Trends in interdisciplinary studies

"Thinking with hands, eyes and things"

We invite you to participate in the conference devoted to extra-neural aspects of cognition as well as controversies related to them.
The claim that both the body and the environment are involved in our experience of the world is a banal claim. However, the point is what a great role in our mental processes is played by the whole body as well as its interactions with the environment. Cognition may involve integration with our tools, and we may even delegate some of our thinking to the environment. According to situated cognition and extended mind approaches, humans use elements of their environment as external components of cognitive processes or as means enabling them to reduce the complexity of the cognitive problems they face. The theory of affordances connects observers and environments in the act of cognition and cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective. Some researchers treat immune system as one of cognitive systems. Proponents of embodied cognitive science claim that aspects of the body beyond the brain play a significant role in cognition. Conversely, there are many critical voices in answer to the statements above. They say that cognitive-scientific results do not enough support thesis of embodied, distributed, extended and situated cognition. According to those critics, nonneuronal body and elements of environment play a peripheral role in cognitive processing.