Abstract
Distributed cognition is widely recognized as an approach to the study of all cognition. It identifies the distribution of cognitive processes between persons and technology, among people, and across time in the development of the social and material contexts for thinking. This paper suggests an ectoderm-centric perspective as the basis for distributed cognition, and in so doing redefines distributed cognition as the ability of an organism to interact with its environment for the purpose of satisfying its most basic physiological (internal and external) and social needs in order to survive and sustain itself. Underlying this ectoderm-centric perspective is a proposed theory of reactive and interactive learning.
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The author would like to acknowledge the helpful discussions, comments and suggestions by J. Fonseca that helped focus the content in several sections of this paper.
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Special Issue “Origins of Mind” edited by Liz Stillwaggon Swan and Andrew M. Winters
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Cárdenas-García, J.F. Distributed Cognition: An Ectoderm-Centric Perspective. Biosemiotics 6, 337–350 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9166-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9166-8