  So pervasive has this computational conception of cognition been over the past decades that many cognitive scientists would be happy to identify cognition with computation, giving little thought to the possibility of alternatives. Certainly the great strides toward understanding cognition that the advent of computationalism has made possible invites the idea that computational cognitive science, if not the only game in town, is likely the best. However, ecological psychology, which J.J. Gibson (1966; 1979) began to develop around the time that computationalism came to dominate psychological practice, rejected nearly every plank of the information processing model of cognition that computational cognitive science epitomizes. More recently, connectionist cognitive science has challenged the symbolist commitments of computationalism even while conceding a role for computational processes. Both ecological psychology and connectionist psychology have played significant roles in the rise of embodied cognition and so a brief discussion of their points of influence is necessary to understand the “embodied turn.” Likewise, some embodied cognition researchers draw on a very different source for inspiration—the phenomenological tradition with special attention to Merleau-Ponty’s contributions. The next three subsections examine these various strands of influence.