Edited Volumes

Favela, L. H., & Raja, V. (Eds.). (In progress). The dynamical hypothesis three decades later: Advances, critiques, and prospects for a dynamical cognitive science. Topics in Cognitive Science.

Our proposal aims to revisit and elucidate the roles dynamical systems theory (DST) is playing, or not, in the cognitive sciences since the “dynamical hypothesis” was first published in the mid-1990s. Various subfields within the cognitive sciences have since then embraced or rejected DST as an investigative tool or conceptual framework to understand cognition. It is arguable that the range of topics and applications of DST has grown with the years, including recently permeating the neural sciences in what has been called a “dynamical renaissance in neuroscience." With this special issue, we do not aim to endorse or reject the dynamical hypothesis, but rather to explore its landscape and prospects from different theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. The reason for proposing this special issue now has already been hinted at in the previous paragraph: We are witnessing a dynamical renaissance in the neural sciences that calls for a reassessment of the role and prospects of DST in the cognitive sciences writ large. Some of the conceptual issues that drove the dynamical hypothesis in the first place are still open—e.g., cognition as computation and mental/neural representations—and technological and methodological novelties in neuroscience are expanding the hypothesis to phenomena and scales previously unexplored. Additionally, the corpus of dynamical work in the behavioral sciences keeps advancing both in the individual and in the social realm. The conjunction of all these factors emphasizes the timeliness of our special issue topic.

Special issue articles:

Barack, D. The dynamicist landscape.
Barwich, A.-S., & Severino, G. J. The wire is not the territory: Understanding representational drift in olfaction with dynamical systems theory.
Beer, R. D. On the proper treatment of dynamics in cognitive science.
Chemero, A. Abduction and deduction in dynamical cognitive science.
Necaise, A., Han, J., Vrzáková, H., & Amon, M. J. Understanding collective human behavior in social media networks via the dynamical hypothesis: Applications to radicalization and conspiratorial beliefs.
Nguyen, T. D., Magaldino, C. M., Landfair, J. T., Amazeen, P. G., & Amazeen, E. L. From cognitive agents to cognitive systems: Theoretical, methodological, and empirical developments of van Gelder’s (1998) “dynamical hypothesis.”
Paxton, A. The dynamical hypothesis in situ: Challenges and opportunities for a dynamical social approach to interpersonal coordination.
Raczaszek-Leonardi. What dynamic approaches have taught us about cognition and what they have not: On values in motion and the importance of replicable forms.
van Eijndhoven, K., Wiltshire, T. J., Halgas, E. A., & Gevers, J. M. P. A methodological framework to study change in team cognition under the dynamical hypothesis.
Wallot, S., Irmer, J. P., Tschense, M., Kuznetsov, N., Højlund, A., & Dietz, M. Multivariate methods for dynamic system analysis: A generalized variance approach to multivariate detrended fluctuation analysis.

Commentaries:

Gorman, J. C. Simultaneous hypotheses in cognitive agents: Commentary on Paxton, Necaise et al., and the dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science.
Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Mangalam, M. Ball don’t lie: Commentary on Chemero (2024) and Wallot et al. (2024).
Spivey, M. J. Team cognition research is transforming cognitive science.

Favela, L. H. (Guest Editor). (2019). Innovative dynamical approaches to cognitive systems. Special issue of Cognitive Systems Research.

During the past thirty years, dynamical theories and methods have been increasingly imported into investigations of cognitive systems. From the Haken-Kelso-Bunz model to the work of ecological psychologists to explain control and coordination in terms of dissipative structures, early emphases on the dynamics of cognition focused on macroscale whole-animal and animal-environment systems. More recent research has begun to emphasize microscale dynamics of neural networks and single neuron activity. Dynamical approaches have often supplemented more widespread frameworks such as connectionist and computational-representational theories of cognition. Conversely, some have argued that dynamics-focused frameworks can replace more traditional computational and representational approaches. In this way, dynamic-centered frameworks have guided innovative new ways of thinking about cognition, including embodied, extended, distributed, and other non-brain-centric conceptions of cognition. There is no doubt that dynamical theories and methods have proven their utility across scales of investigation into cognitive systems. This special issue of Cognitive Systems Research will feature recent work in dynamical approaches to cognitive systems. In particular, this issue aims to showcase recent theoretical and methodological innovations in research on various aspects of cognitive systems and across a range of spatial and temporal scales.

Special issue articles:

Favela, L. H. Editor's introduction: Innovative dynamical approaches to cognitive systems.
Amazeen, P. G. From physics to social interactions: Scientific unification via dynamics.
Amon, M. J., Pavlov, O. C., & Holden, J. G. Synchronization and fractal scaling as foundations for cognitive control.
Dale, R., & Bhat, H. S. Equations of mind: Data science for inferring nonlinear dynamics of socio-cognitive systems.
Demir, M., Cooke, N. J., & Amazeen, P. G. A conceptual model of team dynamical behaviors and performance in human-autonomy teaming.
Favela, L. H., & van Rooij, M. M. J. W. Reasoning across continuous landscapes: A nonlinear dynamical systems theory approach to reasoning.
Hellrigel, S., Jarman, N., & van Leeuwen, C. Adaptive rewiring in weighted networks.
Spivey, M. Discovery in complex adaptive systems.