresponding nested sequence of system classes: (1) autonomous systems, (2) (re)active autonomous systems, (3) informationally controlled autonomous systems (autonomous agents), and (4) cognitive systems.This article provides the following characterization of cognition: The cognitive system is the set of mechanisms of an autonomous agent that (1) allow increase of the correlation and integration between the environment and the information system of the agent, so that (2) the agent can improve the selection of actions and thereby produce more successful behavior.Finally, it shows that common cognitive capacities satisfy the characterization: learning, memory, representation, decision making, reasoning, attention, and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavily weighted terms such as intentionality, rationality, or mind. However, most of the available definitions of agency are too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific research program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: (a) a system must define its own individuality, (b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry), and (c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable of meeting the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook for the road that lies ahead in the pursuit of understanding, modeling, and synthesizing agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental assumption of cognitive science is that the individual is the correct unit of analysis for understanding human intelligence. I present evidence that this assumption may have limited utility, that the social networks containing the individuals are an important additional unit of analysis, and that this "network intelligence" is significantly mediated by non-linguistic processes. Across a broad range of situations these network effects typically predict 40% or more of the variation in human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequential behavior is observed in various domains of cognitive psychology, including free recall paradigms. In this article, within a neurocomputational framework, resampling (RS) mechanisms are compared with competitive queuing (CQ) mechanisms. While both types of implementations select the most active representation, the subsequent inhibition is at the level of selection for RS models and at the level of (re)activation for CQ models. It is shown that despite the overwhelming success of CQ models in serial recall (with regard to types of sequencing error) RS models outperform CQ models with regard to inter-response times in a free recall task. Additional analyses show that decay of response suppression reduces the difference between the models. The RS model is sensitive to the size of the search set and accounts for memory selection performance in patients with Alzheimer's dementia or Huntington's disease. Finally, a non-mnemonic clustering behavior is observed, which is related to the dynamical process of the selection mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the cognitive sciences, cognition tends to be interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective, involving a stringent set of human capabilities. Instead, we suggest that cognition is better explicated as a much more general biological phenomenon, allowing the lower bound of cognition to extend much further down the phylogenetic scale. We argue that elementary forms of cognition can already be witnessed in prokaryotes possessing a functional sensorimotor analogue of the nervous system. Building on a case-study of the Escherichia coli bacterium and its sensorimotor system, the TCST- system, we home in on the characteristics of minimal cognition, and distinguish it from more basic forms of ontogenetic adaptation. In our view, minimal cognition requires an embodiment consisting of a sensorimotor coupling mechanism that subsumes an autopoietic organization; this forms the basis of the growing consensus that the core of cognition revolves around sensorimotor coupling. We discuss the relevance of our interpretation of minimal cognition for the study of cognition in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of ‘how cognitive agents work’ but the issue of ‘what makes something cognitive’ has not been sufficiently addressed yet and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the latter. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized in favor of an organizational approach focused on the internal dynamic relationships that constitute cognitive systems. A definition of cognition as adaptive-autonomy in the embodied and situated neurodynamic domain is provided: the compensatory regulation of a web of stability dependencies between sensorimotor structures is created and preserved during a historical/developmental process. We highlight the functional role of emotional embodiment: internal bioregulatory processes coupled to the formation and adaptive regulation of neurodynamic autonomy. Finally, we discuss a ‘minimally cognitive behavior program’ in evolutionary simulation modeling suggesting that much is to be learned from a complementary ‘minimally cognitive organization program’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a methodology for incremental development of complex adaptive behaviors in robots. The methodology decomposes a given root strategy into a tree of self-contained supporting strategies that can be fully implemented and tested before the next strategy is added. The methodology also uses comparative performance tests for each new strategy relative to its predecessor. The methodology assumes the use of skill modules that can be shared by multiple behavioral layers and produces learning mechanisms that are highly specialized and context dependent. Two example applications of the methodology are presented using simulated robots in the domains of foraging/mapping and conflict resolution. The examples are implemented by hand using a decomposed model of behavior that allows skill modules to be shared while retaining a unique representation of each strategy for excitation and inhibition. Finally, we discuss how the solutions produced using this methodology differ from existing behavior-based solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diverse, complex, and adaptive animal behaviors are achieved by organizing hierarchically structured controllers in motor systems. The levels of control progress from simple spinal reflexes and central pattern generators through to executive cognitive control in the frontal cortex. Various types of hierarchical control structures have been introduced and shown to be effective in past artificial agent models, but few studies have shown how such structures can self-organize. This study describes how such hierarchical control may evolve in a simple recurrent neural network model implemented in a mobile robot. Topological constraints on information flow are found to improve system performance by decreasing interference between different parts of the network. One part becomes responsible for generating lower behavior primitives while another part evolves top-down sequencing of the primitives for achieving global goals. Fast and slow neural response dynamics are automatically generated in specific neurons of the lower and the higher levels, respectively. A hierarchical neural network is shown to outperform a comparable single-level network in controlling a mobile robot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the use of the dynamical systems theory in the study of cognition. Interactions between the numerous components of biological systems; Features of the Heuristic rules; Indication for the evolution of behavior and cognition.

Various organisms share certain basic rules for a searching behavior. We hypothesize that these rules may emerge from basic properties of nonlinear systems as a whole, rather then being evolved from a scratch gradually. In order to support this hypothesis, we have developed a virtual agent that consists of three simple nonlinear oscillators. These oscillators are driven by an internal noise, which results in phase transitions in their activity. External stimuli modify the activity via sensors and food consumption. The interaction among the activity of oscillators and external influences give rise to an emergence of searching rules that are similar to those shared by various organisms, thus favoring this hypothesis. The hypothesis can be verified further by investigating various types of nonlinear systems in different environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a commentary to the article written by Randall Beer which studies the idolized models of minimally cognitive behavior. Major players in developing a radical embodied, situated and dynamical perspective on cognition; Criteria for deciding on cognition; Inclusion of the basic issues of conceptual development.

Details the internal representations and transition processes of cognitive science and its application to robotic systems. Demonstration of a proprioceptive feedback process using the arm/hand system; Proprioceptive tracts; De-bugging minimal robust representationalism; Complications; Views on cognitivism and representationalism.

Presents a perspective regarding the explanatory benefits of representation in understanding cognition. Distinct levels of understanding; Basic requirement from representations; Components of the theoretical platform.

Presents a perspective for developing a theoretical basis for the design of complex agents for cognition. Limitations of simple dynamics and simple agents; Complex dynamics and tractability of parametrically coupled maps; Inclusion of the events that shown consequences of external perturbation of these networks.

Presents a perspective to the article of Randall Beer which studies the idolized models of minimally cognitive behavior published in the 2003 issue of the "Adaptive Behavior" journal. Role of situated action in cognition; Factors and forces in the production of intelligent behavior; Implications of the gap between behavior and judgment.