ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a summary of the major paradigms that have dominated studies in the cognitive sciences from the 1940s until 2000. It provides a discussion of enactive, embodied and distributed cognition, three contemporary fields that are having a major impact on practice and scholarship in theatre and performance. Most cognitive scientists working within a non-representational version of connectionism also accept many of the major insights of embodied cognition. Insights into embodied cognition that started with cognitive linguistics also flourished in other areas of the field. The enactive approach to cognition builds upon many of the assumptions of embodiment. Five intertwined principles constitute enactive cognition: autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment and experience. Also known as 'situated' or 'embedded,' and occasionally as 'extended' cognition, distributed cognition moves human cognitive operations beyond the brain and body and into the environment. In most uses, however, extended cognition differs from distributed cognition.
