| Popis: |
Think of a little boy playing in the playground, climbing up on ladders, balancing on beams, jumping, running, catching other kids. Or think of a girl who prepares to draw a picture, finding and setting up her painting utensils, dipping the brush in water, carefully wiping it off, whipping up the water paint of the selected color with small circular movements, the brush just touching the pad of paint. When she actually paints, she makes a sequence of brush strokes to sketch a house. Clearly, both scenes involve lots of cognition. The ongoing, complex behaviors of the two children are certainly not simple reflexes, nor fixed action patterns elicited by key stimuli, nor strictly dictated by stimulus–response relationships. Hallmarks of cognition are visible: selection, sequence generation, working memory. And yet, what makes these daily life activities most intriguing is how seamlessly the fine and gross motor control is tuned to the environment; how sensory information is actively sought by looking around, searching, establishing reference; and how seamlessly the flow of activities moves forward. No artificial system has ever achieved even remotely comparable behavior. Although computer programs may play chess at grand master level, their ability to generate smooth flows of motor actions in natural environments remains extremely limited. Clearly, cognition takes place when organisms with bodies and sensory systems are situated in structured environments, to which they bring their individual behavioral history and to which they quickly adjust. There is a strong theoretical tension in cognitive science about the extent to which cognition can be studied while abstracting from embodiment, situatedness and the structure of the nervous systems that control cognitive processes in organisms. This chapter argues that in making such abstractions, important concepts are missed, including most importantly the concepts of stability and instability. The embodied view of cognition emphasizes the close link of cognition to the sensory and motor surfaces and the structured environments in which these are immersed. The dynamical systems approach |
