26 research outputs found
Principles of minimal cognition:Casting cognition as sensorimotor coordination
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
Genetic determinism: how not to interpret behavioral genetics
Recently, investigators in behavioral genetics have found loci on the genome (so-called ‘quantitative trait loci’ or QTLs) that are associated with complex mental traits, such as anxiety or novelty seeking. The interpretation of these findings raises interesting theoretical questions. At first sight, the discovery of ‘genes-for-personality’ seems to support genetic determinism and reductionism. Genetic determinism is the view that the phenotype is precoded in or determined by the genotype. However, evidence from developmental biology and neural modeling indicates that development is a result of interactive processes at many levels, not only the genome, so that geneticism must be rejected. Identifying QTLs and perhaps also the causal paths in the tangle of top-down and bottom-up influences between genome, organism and environment is best seen as a simplification. It amounts to considerably less than reduction in the classical sense of replacement via bridge laws or elimination. It is argued that higher (psychological and physiological) levels are functionally characterized and are irreducible to molecular-genetic levels. Therefore, it is to be expected that ideas about inter-level relations may be useful in clarifying the relation between loci on the genome (QTLs), gene products, the nervous system, behavior and personality, and to help identify the contribution of genetic factors in behavioral genetics. © 2000, Sage Publications. All rights reserved
Theoretical behaviorism meets embodied cognition. Two theoretical analyses of behavior
This paper aims to do three things: First, to provide a review of John
Staddon’s book Adaptive dynamics: The theoretical analysis of behavior.
Second, to compare Staddon’s behaviorist view with current ideas on
embodied cognition. Third, to use this comparison to explicate some
outlines for a theoretical analysis of behavior that could be useful as a
behavioral foundation for cognitive phenomena. Staddon earlier
defended a theoretical behaviorism, which allows internal states in its
models but keeps these to a minimum while remaining critical of any
cognitive interpretation. In his latest book, Adaptive dynamics, he
provides an overview and analysis of an extensive number of these
current, behaviorist models. Theoretical behaviorism comes close to the
view of embodied cognition, which also stresses the importance of
behavior in contrast to high-level cognition. A detailed picture of the
overlaps and differences between the two approaches will be sketched by
comparing the two on four separate issues: the conceptualization of
behavior, loopy structures, parsimonious explanations, and cognitive
behavior. The paper will stress the need for a structural analysis of
behavior to gain a better understanding of both behavior and cognition.
However, for this purpose,