Action Switching in Brain-Body-Environment Systems

Abstract

In recent years, the cognitive sciences have been converging upon an integrated perspective, a perspective that reframes behavior and cognition as a special type of self-organization that arises through the nonlinear, distributed interactions between brain, body and environment (abbreviated BBE). The BBE perspective has been separately developed by multiple lines of research such as the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998), distributed cognition (Hutchins 2000), embodied cognition (Clark 1998), enactive cognition (No{\.{e}} 2005; Thompson 2007; Varela et al. 1992) ), situated cognition (Clancey 1997; Hutchins 1995), and the dynamical approaches to cognition (Beer 1995b; Thelen and Smith 1996; Kelso 1995; Port and van Gelder 1995). These different theories all emphasize different elements of the BBE; either the body, or the environment, or the temporal element. But their different theories are friendly to each other and can be brought together into a broader, integrated perspective. By bringing focus to all of the relevant components and their interactions, cognitive systems are transformed into seemingly self-organizing systems, in which behavior and cognition become a dynamical process that unfolds through distributed interactions (Kelso 1995; Maturana and Varela 1980; Thompson 2007).