Embodying cognitive ethology

Abstract

Cognitive psychology considers the environment as providing information, not affecting fundamental information processes. Thus, cognitive psychology's traditional paradigms study responses to precisely timed stimuli in controlled environments. However, new research demonstrates the environment does influence cognitive processes and offers cognitive psychology new methods. The authors examine one such proposal: cognitive ethology. Cognitive ethology improves cognitive psychology's ecological validity through first drawing inspiration from robust phenomena in the real world, then moving into the lab to test those phenomena. To support such methods, cognitive ethologists appeal to embodied cognition, or 4E cognition, for its rich relationships between agents and environments. However, the authors note while cognitive ethology focuses on new methods (epistemology) inspired by embodied cognition, it preserves most traditional assumptions about cognitive processes (ontology). But embodied cognition-particularly its radical variants-also provides strong ontological challenges to cognitive psychology, which work against cognitive ethology. The authors argue cognitive ethology should align with the ontology of less radical embodied cognition, which produces epistemological implications, offering alternative methodologies. For example, cognitive ethology can explore differences between real-world and lab studies to fully understand how cognition depends on environments.

Keywords: attention; cognition; cognitive ethology; embodied cognition; real-world environment.

Figure 1.

Theories of Cognition. With the rise of embodied cognition, theories of cognition can be placed on a continuum from pure sense–think–act processing to pure sense–act processing. The pure sense–think–act (A) cycle characterizes cognitive psychology’s traditional view of processing. Thinking necessarily mediates the relationship between sensing and acting. Action on the world can change the information available for sensing, as indicated by the feedback loop illustrated with the dashed arrows. The “thinking” function is larger than the other two because cognitive psychologists overemphasize representational processing and underemphasize both sensing and acting (J. R. Anderson, 1983; Newell, 1990). Less radical embodied cognitive psychologists propose cognition involves both sense–think–act processing and sense–act processing (B). Some processing involves using representational processes to mediate relationships between sensed information and action on the world. Some processing permits direct links between sensing and acting without the need for thinking or planning. The pure sense–act (C) cycle is endorsed by embodied cognitive psychologists who reject the sense–think–act cycle. In the sense–act cycle, representational processes (thinking) have disappeared. Sensing is linked directly to acting, and complex behavior emerges from feedback between the two functions. We propose cognitive ethology would be well served by endorsing processing is represented somewhere in the middle of the continuum (e.g., more like B and less like A or C).