Readiness-to-hand, extended cognition, and multifactality

A recent set of experiments of ours supported the notion of a transition in experience from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-tohand proposed by phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger. They were also an experimental demonstration of an extended cognitive system. We generated and then temporarily disrupted an interactiondominant system that spans a human participant, a computer mouse, and a task performed on the computer screen. Our claim that this system was interaction dominant was based on the detection of 1/f noise at the hand-tool interface. The inference from the presence of 1/f noise to the presence of an interaction-dominant system is occasionally disputed. Increasing evidence suggests that inference from multifractality to interaction dominance is more certain than 1/flike scaling alone. In this paper, we reanalyze the data using the wavelet transform modulus maxima method, showing that the human-mouse system displays multifractality. This reinforces our claims that the system is interaction dominant.