Figure 2 - uploaded by Elizabeth Barbara Torres
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Sensory-motor maps, nerves and ganglia across the body and face project to cortical maps. Their proper development scaffold bottom-up and top-down interactions to enable cognitive decisions and socio-motor behaviors. An open question is whether their disruption impedes the processes connecting intention and volition.
Source publication
The previous chapter highlighted the contributions of cognitive theories to autism research. These cognitivist ideas reviewed in the chapter provide a top-down approach to the possible relations between cognition and movements. Despite their relevance to help us formulate questions regarding motor control differences in ASD, the top-down approach t...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... cognitivist researcher describes the individual performing a socially-oriented or purposeful behavior that has already matured to some extent. The top-down inferences cognitive theories make about the functioning of the mind are not based on evolving physical bodies with embedded evolving nervous systems, developing from the bottom up (Figure 2). As such, the cognitivist could never see the need for understanding the mechanisms necessary to control a body in motion as basic ingredients required to construct predictive behavior underlying the description of the (presumed) mental intentions of others and their social consequences. ...
Context 2
... rather disembodied approach of the cognitivists' theories fails to consider that the rapid physical changes that a newborn baby experiences while gaining autonomy over the body are also characterized by changes in the rates of growth of the peripheral nerves innervating the face, trunk and limbs (Figure 2). Such nerves ought to establish proper synapses to build networks that effectively communicate activity from the end effectors back to the also-fast-growing brain. ...
Context 3
... close this section of the book with the proposition that a bottom-up approach to neurodevelopment at the early stages may be more appropriate to capture the dynamic and variable nature of the nervous systems in transition to deliberate autonomy of the brain over the body (Figure 2). Indeed, the emergence of an intentional brain that finds a way to deliberately control the body at will, a body that it gradually learns to own, may be better captured with methods that first track this emergent property from the periphery ( Torres et al. 2013, Torres et al. 2016. ...
