Decades of behavioral observations have shown that invertebrate and vertebrate species have the ability to distinguish between self-generated afferent inputs versus those that are generated externally. In the present article, I describe activities focused around the discussion of a classic American Physiological Society paper by Curtis C. Bell…

We develop the view that the involvement of mirror neurons in embodied experience grounds brain structures that underlie language, but that many other brain regions are involved. We stress the cooperation between the dorsal and ventral streams in praxis and language. Both have perceptual and motor schemas but the perceptual schemas in the dorsal…

This paper describes a neural model of speech acquisition and production that accounts for a wide range of acoustic, kinematic, and neuroimaging data concerning the control of speech movements. The model is a neural network whose components correspond to regions of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum, including premotor, motor, auditory, and…

An analysis is made of the reciprocal relationship between play and three areas of interaction between the brain and human development: (1) the affective characteristics of play and the brain; (2) developmental theories of cognition and play; and (3) creativity as a continuation of the brain's need for play. (JN)

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of…

The article describes the neurolinguistic programing model and applies it to teaching orientation and mobility skills to congenitally blind students, who have access to only the auditory and kinesthetic primary systems. Understanding the effects on thought of limited representational systems can help trainers teach more effective cane or dog guide…