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Welcome to our new blog, 'Cognition Without Borders'! Sabrina and I are excited to be here and we hope you'll enjoy what we have in store for you over the coming weeks and months. I thought it might be nice to begin with a brief introduction to the topics we'll be covering and why we're interested in these.
'Cognition Without Borders'
What does the blog title mean? It's what happens when you take the idea of embodied cognition seriously. Put (very) briefly, the kind of embodiment we endorse suggests that cognition is not 'all in the head'. Human behaviour (and that of all animals) does not simply come from our brains giving orders to our bodies as we wander around the world. Our brains are interesting, and very busy, but they are not solely responsible for our behaviour. We are connected to our environment in very important ways, and we use our bodies and our environments to help solve cognitive tasks, all day, every day. For example, skilled actions like catching a ball are not controlled by programmes stored in the nervous system. Instead, we use perception to couple ourselves to what's happening in the world, which we then actively use to solve part of the problem at hand. In the case of catching the ball, if we move so as to make the world look a certain way, this lets us move to be in the right place at the right time to catch the ball.
Cognition, therefore, is not 'what happens inside the head' - cognition is the activity of the brain and also the body in the world, and some of the 'work' of cognition is done by the body and world. Cognition emerges from this extended, embodied system, and if we wish to understand cognition fully (as we psychologists say we do) we need to start looking more widely than just the brain for answers.
What to expect from this blog
Sabrina and I will tackle a wide variety of questions that pop out of taking this kind of embodied view of cognition seriously. We'll introduce you to James and Eleanor Gibson (the most important psychologists you've likely never heard of) and the ecological approach they developed to answer fundamental questions in embodied perception and development. We'll explain why embodied cognition is not what you think it is, and why this matters. We'll talk about how embodied cognition leads us to think very differently about what the brain is up to, and how we can use these ideas to understand perception, action and (the hard one!) language. Along the way we'll talk about recent research that takes this approach and review some of the better books in the area.
Sabrina and I also blog (in more theoretical detail) on all these topics at Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists and you can follow us on Twitter, @PsychScientists. I maintain a lab blog here where my students and I blog about our research. We love to hear from readers about what you think, and we look forward to your comments!
