Empirical Evidence for Extended Cognitive Systems

Prospects for Augmenting Team Interactions with Real-Time Coordination-Based Measures in Human-Autonomy Teams

Complex work in teams requires coordination across team members and their technology as well as the ability to change and adapt over time to achieve effective performance. To support such complex interactions, recent efforts have worked toward the design of adaptive human-autonomy teaming systems that can provide feedback in or near real time to achieve the desired individual or team results. However, while significant advancements have been made to better model and understand the dynamics of team interaction and its relationship with task performance, appropriate measures of team coordination and computational methods to detect changes in coordination have not yet been widely investigated. Having the capacity to measure coordination in real time is quite promising as it provides the opportunity to provide adaptive feedback that may influence and regulate teams' coordination patterns and, ultimately, drive effective team performance. A critical requirement to reach this potential is having the theoretical and empirical foundation from which to do so. Therefore, the first goal of the paper is to review approaches to coordination dynamics, identify current research gaps, and draw insights from other areas, such as social interaction, relationship science, and psychotherapy. The second goal is to collate extant work on feedback and advance ideas for adaptive feedback systems that have potential to influence coordination in a way that can enhance the effectiveness of team interactions. In addressing these two goals, this work lays the foundation as well as plans for the future of human-autonomy teams that augment team interactions using coordination-based measures.

Abduction and Deduction in Dynamical Cognitive Science

This paper reviews the recent history of a subset of research in dynamical cognitive science, in particular that subset that allies itself with the sciences of complexity and casts cognitive systems as interaction dominant, noncomputational, and nonmodular. I look at this history in the light of C.S. Peirce's understanding of scientific reasoning as progressing from abduction to deduction to induction. In particular, I examine the development of a controversy concerning the use of the interaction dominance of human cognitive systems as an explanation of the ubiquitous 1/f noise, multifractality, and complexity matching in human behavior.

Cognitive Science Progresses Toward Interactive Frameworks

Despite its many twists and turns, the arc of cognitive science generally bends toward progress, thanks to its interdisciplinary nature. By glancing at the last few decades of experimental and computational advances, it can be argued that-far from failing to converge on a shared set of conceptual assumptions-the field is indeed making steady consensual progress toward what can broadly be referred to as interactive frameworks. This inclination is apparent in the subfields of psycholinguistics, visual perception, embodied cognition, extended cognition, neural networks, dynamical systems theory, and more. This pictorial essay briefly documents this steady progress both from a bird's eye view and from the trenches. The conclusion is one of optimism that cognitive science is getting there, albeit slowly and arduously, like any good science should.

Alternative Object Use in Adults and Children: Embodied Cognitive Bases of Creativity

Why does one need creativity? On a personal level, improvisation with available resources is needed for online coping with unforeseen environmental stimuli when existing knowledge and apparent action strategies do not work. On a cultural level, the exploitation of existing cultural means and norms for the deliberate production of novel and valuable artifacts is a basis for cultural and technological development and extension of human action possibilities across various domains. It is less clear, however, how creativity develops and how exactly one arrives at generating new action possibilities and producing multiple alternative action strategies using familiar objects. In this theoretical paper, we first consider existing accounts of the creative process in the Alternative Uses Task and then present an alternative interpretation, drawing on sociocultural views and an embodied cognition approach. We explore similarities between the psychological processes underlying the generation of new uses in the Alternative Uses Task and children’s pretend play. We discuss possible cognitive mechanisms and speculate how the generation of new action possibilities for common objects in pretend play can be related to adults’ ability to generate new action strategies associated with object use. Implications for creativity development in humans and embodied artificial agents are discussed.

Turing's cascade instability supports the coordination of the mind, brain, and behavior

Turing inspired a computer metaphor of the mind and brain that has been handy and has spawned decades of empirical investigation, but he did much more and offered behavioral and cognitive sciences another metaphor-that of the cascade. The time has come to confront Turing's cascading instability, which suggests a geometrical framework driven by power laws and can be studied using multifractal formalism and multiscale probability density function analysis. Here, we review a rapidly growing body of scientific investigations revealing signatures of cascade instability and their consequences for a perceiving, acting, and thinking organism. We review work related to executive functioning (planning to act), postural control (bodily poise for turning plans into action), and effortful perception (action to gather information in a single modality and action to blend multimodal information). We also review findings on neuronal avalanches in the brain, specifically about neural participation in body-wide cascades. Turing's cascade instability blends the mind, brain, and behavior across space and time scales and provides an alternative to the dominant computer metaphor.