Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ New Cornell Study Suggests That Mental Processing is Continuous, Not Like a Computer

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
As I said in my recent paper, the trend in research is away from cognitivist theories of mind. "For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols -- like a digital computer," said Spivey. "More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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