Contextual Cognition: The Invisible Sensus Communis of a Situated Mind

Abstract

In any given instant, human neurocognition engages in mutually constraining motor, cognitive, and social processes, which are in turn situated in a multifaceted and ever-changing frame. However, contemporary approaches to cognitive neuroscience have favored isolationist, atomistic views of mental skills, thus failing to account for these natural functional synergies. To better understand the situated mechanisms involved, this book introduces two empirically grounded models of relevant phenomena: contextual social cognition (the collection of psychological processes underlying context-dependent social behaviour) and action-language coupling (the integration of ongoing actions with movement-related verbal information). In both cases, we combine behavioral, neuroscientific, and neuropsychiatric evidence to forge a novel view of contextual influences on active, multi-domain processes. These theoretical formulations instantiate a promising and underexploited alternative to mainstream approaches in cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, they offer network-based accounts of multidimensional interactions among various experiential domains, thus capturing critical aspects of mind?s situated and integrative capacities. Moreover, we highlight our models? translational potential for the clinical field. Our focus is on diseases compromising social cognition (mainly illustrated by behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia) and motor skills (in particular, Parkinson?s disease). Crucially, by expounding the clinical implications of both proposals, we profit from a give-and-take between theory and practice to further test their descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Finally, we discuss the overarching epistemological implications of our framework. In particular, we set forth metatheoretical considerations regarding intercognition, the constant binding of processes triggered by environmental and body-internal sources. In sum, by integrating empirical evidence, translational considerations, and epistemological reflections, this book aims to tap into some of the key mechanisms which confer a sensus communis to our ongoing experience.