4e cognition

Workshop in Evolution and the Embodied Mind: The biological roots of 4E Cognition

City: Donostia-San Sebastián (Spain).

Date: 12, 13 & 14 July, 2019.

Venue: Ignacio María Barriola Building (Elhuyar Square, 1), University of the Basque Country.

This workshop aims to gather researchers in Evolution and 4E Cognition in order to evaluate which are the complementarities and tensions between these two approaches. The topics of the workshop will include (although will not be restricted to) the following ones:

  1. Minimal cognition from a 4E perspective
  2.  Embodied and situated approaches to the evolution of cognition
  3.  The role of sociality in cognitive evolution from a 4E perspective

Unfortunately, there is no extra place for speakers, but do not hesitate to contact them for joining as attendants. There will be a great deal of discussion and debate, and it will be great to have an audience willing to engage into these topics. If you plan to go, please, confirm your assistance by emailing them in the contact section of the website (provided below). The workshop is organized by Manuel Heras-Escribano and Ezequiel Di Paolo (IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, EHU-UPV) and generously funded by the BBVA Foundation through the 2018 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators entitled “La filosofía de las affordances: los orígenes ecológicos, evolutivos y sociales de la cognición [AFFORDEVOCOG]”

For more information, visit: https://evolutionandtheembodiedmind.wordpress.com/

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Simposio Cognición 4E UAEM

Estimados colegas, 

El año pasado publicamos un número especial en el journal Adaptive Behavior alrededor de las investigaciones en 4E Cognition (cognición corporeizada, incrustada, enactiva, extendida) en México: Spotlight on 4E Cognition Research in Mexico 

https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=Spotlight+on+4E+Cognition+Research+in+Mexico&SeriesKey=adba

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712318791633

Con el afán de darle una continuidad a este esfuerzo y seguir difundiendo el interés en estas investigaciones, los invitamos a participar en el Simposio 4E Cognition, que se llevará a cabo en el marco del 5to Coloquio Internacional de Ciencias Cognitivas, del 25 al 27 de septiembre del 2019 en la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM, Cuernavaca, México).

En este CFP, damos la bienvenida a propuestas de ponencias forzosamente relacionadas con las perspectivas 4E que incluyan, pero no se limiten a los siguientes temas:

– Embodied AI
– Cognición animal
– Continuidad entre vida y mente
– Interacción social
– Autonomía y agencia
– Perspectivas ecológicas a la cognición
– Teoría sensorio-motora
– Tesis de la mente extendida
– Interacción humano-computadora
– Neurociencia cognitiva
– Psicopatología

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CFP: Andy Clark and Critics Conference

Andy Clark and Critics

May 31, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Bayes Centre, University of Edinburgh
47 Potterrow, Edinburgh EH8 9BT, UK

Andy Clark is a leading philosopher and cognitive scientist. The fruits of his work have been diverse and lasting. They have had an extraordinary impact throughout philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. The extended mind hypothesis, the power of parallel distributed processing, the role of language in opening up novel paths for thinking, the flexible interface between biological minds and artificial technologies, the significance of representation in explanations of intelligent behaviour, the promise of the predictive processing framework to unify the cognitive sciences: these are just some of the ideas explored in Clark’s work that have been picked up by many researchers, and that have been contributing to intense debate across the sciences of mind and brain.

In occasion of the launch of the book “Andy Clark and his Critics” (OUP), a free one-day conference will be held at the University of Edinburgh on May the 31st 2019. The aim of the conference is to take an interdisciplinary, critical and forward-looking approach to Andy Clark’s work, bringing together researchers working in various fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Keynote talks will be given by Professors Barbara Webb (University of Edinburgh, Biorobotics), Jesse Prinz (CUNY, Philosophy), and Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh/Sussex, Philosophy). Three additional slots will be available for contributed papers.

Contributions from any area of philosophy or cognitive science related to Clark’s are welcome. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

    • The extended mind
    • 4E cognition
    • “Natural born cyborgs”, mind and technology
    • Language and “magic words”
    • Neurocomputational approaches to the mind
    • Relationships between these topics across Clark’s work

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CALL FOR PAPERS – Adaptive Behavior Special issue on “Post-cognitivist approaches to perceptual learning”

The classical cognitivist theory in cognitive science depicts perception as the result of information processing of sense data, which is transformed into a representation of the original information to be useful for the human mind. In the same vein, perceptual learning has been understood as an enrichment of sensations by representational mechanisms. In this view, the improvement in performance must be understood as the effect of a sophistication of computational algorithms entailing a better interpretation of sensory stimuli.

At the end of the 20th century, criticism against the cognitivist framework and its ideas of perception, cognition, and representation started to arise. Some of these arguments crystallized in alternative theories of cognition that offers an innovative way to understand perception and, consequently, perceptual learning.

The aim of this special issue is to document the theories and research that highlight a “4E cognition” approach to perceptual learning. The issue is focused on contributions from the current panorama of post-cognitivism with an emphasis on theories from the ecological, enactive and sensorimotor accounts.

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CALL FOR PAPERS – Adaptive Behavior Special issue: “Spotlight on 4E Cognition research in Colombia”

The last couple of decades in cognitive science have seen an increasing interest in the philosophical and scientific study of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition – so-called “4E cognition.” By now theories of 4E cognition have matured and a lot of evidence has been collected, which consequently has reshaped our understanding of the relationship between an agent’s brain, body, and its material and sociocultural world. Despite their differences in emphasis, the various strands of 4E cognition research are united in proposing that an agent’s cognitive activity is bodily mediated, especially by the context-sensitive deployment of sensorimotor capacities.

While these interdisciplinary approaches have largely been developed in Europe, the United States, and Australia, other regions have also been influenced by this growing movement and have started to advance their own original contributions. The aim of this special issue is, therefore, to put a spotlight on 4E cognition research from one such region, Colombia. It intends to do so in two respects: first, to explore the current state and breadth of the field in Colombia; second, to critically examine questions and problems elicited by this Colombian research, focusing on open challenges, with the aim to articulate more precise arguments for and against key claims advanced by 4E cognition research.

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Call for Posters and Registration: 4E Cognition and the Landscapes of Mental Disorder (5-6 April 2018, University of Exeter)

4E Cognition and the Landscapes of Mental Disorder
5 – 6 April 2018
University of Exeter

https://www.joelkrueger.com/4e-conference

How does the environment impact the dynamics of mental disorder? Whilst dominant biomedical approaches in psychopathology adopt brain-centered approaches to taxonomy, diagnosis, and treatment, emerging “4E” approaches in cognitive science look beyond the brain and portray minds as embodied , embedded , enacted, and extended. According to 4E cognition, minds are shaped by ongoing engagements with their material, social, and symbolic environments. This conference will explore the implications of 4E frameworks for understanding and treating mental disorder.

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CALL FOR PAPERS: RECONCEIVING COGNITION. Antwerp, June 27-29

The cognitive sciences, including its neural branches, continue to flourish. But what exactly is cognition? Recent developments in Embodied, Embedded and Enactive approaches to cognition, or E-cognition, have drawn attention to the numerous ways in which embodied situated interaction might be more intimately related to cognition than previously acknowledged. E-cognition is often taken to raise concerns about the tenability of a conception of cognition according to which in-the-head representational and/or computational mechanisms breathe cognitive life into organismic activities that would otherwise be mere bodily motion. But do E-factors call for a replacement or merely a reform of standard conceptions of cognition? And what exactly should be the new concept of cognition? Relatedly, the arrival of E-cognition leads to such questions as whether or not we need to reconsider the relation between cognition (including perception) and behavior, what explanations of cognition consist of, and what role the brain should play in such explanations.

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CALL FOR PAPERS – Adaptive Behavior

Special issue: “Spotlight on 4E Cognition research in Mexico”

The last couple of decades in cognitive science have seen an increasing interest in the philosophical and scientific study of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition – so-called “4E cognition.” By now theories of 4E cognition have matured and a lot of evidence has been collected, which consequently has reshaped our understanding of the relationship between an agent’s brain, body, and its material and sociocultural world. Despite their differences in emphasis, the various strands of 4E cognition research are united in proposing that an agent’s cognitive activity is bodily mediated, especially by the context-sensitive deployment of sensorimotor capacities.

While these interdisciplinary approaches have largely been developed in Europe, the United States, and Australia, other regions have also been influenced by this growing movement and have started to advance their own original contributions. The aim of this special issue is, therefore, to put a spotlight on 4E cognition research from one such region, Mexico. It intends to do so in two respects: first, to explore the current state and breadth of the field in Mexico; second, to critically examine questions and problems elicited by this Mexican research, focusing on open challenges, with the aim to articulate more precise arguments for and against key claims advanced by 4E cognition research.

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Seminar on enactivism and autopoiesis
This online seminar should be of interest to members of our group…
Dear ENSO Community,
It is my pleasure to kick off the 2017 year of ENSO Seminars with a talk by Mario Villalobos entitled Radical enactivism and autopoietic theory of cognition: Prospects for a full revolution in cognitive science. The abstract and other details of the talk can be found on the ENSO Seminar page for the event.
This will be the 13th Seminar in our series, taking place on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017, 8 p.m. UTC. (You can have this time automagically translated into your local time by visiting the aforementioned ENSO Seminar page.)
If you are interested in participating in the live session, please send me an email before or during the event and I will respond by sending you a link that you can follow to participate. For this link to work, you will need to have the browser plugin for google hangouts.
After this talk has been delivered, we will have had talks from nine different countries: Ireland, USA, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, Amsterdam, and Chile!
We are currently looking for volunteers for talks in March and later in the year. Please consider giving a talk — especially if you are hailing from a country that has not yet been represented!
I hope to see you there!
All the best,
Matthew & Marek