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Advisory Board

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.