Embodied Cognitive Science: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Embodied Cognitive Science

The fields of linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology all contribute to the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science, which is the scientific study of the mind and the activities that occur within it. This research investigates the nature of cognition as well as its activities and functions. Cognitive scientists investigate intellect and behavior, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which the nervous system represents, processes, and transforms information. Language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion are all aspects of the mind that cognitive scientists are interested in studying. In order to gain a better understanding of these aspects of the mind, cognitive scientists draw from a variety of other academic disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neurology, and anthropology. The study that is typically performed in cognitive science covers a wide range of organizational levels, including learning and decision making, logic and planning, neural circuitry, and modular brain organization. One of the most important ideas in cognitive science is the idea that "thinking can be best understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Cognitive Science

Chapter 2: Perception

Chapter 3: Cognitive Model

Chapter 4: Embodied Cognitive Science

Chapter 5: Embodied Cognition

Chapter 6: Situated Cognition

Chapter 7: Distributed Cognition

Chapter 8: Enactivism

Chapter 9: Extended Mind Thesis

Chapter 10: Predictive Coding

(II) Answering the public top questions about embodied cognitive science.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of embodied cognitive science in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of embodied cognitive science' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of embodied cognitive science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Cognitive science

The fields of linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology all contribute to the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science, which is the scientific study of the mind and the activities that occur within it.

The study of cognitive science aims to comprehend and explicate the fundamentals of intelligence in the expectation that doing so would result in a deeper insight into both the workings of the mind and the process of education. The 1950s saw the beginning of an intellectual movement that came to be known as the cognitive revolution, which led to the development of the cognitive sciences.

In the 1950s, an intellectual movement that came to be known as the cognitive revolution laid the groundwork for what is now known as the cognitive sciences. Plato's Meno and Aristotle's De Anima are two examples of ancient Greek philosophical texts that can be used to trace the origins of cognitive science. Many modern philosophers, including Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Cabanis, Leibniz, and John Locke, rejected scholasticism despite the fact that most of them had never read Aristotle, and they were working with an entirely.

Early cyberneticists in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who attempted to comprehend the organizing principles of the mind are considered the forefathers of the present culture of cognitive science. This culture may be traced back to the early cyberneticists. McCulloch and Pitts constructed the earliest forms of what are now known as artificial neural networks, which are models of computation influenced by the structure of biological brain networks. McCulloch and Pitts' work is credited with laying the groundwork for the field of artificial neural networks.

The early development of the theory of computation and the digital computer in the 1940s and 1950s was another factor that contributed to the phenomenon.

Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann played an important part in the development of these ideas.

The contemporary computer system, or Von Neumann machine, would be of vital importance to the field of cognitive science, both in the sense that it is a metaphor for the mind, in addition to its use as a method of inquiry.

J.C.R. Licklider, who was working within the psychology department at the time and conducting experiments using computer memory as models for human cognition, is credited with being the first person to conduct cognitive science experiments at an academic institution. These experiments took place at the MIT Sloan School of Management, which was established by Licklider. Within the context of the history of psychology in the United States, Skinner's behaviorist paradigm was the standard at the time. The majority of psychologists have focused their attention on the functional linkages that exist between stimuli and response rather than postulating the existence of interior representations. Chomsky proposed that in order to explain language, we require a theory similar to generative grammar, which not only attributed internal representations but also defined the order in which they are structured.

Christopher Longuet-Higgins first used the term cognitive science in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which was concerned with the then-current state of artificial intelligence research. Longuet-Higgins first used the term cognitive science in 1973.

Research on artificial intelligence blossomed throughout the 1970s and early 1980s as more people gained access to computers. Researchers such as Marvin Minsky would write computer programs in languages such as LISP to attempt to formally characterize the steps that human beings went through, for example, in making decisions and solving problems, in the hope of better understanding human thought and also in the hope of creating artificial minds. This was done in the hopes of better understanding human thought and also of creating artificial minds. This methodology is referred to as symbolic AI..

Over time, the symbolic AI research program's limitations became obvious to everyone involved. For instance, it seemed impossible to list all of human knowledge in a format that could be utilized by a symbolic computer program. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the research paradigm of connectionism and neural networks gained popularity. According to this theory, which is frequently attributed to James McClelland and David Rumelhart, the mind can be seen as a collection of intricate connections, which are shown in the form of a layered network. Critics contend that symbolic models are superior at capturing some occurrences, and that connectionist models are frequently so complex that they offer very little in the way of explanatory value. Symbolic models are also favored by critics. The symbolic and connectionist models have been integrated in recent years, which has made it possible to make use of both modes of explanation.

One of the fundamental premises of cognitive science is that it is impossible to gain a comprehensive understanding of the mind and brain by focusing exclusively on one level of investigation. An illustration of this would be the challenge of remembering a phone number and then being able to get it later. Studying behavior by direct observation, also known as naturalistic observation, is one method that could be utilized in the quest to gain an understanding of this process. The accuracy of a person's response may be evaluated by showing them a phone number, then waiting a set amount of time before asking them to recall it; this would allow the researcher to determine how well the individual remembered the number. Studying the firings of individual neurons in the brain of a person as they are attempting to recall a phone number is yet another method that can be utilized to evaluate cognitive aptitude. Neither of these tests, on its own, would be sufficient to provide a comprehensive explanation of how the process of memorizing a phone number actually works. Even if the technology existed to map out every neuron in the brain in real time and it was known when each neuron fired, it would still be difficult to determine how a specific firing of neurons translated into the behavior that is being observed. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to have a grasp of the relationship that exists between these two levels. In his book titled The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco Varela makes the argument that the new sciences of the mind need to broaden their purview to incorporate both lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience. This can be provided by a functional level explanation of the process, according to the traditional cognitivist view of the world. An improved knowledge of the processes that take place in the brain to give rise to a specific behavior can be developed by the investigation of a given occurrence from a number of different levels. A well-known explanation of the three levels of analysis was provided by Marr:

The theory of computation, which outlines the objectives of the computing process; Giving a representation of the inputs and outputs as well as the algorithms that change one into the other; and Representation and Algorithms

The actual physical implementation of the algorithm and representation, also known as the hardware implementation.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that draws its contributors from a variety of other fields, such as psychology, neurology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology, and biology, amongst others. Cognitive scientists collaborate in the pursuit of understanding the mind and how it interacts with the world around it, much in the same way that researchers in other scientific fields do. The discipline considers itself to be compatible with the physical sciences, employs the scientific method in addition to simulation or modeling, and frequently compares the results of models with characteristics of human cognition. Along the same lines as the discipline of psychology, there are some who question if there is such a thing as a unified cognitive science. This has caused some scholars to prefer the term cognitive sciences in its plural form.

The concept that mental states and processes ought to be explained by their function – what they do – is known as the functionalist view of the mind. This viewpoint is held by the majority of people who consider themselves to be cognitive scientists, although it is not universally held. According to the multiple realizability account of functionalism, non-human systems like robots and computers can also be ascribed as possessing cognition. This is because the multiple realizability explanation allows for numerous ways in which cognition can be realized.

The phrase any form of mental process or structure that may be investigated in precise terms is what is meant by using the term cognitive in the context of cognitive science (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). This is a fairly broad conception, and it should not be mistaken with the way that cognitive is used in some traditions of analytic philosophy. In those traditions, cognitive refers exclusively to formal rules and truth-conditional semantics, whereas this conceptualization is far broader.

According to the OED's earliest entries for the word