Diverse Intelligences: Navigation of Physical and Epistemological Spaces

Cognition Futures

How do organisms and artificial agents find their way through unfamiliar territory, whether that territory is a physical environment, a conceptual landscape, or a moral problem? This internship contributes to the Cognition Futures paper series, which argues that spatial navigation, affordance perception, epistemic orientation, and moral reasoning share a common computational architecture rooted in the hippocampal-entorhinal system.

The series draws on the concept of a 'common currency' in diverse intelligences research: the idea that comparing intelligence across substrates (biological, artificial, hybrid) requires identifying shared functional capacities rather than substrate-specific benchmarks. Navigation, broadly construed, may be one such currency. The intern would conduct literature review across cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind; help develop arguments for Papers II and III in the series;

and contribute to a researcher tracking database that maps who is working on adjacent problems.

The Embodied Intelligence Conference 2026 paper anchors this work. The project sits within JOPRO's Cognition Futures working group and connects to the complexity science and Frontier Map research lines.

• Conduct targeted literature review across cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind
• Help develop arguments for Papers II and III in the Cognition Futures series
• Contribute to the researcher tracking database
• Synthesize findings across spatial cognition, embodied cognition, affordance theory, and diverse intelligences research
• Contribute draft sections to the paper series

Graduate students in cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, computational neuroscience, or related fields. Familiarity with spatial cognition, place cells/grid cells, embodied cognition, or the diverse intelligences literature is a strong plus.