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According to the thesis of the extended mind, at least some cognitive processes extend into the cognizing subject's environment in the sense that they are composed of processes of manipulation, exploitation, and transformation performed by that subject on suitable environmental structures. In contrast, according to the thesis of the embedded mind, the manipulation, exploitation, and transformation of information-bearing structures provides a useful scaffolding which facilitates cognitive processes but does not, even in part, constitute them. The two theses are distinct but often confused. The extended mind has attracted three ostensibly distinct kinds of objection, all of which on further analysis reduce to the idea that the arguments for the extended mind in fact only establish the thesis of the embedded mind. This chapter argues that these three objections can all be resolved by the provision of an adequate and properly motivated criterion of the cognitive.

This chapter explores the large individual differences in speech and language outcomes in deaf children who have received cochlear implants (CIs). It argues that that the variability in performance on the traditional clinical outcome measures used to assess speech and language processing skills in deaf children with CIs reflects fundamental differences in the speed of information processing operations such as verbal rehearsal, scanning of items in short-term memory, and the rate of encoding phonological and lexical information in working memory. It is also shown that the sequela of deafness and delay in language are not domain-specific and restricted to only hearing and auditory processing. Other neurocognitive systems display disturbances, and these differences appear to reflect the operation of domain-general processes of cognitive control, self-regulation, and organization.

This chapter addresses the relationship of band-limited electrophysiological mass activity to behavior on the one hand, and to the BOLD fMRI signal on the other. Electrophysiological mass activity generally reflects several different components of neuronal activity, which are generated by distinct neural mechanisms and expressed in different frequency ranges. The relative strengths of these components thus determine a so-called specific spectral fingerprint of a perceptual or cognitive process. A striking discrepancy between the spectral fingerprint of stimulus-driven responses in sensory cortices and the fingerprints of intrinsic processes (such as top-down attention or switches between perceptual states) within the same cortical areas is highlighted. It is proposed that this dissociation reflects recurrent interactions between distant cortical areas and/or neuromodulation of cortical activity patterns by ascending systems, which are both thought to play an important role in such processes.

The EXTENDED model claims that human cognitive processing may at times loop into the environment surrounding the organism. In contrast, a more conservative view is that certain cognitive processes lean heavily on environmental structures and scaffoldings but do not thereby include those structures and scaffoldings themselves. This chapter argues that the conservative view threatens to obscure much that is of value and that a robust notion of cognitive extension thus earns its keep as part of the emerging picture of the active embodied mind. To make this case, the chapter begins by sketching some general responses to the worries that motivate the more conservative view. It then presents some new examples and arguments that aim to flesh out the skeleton responses and to illuminate further the nature and importance of cognitive extension itself.

This chapter focuses on the issues that arise in making inferences from event-related potentials (ERPs) about cognition. It is argued that establishing the functional significance of cognitive ERPs requires the identification of both their cognitive correlates and their neural origins.

Contemporary psychology claims an influential position that suggests that the mind is made-up of constellations of domain-specific, specialized computational mechanisms. Controversy remains on how integrative cognitive processes such as imagination fit into this suggested architecture of mind. This chapter considers some of the three possible conceptualizations of imagination. The first conceptualization purports imagination as an operation of the domain-general central process in a Fodorian mind. The second suggests imagination is an operation of a specialized module in a massively modular mind, and the third conceptualization asserts imagination as a product of low binding selectivity in Clark Barrett’s ‘cogzyme’ mind. Of the three conceptualizations, the last one is the most promising, as the key to the imagination seems to be the mapping of meaningful representations between dissimilar cognitive domains. Imagination is thus a consequence of the incomplete insulation between parallel specialized processes. Such de-insulation initiates novelty and innovation but it also allows possible delusional beliefs and psychotic illnesses. Like evolutionary development, imagination has benefits and costs as well.

Somewhere along the line of cognitive processes going from perception to recounting, a transition must take place by which this continuous stream of events is segmented into a sequence of discrete units. This chapter analyzes event segmentation. Darren Newtson's model of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of event segmentation is discussed. According to this model, observers are not confined to one invariant type of segmenting over a given course of events. Instead, the definition of event segments results from a complex interplay of both characteristics of the observed event and of personal factors, the latter ranging from stable cognitive traits to observational goals, prior knowledge, and mood states. As a consequence, variations in segmentations have been shown to have a substantial impact on higher cognitive processes such as memorization, causal attribution, decision making, or experience of time.

This chapter analyzes how the cognitive process inducing the entrepreneurial decision is influenced by placing that same individual in different contexts. In particular, it compares high knowledge contexts with impoverished knowledge contexts, leading to a different view of entrepreneurship. It is shown that entrepreneurship can be an endogenous response to investments in new knowledge when commercialization of that knowledge is constrained by a formidable knowledge filter.

This chapter examines the scope and limits of the tractability argument. It argues for two claims. First, that when explored with appropriate care and attention, it becomes clear that the argument provides no good reason to prefer massive modularity to the more traditional rationalist alternative. Second, while it is denied that tractability considerations support massive modularity per se, this does not mean that they show nothing whatsoever. Careful analysis of tractability considerations suggests a range of characteristics that any plausible version of psychological rationalism is likely to possess. The chapter proceeds as follows: Section 1 outlines and clarifies the general form of the tractability argument. Section 2 explains how massive modularity is supposed to resolve intractability worries. Sections 3 to 7 highlight the deficiencies of the main extant arguments for claiming that nonmodular mechanisms are intractable. Section 8 concludes by sketching some of the general characteristics that a plausible rationalist alternative to massive modularity — one capable of subserving tractable cognitive processes — is likely to possess.

This chapter describes what concepts are taken to be in psychology and identifies the goals of the psychological theories of concepts. In psychology, concepts are characterized as being those bodies of knowledge that are stored in long-term memory and that are used by default in the processes underlying most, if not all, higher cognitive competences when they result in judgments about the referents of these concepts. Theories of concepts attempt to describe the knowledge stored in concepts, the format of concepts, the cognitive processes that use concepts, the acquisition of concepts, and the localization of concepts in the brain. By doing so, they can explain the properties of people's higher cognitive competences. Alternative characterizations of concepts by Prinz, Barsalou, and Dennett are criticized.

Theory of Mind (ToM), originally defined as the ability to consider the human mind as a generator of representations, is a cornerstone in social interactions because it corresponds to developing an awareness of how mental states (beliefs, desires, wishes, etc.) govern the behavior of self and others. This chapter explores relations between ToM and teaching-learning. It begins by discussing these relationships and presenting the state-of-the-art findings about ToM in deaf children. It then discusses how cognitive processes underlying ToM may differ among deaf children, and in deaf children compared to hearing children. The chapter presents ways in which some key aspects of hearing children's ToM might differ from researchers' conceptions about ToM development. This leads to a discussion of learning by deaf students and the need for teachers to be conscious of different learning styles.

This chapter proposes a speech production architecture in which all speech occurs within two larger frameworks called wrappers. The overall wrapper is expression; the next wrapper is prosody. Expression and prosody are defined as used in this book. Within a prosodic framework, planning and rendering (carrying out the plan to speak by moving the articulators) is presented. Cognitive and physical processes and their phonological and phonetic correlates are discussed.

This chapter discusses a host of psychological phenomena and their supporting mechanisms that favor status quo maintenance. These phenomena are placed into two loose clusters: those that describe cognitive processes and those that describe evaluative processes. The chapter argues these processes work in tandem, providing existing states with a psychological advantage; relative to alternatives, the status quo requires less effort, intention, control, and/or awareness for support and/or endorsement. As such, status quo maintenance is more ubiquitous and subtle than often believed.

This chapter reviews recent findings from studies on cognitive processing during sleep using two distinct approaches. It first describes a series of studies that used standard cognitive testing to determine how these basic cognitive processes are altered during various sleep stages. It then describes a second set of experiments which used actual dream reports to investigate the nature of cognitive processing during sleep. The chapter concludes with a model of dream construction that suggests the nature of the relationship between dreaming and off-line memory reprocessing.

This chapter summarizes a decade or more of research on the functions of the frontal lobes through the study of patients with pathology restricted to that region. It begins with one assumption: there is no unitary frontal lobe process, no central executive. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that different cognitive processes can be related to distinct regions of the frontal lobes. A very brief review of the relation of less cognitive human abilities, such as humor appreciation and theory of mind, provides some support that even higher human abilities depend on the interaction of more distinct localizable functions. The chapter then moves from the location of distinct processes to the interaction of these in networks and cognitive systems. Finally, it presents the implications of the review.

Dynamical systems thinking can provide metaphors that help ask new questions, generate new experimental paradigms and measures, and lead to new kinds of explanations. This chapter reviews dynamical systems theory (DST) as a set of concepts that formalizes such metaphors and thus becomes a scientific theory of considerable rigor. It considers five concepts: (1) Behavioral patterns resist change; that is, they are stable. This may be mathematically characterized by considering behavioral patterns as the attractor states of a dynamical system. (2) Behavioral change is brought about by a loss of stability. (3) Representations possess stability properties, as well, and can be understood as the attractor states of dynamic fields, that is, of continuous distributions of neuronal activation. (4) Cognitive processes emerge from instabilities of dynamic fields. (5) Learning occurs as changes in behavioral or field dynamics that shift the behavioral and environmental context in which these instabilities occur.

This chapter seeks to provide a kind of thinking about behavioral processes in rats that is characteristic of a cognitive approach and to provide some examples of experimental paradigms that have been used with some success to probe the nature of the rat's representations of its environment and its own actions. The examples are drawn mainly from recent work on attentional and memory processes, two of the traditional subject matters in cognitive science.

There are increasingly good reasons to doubt that the ‘classical’ representational theory of mind (RTM) language of thought (LOT) computational theory of mind (CTM) model is anything like a general account of how the cognitive mind works; and the magnitude of our current bewilderment about certain aspects of cognitive processes is the measure of the failure. This is not, of course, a cause for lamentation. A lot of our best science has been learned from the falsification of prima facie interesting ideas: it's a matter of figuring out where you are by finding out where you aren't. Just as Holmes says: ‘When you've eliminated all the impossibles, what's left must be the truth’. Assuming, of course, that there is anything left, and assuming that there is only one of them. This chapter is about what seems to have gone wrong.

Written language provides a means to transform speech into durable, static visual representations, allowing communication of specific thoughts and ideas to transcend time and place. As literate adults, we tend to take for granted our ability to receive and transmit written messages, but this skill requires the integrated function of cognitive, linguistic, and sensorimotor processes that are vulnerable to the effects of acquired brain damage. The goal of neuropsychological assessment of writing is to examine the status of the component processes necessary to support written communication. An understanding of the nature and degree of impairment to specific processes, as well as the availability of residual abilities, provides guidance for the design and implementation of a behavioural rehabilitation plan that is appropriate for a given individual. This chapter provides an overview of the cognitive processes that support writing and a description of the major acquired agraphia syndromes, followed by a review of evidence-based treatment approaches for these writing impairments.

The ubiquitous phrase “thinking outside of the box” implies that creative thought requires breaking through the walls that constrain ideas. Indeed, it is much easier and cognitively efficient to solve problems by retrieving known, established solutions (i.e., to follow the path of least resistance). Deviations from known solution paths can require significant time and cognitive effort. What the conditions are that force people from retrieving well-established solution paths and the implications of these deviations on both the outcome of a creative task and the person's experience during it are the focus of this chapter. While the importance of constraints in creative tasks has been identified by researchers in psychology, few studies had examined how constraints influence individuals' cognitive processes, their subjective experiences, and the outcomes produced in these situations. An investigation of all of these aspects of creativity is especially critical in a consumer context as manufacturers and retailers vie to develop and sell products that satisfy consumers' apparent demand for creative experiences and unique outcomes. The research presented in this chapter focuses on the influence of input and time constraints, both common contextual factors in consumption situations, on two critical aspects of creative tasks: the outcomes produced and the experience itself. Paradoxically, this chapter finds that input constraints encourage more creative processing, provided the individual is not under significant time constraints. However, operating under such constraints can lead to a less enjoyable creative experience.