Navigating beyond “here & now” affordances—on sensorimotor maturation and “false belief” performance

How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of “sensorimotor priors,” i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance

Beyond sensorimotor segregation: On mirror neurons and social affordance space tracking

Mirror neuron research has come a long way since the early 1990s, and many theorists are now stressing the heterogeneity and complexity of the sensorimotor properties of fronto-parietal circuits. However, core aspects of the initial ‘ mirror mechanism ’ theory, i.e. the idea of a symmetric encapsulated mirroring function translating sensory action perceptions into motor formats, still appears to be shaping much of the debate. This article challenges the empirical plausibility of the sensorimotor segregation implicit in the original mirror metaphor. It is proposed instead that the teleological organization found in the broader fronto-parietal circuits might be inherently sensorimotor. Thus the idea of an independent ‘purely perceptual’ goal understanding process is questioned. Further, it is hypothesized that the often asymmetric, heterogeneous and contextually modulated mirror and canonical neurons support a function of multisensory mapping and tracking of the perceiving agents affordance space. Such a shift in the interpretative framework offers a different theoretical handle on how sensorimotor processes might ground various aspects of intentional action choice and social cognition. Mirror neurons would under the proposed “social affordance model” be seen as dynamic parts of larger circuits, which support tracking of currently shared and competing action possibilities. These circuits support action selection processes—but also our understanding of the options and action potentials that we and perhaps others have in the affordance space. In terms of social cognition ‘ mirror ’ circuits might thus help us understand not only the intentional actions others are actually performing—but also what they could have done, did not do and might do shortly

How children make sense of the world:A perceptual learning account

The aim of this thesis was to describe the social and non-social development of infants and children from a perceptual learning account. Perceptual learning is a domain-general process by which children progressively can distinguish more diverse and relevant information in the world around them. This then allows children to couple perception and action in novel and adaptive ways, helping them to meet the demands and opportunities provided by that world. It is claimed that this does not require the mediation of any specialized cognitive functions, something that is usually either explicit or implicitly acclaimed in theories of development. This thesis reports several studies that show how infants and children develop social and non-social skills by means of perceptual learning, such as gaze following, specific forms of imitation, facial expression recognition, and understanding of physical mechanisms. As an example, it was shown that infants are able to perceive another person’s intended actions with objects by perceptually tuning into the sequence of events of how he or she interacts with those objects. In another reported study, it was shown that children’s interaction with physical mechanisms can create the perceptual information that helps them to understand those physical mechanisms in an advanced manner. For the future, it was suggested that perceptual learning should be used to further investigate early social development and learning contexts for children. This could lead to new insights on how to describe development and learning processes and to optimize contexts for learning to occur

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Dance

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Danc

Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

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Inside the brain of an elite athlete: The neural processes that support high achievement in sports

Events like the World Championships in athletics and the Olympic Games raise the public profile of competitive sports. They may also leave us wondering what sets the competitors in these events apart from those of us who simply watch. Here we attempt to link neural and cognitive processes that have been found to be important for elite performance with computational and physiological theories inspired by much simpler laboratory tasks. In this way we hope to inspire neuroscientists to consider how their basic research might help to explain sporting skill at the highest levels of performance

Action-Related Representations

Theories of grounded cognition state that there is a meaningful connection between action and cognition. Although these claims are widely accepted, the nature and structure of this connection is far from clear and is still a matter of controversy. This book argues for a type of cognitive representation that essentially combines cognition and action, and which is foundational for higher-order cognitive capacities