Extended cognition is the view that mental processes and mind extend beyond the body to include aspects of the environment in which an organism is embedded and the organism's interaction with that environment.Cognition goes beyond the manipulation of symbols to include the emergence of order and structure evolving from active engagement with the world. As described by Mark Rowlands, mental processes are:
Embodied involving more than the brain, including a more general involvement of bodily structures and processes.
Embedded functioning only in a related external environment.
Enacted involving not only neural processes, but also things an organism does.
Extended into the organism's environment.
This contrasts with the view of the mind as a processing center that creates mental representations of reality and uses them to control the body's behaviour. The field of extended cognition focuses upon the processes involved in this creation, and subsumes these processes as part of consciousness. which is no longer confined to the brain or body, but involves interaction with the environment. At a 'low' level, like motor learning and haptic perception, the body is involved in cognition, but there is a 'high' level where cultural factors play a role. This view of cognition is sometimes referred to as ‘enaction’ to emphasise the role of interplay between the organism and its environment and the feedback processes involved in developing an awareness of, and a reformation of, the environment.
The paper The Extended Mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) is a seminal work in the field of extended cognition. In this paper, Clark and Chalmers present the idea of active externalism (similar to semantic or "content" externalism), in which objects within the environment function as a part of the mind. They argue that it is arbitrary to say that the mind is contained only within the boundaries of the skull. The separation between the mind, the body, and the environment is seen as an unprincipled distinction. Because external objects play a significant role in aiding cognitive processes, the mind and the environment act as a "coupled system". This coupled system can be seen as a complete cognitive system of its own. In this manner, the mind is extended into the external world. The main criterion that Clark and Chalmers list for classifying the use of external objects during cognitive tasks as a part of an extended cognitive system is that the external objects must function with the same purpose as the internal processes.