General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition

Abstract

In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring 'higher' cognition. An example of this is how during the design process architects can let themselves be guided by the future behavior of visitors to an exhibit they are planning. The main question is what the sociomaterial environment and the skilled agent are like, such that they can relate to each other in these ways. We argue that this requires an account of the regularities in the environment. Introducing the notion of general ecological information, we will give an account of these regularities in terms of constraints, information and the form of life or ecological niche. In the first part of the paper, we will introduce the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal's informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action. We will show how skilled agents can pick up on the regularities in the environment and let their behavior be guided by the practices in the form of life. This conceptual framework is important for radical embodied and enactive cognitive science, because it allows these increasingly influential paradigms 123Synthese to extend their reach to forms of 'higher' cognition such as long-term planning and imagination.

Cultural Evolution of Sustainable Behaviors: Pro-environmental Tipping Points in an Agent-Based Model

“…1 Ecological information is ''the set of structures and regularities in the environment,'' such as patterns of light or sound reflected by the physical environment, ''that allow an animal to engage with affordances.'' 34 It is important to emphasize that an affordance is a relational construct, or a relation between capabilities and the environment. 3 For instance, a bicycle path will only afford bicycling for a person who knows how to cycle.…”

Mycological rationality: Heuristics, perception and decision-making in mushroom foraging

“…Two pictures were presented for the search task (Figs 7 and 9). The pictures were chosen to portray relatively little ecological information (Gibson 1979;Bruineberg, Chemero, and Rietveld 2018), but a sufficient amount of cues to direct search. Overall, the respondents replied to the open question "What mushroom species would you search for in the terrain in this picture?"…”

An Enactive-Ecological Approach to Information and Uncertainty

“…Thus, local covariation may be enough for specification. Finally, there has been a debate among ecological psychologists about whether the covariation must be strong enough to support a 1:1 specifying relationship or just a probabilistic specifying relationship (Heras-Escribano and de Pinedo, 2016;Bruineberg et al, 2018). In the latter case the environmental structure does not uniquely specify its source because the correlation between them is not exceptionfree.…”