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Abstract Artificial intelligence has not achieved defining features of biological intelligence despite models boasting more parameters than neurons in the human brain. In this perspective article, we synthesize historical approaches to understanding intelligent systems and argue that methodological and epistemic biases in these fields can be resolved by shifting away from cognitivist brain-as-computer theories and recognizing that brains exist within large, interdependent living systems. Integrating the dynamical systems view of cognition with the massive distributed feedback of perceptual control theory highlights a theoretical gap in our understanding of nonreductive neural mechanisms. Cell assemblies—properly conceived as reentrant dynamical flows and not merely as identified groups of neurons—may fill that gap by providing a minimal supraneuronal level of organization that establishes a neurodynamical base layer for computation. By considering information streams from physical embodiment and situational embedding, we discuss this computational base layer in terms of conserved oscillatory and structural properties of cortical-hippocampal networks. Our synthesis of embodied cognition, based in dynamical systems and perceptual control, aims to bypass the neurosymbolic stalemates that have arisen in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computational neuroscience.
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Embodiment and Human Development
Abstract We are recognizing increasingly that the study of cognitive, social, and emotional processes must account for their embodiment in living, acting beings. The related field of embodied cognition (EC) has coalesced around dissatisfaction with the lack of attention to the body in cognitive science. For developmental scientists, the emphasis in the literature on adult EC on the role of the body in cognition may not seem particularly novel, given that bodily action was central to Piaget's theory of cognitive development. However, as the influence of the Piagetian account waned, developmental notions of embodiment were shelved in favor of mechanical computational approaches. In this article, I argue that by reconsidering embodiment, we can address a key issue with computational accounts: How meaning is constructed by the developing person. I also suggest that the process-relational approach to developmental systems can provide a system of concepts for framing a fully embodied, integrative developmental science.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1460889
- PAR ID:
- 10658941
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Child Development Perspectives
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1750-8592
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 245-250
- Size(s):
- p. 245-250
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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