Extending cognitive development into the body and the environmentExtending cognitive development into the body and the environment

Abstract

Development is a fundamentally embodied and enacted process, and human development cannot be understood outside of the embodied and extended context in which it takes place. A number of perspectives on the study of philosophy, perception, action and cognition in general have argued that cognition extends into the body and the environment. This paper provides a brief introduction on these perspectives, focusing on Gibson’s Ecological Perception and Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s Enactivism, as well as Clark’s Predictive Coding framework. Despite their differences, all three approaches share a focus on explaining cognition beyond the limits of the brain. Studying cognition as part of a general system that includes body and environment has important implications for the explanations generated by developmental psychology. The paper reviews and contextualizes research that engages with these implications, and provides suggestions for further research in the hope of stimulating systematic research into how body and environment shape cognition during development.