Development weaves brains, bodies and environments into cognition

ABSTRACT

Understanding how and why human cognition has the properties it does is one of science’s fundamental questions. Current thinking in Cognitive Science has delineated two candidate approaches that differ in how they address the question of the relationship between sensory-motor and cognitive processes. In this paper, we add to this discussion by arguing that this question is properly phrased as a developmental question and that ultimately to understand the properties of human cognition we must ask how does human cognition come to have these properties. We conclude that because development weaves brains, bodies and environments into cognition, cognition is inexorably linked to processes of perceiving and acting and inseparable from them.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognition
• development
• dynamic systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.