
Contents
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Acknowledgments Acknowledgments
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Cite
Extract
More than 2000 years ago — maybe as the first humans in the world — Greek philosophers have thought about the puzzling introspectively assessed dichotomy between our physical bodies and our seemingly, non-physical, mental minds. How is it that we can think highly abstract thoughts, seemingly fully detached from the actual, physical reality? Despite the obvious interactions between mind and body (we get tired, we are hungry, we stay up late despite being tired, etc.), until today it remains puzzling how our mind controls our body, and vice versa, how our body shapes our mind.
This textbook focuses on the embodiment of the mind in all its facets. Many other books on cognitive science focus on sensory information processing, motor output generation, reasoning, symbol processing, and language in separate rather disconnected chapters. This book integrates these aspects of cognition sketching-out their interdependencies and their potential ontogenetic (over a life-time) and phylogenetic (over centuries, millennia, and beyond) development. As a consequence, after giving a multidisciplinary background on the development of cognitive science as a research discipline, the book starts from an evolutionary developmental perspective, shedding light on how behavior traits and genetic codes may have developed on our earth. Next, we proceed with cognitive development during a life-time, focusing on reinforcement learning and the development of flexible behavioral capabilities by learning about and selecting amongst redundant alternative interactions with the environment. An excursion into a functional perspective on the human brain then leads to principles of perception and action generation, including the relations between these principles, leading to multisensory and multi-information interactions. Processes of attention and the different aspects of attentional processes then lead to principles of decision making, language, and abstract thought. One goal of the book is thus to sketch-out a developmental pathway towards higher, symbolic, abstract cognitive capabilities starting bottom-up with principled processes of bodily representations and body control, offering a novel perspective on cognitive science by taking a sensorimotor, integrative, embodied stance.
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