Thesis (B.A. (Hons.)) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: E. Glynn Harmon. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-147) Also available from UMI.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of West Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 151 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on November 13, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Jeffrey Rouder. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation defends extended cognitivism: a recently emerging view in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science that claims that an individual's cognitive processes or states sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their brain or their skin to include states and processes in the world. I begin the defence of this thesis through a background discussion of several foundational issues in cognitive science: the general character of cognitive behaviour and cognitive processes, as well as the nature and role of representation as it is standardly taken to figure in cognition. I argue in favour of the widely held view that cognition is best characterised as involving information processing, and that carriers of information (i.e., representations) are ineliminable components of the most distinctively human and powerful forms of cognition. Against this background the dissertation argues in stages for successively stronger claims regarding the explanatory role of the external world in cognition. First to be defended is the claim that cognition is often embedded in one's environment. I develop this claim in terms of what I call 'parainformation': roughly, information that shapes how we tackle a cognitive task by enabling the extraction of task-relevant information. Proceeding then to the defence of extended cognitivism, I draw most significantly on the work of Andy Clark. In outline, and in general following Clark, it is argued that states and processes occurring beyond the skin of the cognitive agent sometimes play the same explanatory role as internal processes that unquestionably count as cognitive. I develop this claim in two versions of differing strength: firstly, in a general way without commitment to the representational character of extended cognition, and secondly in a specifically representational version with special attention to intentional explanation. Against each of these versions of extended cognitivism are ranged a number of criticisms and objections, many of which stem from the work of Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa. The dissertation examines these objections and rejects each of them in turn. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

The main purpose of this study was to investigate a theory of information storage and retrieval of a simple motor task as an explanation of the repetition effect (RE) in a 2-choice reaction time task. Subsidiary problems involved 1) examining the effect of inter-trial interval (ITI) on RE, 2) examining the effect of probability (P) of occurrence of an S-R pair on the RE and, 3) examining the interacting effects of ITI and P on the RE. The experimental task was a 2-choice reaction time (RT) task where the subject had to respond as quickly as possible by depressing a response key following the onset of a stimulus light. Two types of tasks were used: 1) self-paced, in which the ITI was approximately 380 msec. and, 2) discrete, in which the ITI was approximately 1600 msec. Each subject was tested in both tasks and on all three probability conditions (P = .33, .50, .67). Sixteen students and staff of the University of British Columbia served as subjects. The results, which were somewhat tenuous due to equipment malfunctions, indicated that there was no RE in either the discrete or serial CRT task. This suggested that there were no differences in the subjects response strategies in either the discrete or serial task. The model of motor memory retrieval was not supported by this investigation. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

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