“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".
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.