Cognition

This is the third volume of the new conference series Design Computing and Cognition (DCC) that takes over from and subsumes the successful series Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID) published by Kluwer (now Springer) since 1992. The AID volumes have become standard reference texts for the field. It is expected that the DCC volumes will perform the same role. Design Computing and Cognition’04 and Design Computing and Cognition’06 both edited by John S Gero, were published by Springer.

Dogs are a valued part of millions of households worldwide. They also serve many functions in human societies from herding livestock to detecting drugs, explosives, or illegal wildlife to providing physical assistance or emotional support to those in need. Yet, in terms of behavior and cognition, dogs have only become a serious subject of scientific study in the last 20 years. Similarly, we have recently witnessed a sharp increase in studies of canine-human interaction, exploring the motivational, emotional, cognitive, physiological, and neural mechanisms of dogs on human psychology and well-being. This book is a collection of chapters stemming from the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, which focused on Canine Cognition and the Human Bond. The primary goal of this symposium was to bring together researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and anthropology to delve deeper into the canine-human bond. These chapters describe the current state of knowledge from international experts in the fields of canine cognition and canine-human interaction. Bridging these two areas can help us better understand the canine-human bond, potentially improving the lives of both dogs and people.

Cognition Beyond the Brain challenges neurocentrism by advocating a systemic view of cognition based on investigating how action shapes the experience of thinking. The systemic view steers between extended functionalism and enactivism by stressing how living beings connect bodies, technologies, language and culture. Since human thinking depends on a cultural ecology, people connect biologically-based powers with extended systems and, by so doing, they constitute cognitive systems that reach across the skin. Biological interpretation exploits extended functional systems.

This edited work draws on a range of contributed expertise to trace the fortune of an Aristotelian thesis over different periods in the history of philosophy. It presents eight cases of direct or indirect challenges to the Aristotelian passive account of human cognition, taking the reader from late antiquity to the 20th century. Chapters analyse the (often indirect) effect of Aristotle’s account of cognition on later periods. In his influential De anima, Aristotle describes human cognition, both sensitive and intellectual, as the reception of a form in the cognitive subject.

The papers in this volume are from the Ninth International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition (DCC’20) held virtually at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. They represent the state-of-the-art of research and development in design computing and design cognition including the increasingly active area of design cognitive neuroscience. They are of particular interest to design researchers, developers and users of advanced computation in designing as well as to design educators.

This book presents a theoretical critical appraisal of the Mechanistic Theory of Human Cognition (MTHC), which is one of the most popular major theories in the contemporary field of cognitive science.