4E cognition

“4E cognition” is a relatively new and growing field of interdisciplinary research. It advocates that cognition is shaped and structured by "dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments".

• 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended - New inspirations in education
  • Embodied: Cognition cannot be fully described in terms of abstract mental processes (i.e., in terms of representations). Rather, it must involve the entire body of the living system (brain and body).
  • Embedded: Cognition is not an isolated event separated from the agent’s ecological niche. Instead, it displays layers of co-determination with physical, social, and cultural aspects of the world.
  • Extended: Cognition is often offloaded into biological beings and non-biological devices to serve a variety of functions that would be impossible (or too difficult) to be achieved by only relying on the agent’s own mental processes.
  • Enactive: Cognition is conceived of as the set of meaningful relationships determined by an adaptive two-way exchange between the biological and phenomenological complexity of living creatures and the environments they inhabit and actively shape.