Commentary: from the human mind’s powerful unconscious capacities to its digitally extended possibilities

Abstract

This commentary elaborates on the themes presented in this special issue, composed of four theoretical reviews and two empirical studies, that all show how much our understanding of cognition and metacognition has advanced during the last fourty years. From the inherent, both conscious and unconscious, capacities of the human mind to its digitally extended possibilities, as well as to the subtle mechanisms of cognitive and metacognitive development, the papers show how much cognitive research has moved on, from approaching the mind as a cognitive system analogous to a computer, which was the dominant perspective in the beginnings of Cognitive Psychology in the 1960s, to approaching the mind as a human function within a dynamic, multifaceted, demanding, and continuously changing sociocultural environment, above and beyond its component processes and the way they interrelate.

Keywords

• unconscious processes
• human-Internet interaction
• cognitive development
• metacognitive development
• Theory of Mind