Nonlinear Dynamics and Psychology

From AGIRI.org

General Resources

The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology has been promoting interesting ideas about nonlinearity and mind for a long time.

Some Good Books and Papers on Nonlinearity and the Mind

Some useful books are

• Juarrero -- Dynamics in Action (more philosophical)
• Thelen & Smith -- Dynamical Systems Approaches to the Development of Cognition and Action (empirical research focused)

See also this Special Issue of Developmental Science from 2003

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/desc/6/4

which gives a good overview of the state of the art.

The intro article to the Special Issue is

Thelen, E. & Bates, E. (2003). Connectionism and dynamic systems: Are they really different? Introduction to J. Spencer & E. Thelen (Eds.),
Connectionism and dynamic systems. Special Section, Developmental Science, 6(4), 378–391.

which is available here

http://crl.ucsd.edu/~bates/papers/index.html

This very nicely written paper represents an explicit call for a dynamical-systems-based theory of dynamical psychology, but doesn't really give much meat. It does refer to Thelen's dynamical analysis of Piaget's object permanence task (in terms of the iterative nonlinear adaptation of arm movement) and alludes that similar analyses might be done for other Piagetan tasks.