Professor Michael L. Anderson
Michael L. Anderson, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Cognitive
Science in the Department of Psychology at Franklin & Marshall College,
and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for Advanced Computer
Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also a
member of the Graduate Faculty in the Program in Neuroscience and
Cognitive Science.
Mike earned a B.S. with honors in
pre-medical studies
at the University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale
University, where he was a Sterling Prize Fellow. He was recently
recognized as an “emerging leader under 40” by the
Renaissance Weekend,
and was one of only twenty people world-wide to be invited to attend the
McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences workshop for early
career researchers.
He is author or coauthor of over fifty scholarly and
scientific publications in artificial intelligence, cognitive science,
and philosophy of mind. His work has appeared in such journals as
Artificial Intelligence, AI Magazine, Journal of Logic and Computation,
The Neuroscientist, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
Philosophical Psychology and Synthese. His best-known article,
Embodied
Cognition: A Field Guide, was one of the most requested articles
from
Artificial Intelligence for 2003, 2004 and 2006, and has been
adopted
for courses in computer science, philosophy and psychology in several
countries.
Mike authored
Evolution, embodiment and the nature of the mind,
Massive redeployment, exaptation, and the functional integration of
cognitive operations,
Evolution of cognitive function via redeployment of brain
areas, and
The massive redeployment hypothesis and the functional topography of
the brain,
and coauthored
Content and action: The guidance theory of representation,
A self-help guide for autonomous systems,
A review of recent research in reasoning and metareasoning,
How to study the mind: An introduction to embodied cognition,
and
The metacognitive loop I: Enhancing reinforcement learning with
metacognitive monitoring and control for improved perturbation
tolerance.
Read the
full list of his publications!
Primary
areas of research include an account of the evolution of the
cortex via exaptation of existing neural circuitry (the “massive
redeployment hypothesis”); the role of behavior, and of the brain’s
motor-control areas, in supporting higher-order cognitive functions; the
foundations of intentionality (the connection between objects of thought
and things in the world); and the role of self-monitoring and
self-control in maintaining robust real-world agency.