In this series, I summarized major arguments in A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology. My exploration of the uses of psychology has emphasized the explanatory roles it fulfills within broader cultural projects. Briefly, empirical psychology seeks mechanistic explanations which then filter into popular uses of psychology, and discursive clinical …
Embodied (sensorimotor) theories of cognition lead us to expect that subtle differences in motor skills accumulated over a lifetime of experience will impact an individual’s temporal coordination of motor and conceptual information, the automatic interpersonal mimicry of motor behaviors, and the neural representation of objects and events. Given this embodied framework, …
Is it true that “Movement Matters” for learning? We focus on how people learn with manipulatives, which are physical objects that can be used to represent concepts.
Consider the many ways you might teach a child to do something new, like how to turn off the faucet after they are done washing their hands. Perhaps you tell them to turn the knob to the right, as far as it’ll go, until no more water is dripping from …
We are pleased to share the news that friend of the Brains community, Nicholas Shea, has been awarded the 2020 Lakatos Award for their open access book Representation In Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2018). You can download a free PDF copy of the book at http://bit.ly/RepnCognSci Shea will receive …
There are good reasons to suppose that the infant’s innate disposition for informational sensitivity is grounded on a representational mind. As Kim Sterelny (1991, p. 21) writes: «there can be no informational sensitivity without representation. To learn about the world and to use what we learn to act in new …
Gergely and Csibra argue that natural pedagogy has been selected during hominid evolution to ensure 1) fast and efficient acquisition and intergenerational transfer of cultural knowledge, and 2) overcoming the hard social environmental conditions of «cognitive opacity» for human cultural forms. Pedagogical cues work as an “interpretation switch”, signalling to …
