Wayne David Christensen

University of Barcelona | UB · Philosophy

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children's understanding of this aspect, we...

We investigate flexibility and problem solving in skilled action. We conducted a field study of mountain bike riding that required a learner rider to cope with major changes in technique and equipment. Our results indicate that relatively inexperienced individuals can be capable of fairly complex 'on-the-fly' problem solving which allows them to co...

Expert sport performers cope with a multitude of visual information to achieve precise skill goals under time stress and pressure. For example, a major league baseball or cricket batter must read opponent variations in actions and ball flight paths to strike the ball in less than a second. Crowded playing schedules and training load restrictions to...

The nature of the cognition-motor interface has been brought to prominence by Butterfill & Sinigaglia (2014), who argue that the representations employed by the cognitive and motor systems should not be able to interact with each other. Here I argue that recent empirical evidence concerning the interface contradicts several of the assumptions incor...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00520-7

Interpersonal problems are a core symptom of borderline personality disorder (BPD). In particular, patients with BPD exhibit a heightened sensitivity to cues of acceptance or rejection in their relationships. The current study investigated the psychological processes underpinning this heightened responsiveness. In a between-subjects design, we impl...

The nature of the cognition-motor interface has been brought to prominence by Butterfill & Sinigaglia (2014), who argue that the representations employed by the cognitive and motor systems should not be able to interact with each other. Here I argue that recent empirical evidence concerning the interface contradicts several of the assumptions incor...

I focus on problems defining skill and a core theoretical dispute over whether skilled action is largely automatic or consciously controlled. The dominant view in philosophy and psychology has been that skills are automatic, but an emerging body of work suggests that conscious cognition plays a significant role.

In keeping with the dominant view that skills are largely automatic, the standard view of memory systems distinguishes between a representational declarative system associated with cognitive processes and a performance-based procedural system. The procedural system is thought to be largely responsible for the performance of well-learned skilled act...

Using episodic memory to gauge implicit and/or indeterminate social commitments—ADDENDUM - Volume 42 - John Michael, Marcell Székely, Wayne Christensen

In discussing Mahr & Csibra's (M&C's) observations about the role of episodic memory in grounding social commitments, we propose that episodic memory is especially useful for gauging cases of implicit commitment and cases in which the content of a commitment is indeterminate. We conclude with some thoughts about how commitment may relate to the evo...

We present a synthetic theory of skilled action which proposes that cognitive processes make an important contribution to almost all skilled action, contrary to influential views that many skills are performed largely automatically. Cognitive control is focused on strategic aspects of performance, and plays a greater role as difficulty increases. W...

The two systems theory developed by Apperly and Butterfill (2009; Butterfill & Apperly, 2013) is an influential approach to explaining the success of infants and young children on implicit false belief tasks. There is extensive empirical and theoretical work examining many aspects of this theory, but little attention has been paid to the way in whi...

Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sen...

There is a widespread view that well-learned skills are automated, and that attention to the performance of these skills is damaging because it disrupts the automatic processes involved in their execution. This idea serves as the basis for an account of choking in high pressure situations. On this view, choking is the result of self-focused attenti...

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this ap...

In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments i...

Normativity is widely regarded as being naturalistically problematic. Teleosemantic theories aimed to provide a naturalistic grounding for the normativity of mental representation in biological proper function, but have been subject to a variety of criticisms and would in any case provide only a thin naturalist platform for grounding normativity mo...

B eginning with the problem of integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives on moral cognition, we argue that the various disciplines have an inter-est in developing a common conceptual framework for moral cognition research. We discuss issues arising in the other chapters in this volume that might serve as focal points for future investigation an...

“There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping”, writes Hubert Dreyfus, “for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body”.1 Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena...

Sterelny’s Thought in a Hostile World ([2003]) presents a complex, systematically structured theory of the evolution of cognition centered on a concept of decoupled representation. Taking Godfrey-Smith’s ([1996]) analysis of the evolution of behavioral flexibility as a framework, the theory describes increasingly complex grades of representation be...

review of Roger Chaffin, Gabriela Imreh & Mary Crawford, Practicing Perfection: Memory and Piano Performance. New York: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. ISBN 0-80-582610-6 (hardcover) $180.00.

Cognitive neuroscience has come to be viewed as the flagship of the cognitive sciences and is transforming our understanding of the nature of mind. In this paper we survey several research fields in cognitive neuroscience (lateralization, neuroeconomics, and cognitive control) and note that they are making rapid progress on fundamental issues. Late...

The general structure of Steels & Belpaeme’s (S&B’s) central premise is appealing. Theoretical stances that focus on one type of mechanism miss the fact that multiple mechanisms acting in concert can provide convergent constraints for a more robust capacity than any individual mechanism might achieve acting in isolation. However, highlighting the s...

‘Forty-two! ’ yelled Loonquawl. ‘Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years work?’ ‘I checked it very thoroughly, ’ said the computer, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.’ ‘But it was the Great Question! The Ultima...

In this paper, I discuss connections between self-directedness, integration and higher cognition. I present a model of self-directedness as a basis for approaching higher cognition from a situated cognition perspective. According to this model increases in sensorimotor complexity create pressure for integrative higher order control and learning pro...

Standard approaches to cognition emphasise structures (representations and rules) much more than processes, in part because this appears to be necessary to capture the normative features of cognition. However the resultant models are inflexible and face the problem of computational intractability. I argue that the ability of real world cognition to...

Tim van Gelder, following Brandom, Collins and others, uses the so-called wide content of capacities which support social, norm governed activities, such as language, to argue for their anti-natural, abstract, but socially instituted nature and thence for the failure of the entire traditional mind-body discussion as ill-posed. We argue that his for...

this paper we outline a theory of normative functionality aimed at understanding the nature of adaptive systems as globally structured, integrated systems. More specifically, the account is concerned with understanding the process relations constitutive of such systems. The explanatory agenda of this approach includes the following questions: . How...

Donald Campbell has long advocated a naturalist epistemology based on a general selection theory, with the scope of knowledge restricted to vicarious adaptive processes. But being a vicariant is problematic because it involves an unexplained epistemic relation. We argue that this relation is to be explicated organisationally in terms of the regulat...

This paper argues for a radically different approach to normative function than the dominant etiological account, an approach with a broader explanatory agenda. Concepts of biological function address two related but distinct issues: understanding biological organisms as complex organized systems, and understanding the way in which parts have come...

In this paper, we outline a theory of the nature of self-directed agents. What is distinctive about self-directed agents is their ability to anticipate interaction processes and to evaluate their performance, and thus their sensitivity to context. They can improve performance relative to goals, and can, in certain instances, construct new goals. We...

This paper argues for a radically different approach to normative function than the dominant

This paper outlines a positive naturalistic account of the emergence of norms, intentionality and intelligence from the evolutionary elaboration of organisational capacities which are fundamental to biological life forms. Correlatively, it provides a critique of the currently dominant selectionist teleosemantic account of these features. According...

This paper outlines an interactivist-constructivist theory of autonomy as the basic organisational form of life, and the role we see it playing in a theory of embodied cognition. We distinguish our concept of autonomy from autopoiesis, which does not emphasise interaction and openness. We then present the basic conceptual framework of the I-C appro...

Donald Campbell has long advocated a naturalist epistemology based on a general selection theory, with the scope of knowledge restricted to vicarious adaptive processes. But being a vicariant is problematic because it involves an unexplained epistemic relation. We argue that this relation is to be explicated organizationally in terms of the regulat...

It appears to be a straightforward implication of distributed cognition principles that there is no integrated executive control system (e.g. Brooks 1991, Clark 1997). If distributed cognition is taken as a credible paradigm for cognitive science this in turn presents a challenge to volition because the concept of volition assumes integrated inform...

Part I [sections 2–4] draws out the conceptual links between modern conceptions of teleology and their Aristotelian predecessor, briefly outlines the mode of functional analysis employed to explicate teleology, and develops the notion of cybernetic organisation in order to distinguish teleonomic and teleomatic systems. Part II is concerned with arr...

This paper outlines a positive naturalistic account of the emergence of norms, intentionality and intelligence from the evolutionary elaboration of organisational capacities which are fundamental to biological life forms. Correlatively, it provides a critique of the currently dominant selectionist teleosemantic account of these features. According...

This paper outlines a theory of anticipation in autonomous systems. Our account of autonomous systems is designed to model the basic organisational form of life. Anticipation is an integral feature of the autonomy account, and is an important foundational concept for an interactivist-constructivist (I-C) theory of embodied intelligent agents. We pr...