Several recent 'wide' perspectives on cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed—are only partially relevant because cognitive science has already moved beyond them toward integrated mechanistic explanations that include internal submechanisms, interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and the environment. These wide perspectives function as research heuristics for building such explanations. The argument draws on developments in the study of mindreading and debates on emotions, showing that cognitive neuroscience has undergone a silent mechanistic revolution, turning from binary oppositions toward integration with the broader field.
A long-standing view in cognitive science holds that higher thinking uses abstract, amodal mental representations and brain regions separate from sensorimotor areas. Over recent decades, many researchers have instead argued that cognition is fundamentally grounded in sensorimotor activity and bodily constraints, a position called embodied cognition (EC). However, Goldinger et al. (2016) challenged EC's applicability, asserting that some of its assumptions are unacceptable and others offer nothing new, particularly for experimental psychology. This paper agrees with some criticisms—such as that radical embodiment rejecting mental representation is a dead end—but argues that the authors' methodological perspective on EC is inadequate.
Hearing voices is not limited to psychotic disorders but also occurs in the general population, often as perceptions of supernatural beings. In a preregistered experiment, participants completed a signal detection task where expectations about the number of voices present influenced their response bias: expecting fewer voices led to a more conservative strategy, while expecting more led to a more liberal one. Adding sensory noise amplified these effects. The findings indicate that voice detection relies on expectations, especially when sensory data are unreliable, shedding light on predictive processes underlying voice-hearing experiences.