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GRUPO DE CIENCIAS COGNITIVAS Y EDUCACIÓN

  • Comprender la realidad sin representaciones: Affordances y psicología ecológica

    Manuel Heras Escribano Departamento de Filosofía I, Universidad de Granada.

    Frente al paradigma tradicional en ciencia cognitiva, donde la metáfora del ordenador es la imperante, la psicología ecológica se ofrece como la alternativa más potente en el futuro desarrollo de las investigaciones sobre el fenómeno de la cognición. Dentro de ella, la noción de affordance juega un papel fundamental, aunque el concepto no está exento de polémica.

    Heras_Escribano_M._2012_._Comprender_la.pdf

  • The extended body: a case study in the neurophenomenology of social interaction

    Tom Froese & Thomas Fuchs

    Published online: 23 March 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

    Abstract There is a growing realization in cognitive science that a theory of embodied intersubjectivity is needed to better account for social cognition. We highlight some challenges that must be addressed by attempts to interpret ‘simulation theory’ in terms of embodiment, and argue for an alternative approach that integrates phenomenology and dynamical systems theory in a mutually informing manner. Instead of ‘simulation’ we put forward the concept of the ‘extended body’, an enactive and phenomenological notion that emphasizes the socially mediated nature of embodiment. To illustrate the explanatory potential of this approach, we replicate an agent-based model of embodied social interaction. An analysis of the model demonstrates that the extended body can be explained in terms of mutual dynamical entanglement: inter-bodily resonance between individuals can give rise to self-sustaining interaction patterns that go beyond the behavioral capacities of isolated individuals by modulating their intra-bodily conditions of behavior generation.

    Froese_Fuchs-_The_extended_body.pdf

  • Complex dynamical systems and embodiment

    Michael J. Richardson and Anthony Chemero

    Although dynamical systems have been used by cognitive scientists for more than a decade already (e.g. Kugler, Kelso, and Turvey, 1980), dynamical systems first gained widespread attention in the mid-1990s (e.g. Kelso, 1995; Port and van Gelder, 1995; Thelen and Smith, 1994). Dynamical systems theory was then, and continues to be, a crucial tool for embodied cognitive science. The word dynamical simply means “changing over time” and thus a dynamical system is simply a system whose behavior evolves or changes over time. The scientific study of dynamical systems is concerned with understanding, modeling, and predicting the ways in which the behavior of a system changes over time. In the last few decades, thanks to increasing computational power, researchers have begun to investigate and understand the dynamic behavior of complex biological, cognitive, and social systems, using the concepts and tools of non-linear dynamical systems. In the next section, we will describe the key concepts of modern dynamical systems theory (complexity, self-organization, soft assembly, interaction dominance, and non-linearity). In the second section, we briefly discuss some dynamical analysis techniques used in the cognitive sciences. In the third, we give some examples of the application of complex dynamical systems theory and analysis in cognitive science. In the last, we sketch some consequences of the widespread applicability of dynamical approaches to understanding neural, cognitive, and social systems.

    A._Chemero_and_M._Richardson_Dynamical_S.pdf