Living in the modern world entails substantial interaction with information technologies. The ways in which people interact with these devices—how they enter into daily practices—has become so profound that they qualify as technologies of the extended mind. This chapter distinguishes between these devices acting as cognitive support versus becoming bona fide extensions of our minds, and argues...
Theories of embodied cognition propose that perception is shaped by sensory stimuli and by the actions of the organism. Following sensorimotor contingency theory, the mastery of lawful relations between own behavior and resulting changes in sensory signals, called sensorimotor contingencies, is constitutive of conscious perception. Sensorimotor contingency theory predicts that, after training,...
Rapid advances in neuroscience have sparked numerous efforts to study the neural correlate of consciousness. Prominent subjects include higher sensory area, distributed assemblies bound by synchronization of neuronal activity and neurons in specific cortical laminae. In contrast, it has been suggested that the quality of sensory awareness is determined by systematic change of afferent signals...