Coey Charles A, Varlet Manuel, Richardson Michael J
Department of Psychology, Perceptual-Motor Dynamics Laboratory, CAP Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati OH, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2012 Jun 7;6:164. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00164. eCollection 2012.
Traditional theories of cognitive science have typically accounted for the organization of human behavior by detailing requisite computational/representational functions and identifying neurological mechanisms that might perform these functions. Put simply, such approaches hold that neural activity causes behavior. This same general framework has been extended to accounts of human social behavior via concepts such as "common-coding" and "co-representation" and much recent neurological research has been devoted to brain structures that might execute these social-cognitive functions. Although these neural processes are unquestionably involved in the organization and control of human social interactions, there is good reason to question whether they should be accorded explanatory primacy. Alternatively, we propose that a full appreciation of the role of neural processes in social interactions requires appropriately situating them in their context of embodied-embedded constraints. To this end, we introduce concepts from dynamical systems theory and review research demonstrating that the organization of human behavior, including social behavior, can be accounted for in terms of self-organizing processes and lawful dynamics of animal-environment systems. Ultimately, we hope that these alternative concepts can complement the recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and thereby provide opportunities to develop a complete and coherent account of human social interaction.
传统认知科学理论通常通过详细阐述必要的计算/表征功能并识别可能执行这些功能的神经机制来解释人类行为的组织。简单地说，这些方法认为神经活动导致行为。这个相同的一般框架已通过“共同编码”和“共同表征”等概念扩展到对人类社会行为的解释，并且最近许多神经学研究都致力于可能执行这些社会认知功能的脑结构。尽管这些神经过程无疑参与了人类社会互动的组织和控制，但有充分的理由质疑它们是否应被赋予解释上的首要地位。相反，我们提出，要充分理解神经过程在社会互动中的作用，需要将它们适当地置于其具身-嵌入约束的背景中。为此，我们引入动力系统理论的概念，并回顾相关研究，这些研究表明，包括社会行为在内的人类行为组织可以根据动物-环境系统的自组织过程和规律动力学来解释。最终，我们希望这些替代概念能够补充认知神经科学的最新进展，从而为全面、连贯地解释人类社会互动提供机会。
