558 – The Ecological Approach to Cognition: An Introduction

Today on The Perception and Action Podcast, is it true there's no cognition in the ecological approach to skill? No of course not. In this episode I want to start a series of episodes to explain how we can understand cognition, for example problem solving, memory, intention, agency, dissipation and decision making from an ecological viewpoint so it's time for a call to action. Hi, this is Rob Gray from Arizona State University. I've been on a now over 25 year journey as a researcher, professor and high performance consultant to understand how we acquire and adapt our perceptual motor skills. Welcome to The Perception and Action Podcast, where I discuss how psychological research can be applied to improving performance, accelerating skill acquisition and designing technologies. Now on to the show, hi everyone, in this episode I want to introduce a kind of series of episodes I'm going to work on this year, tackling the issue of cognition in ecological dynamics, things like memory, decision making, agency problem solving, anticipation, intentionality, etc. This continues to be a sticking point for a lot of people, from the erroneous claim that there's no thinking at all in ecological dynamics to the many different misunderstandings. This stance was summed up in a quote from Daniel Dennett back in 1998, quote, "If the brain is not a supercomputer, then what is it doing?" Ecological psychology has been criticized for ignoring the brain in its investigations of how perception and action come about, treating it as "wonder tissue" resonating with marvelous sensitivity to a host of sophisticated affordances. End quote. Tackling the question of what the brain is doing, the ecological view of neuroscience is something I also want to address in this series. My own goal here is to better develop my ability to explain and educate coaches and other people about these ideas by understanding them better myself. I continue to be somewhat dissatisfied that I can't give coaches a quick and clear answer to questions like, "How is memory involved then?" So this series is going to be me doing some research and thinking out loud a lot. So please bear with me. Okay, let's begin with a quick overview of ecological cognition. In future episodes, I will get into more specific things like memory and decision making. If you want to read an article that touches on what I'm going to talk about today, I would recommend the recent paper by Duarte Arujo and colleagues called, "The Ecological Dynamics of Cognizant Action in Sport," link in the show notes. To begin, let's consider the traditional definition of cognition that most people are familiar with. That is that cognition involves mental processes that occur within the brain of the performer. We could argue about what exactly these processes are, but generally there involves some sort of operation, computation, manipulation of symbols, enhancement of information, or simulations. The key point here is that cognition lives within the performer. The process is done on representations of the external environment. This is necessary because cognition is separated from the environment. Perception pulls in information from the environment. We disconnect from the environment, process the information, and reconnect to it to act. This is a very serial linear process, perception, then cognition, then action. We interpret, predict, anticipate, pull things out of memory, put things in, decide, and then act. These representations involve storage of information within the brain. Again, this is necessary because cognition is disconnected from the environment. It lives within the performer. The real challenge in understanding the ecological approach to cognition is that it involves a completely different conceptualization of what cognition is. If you hold on to these ideas of mental processes in the brain and things stored in the brain, you're never going to be able to understand the ecological approach to cognition. These are tools that simply do not fit with this approach. Tools like mental processing and memory storage are things that fit with indirect perception and not with ecological dynamics. The main shift in conceptualization is that in ecological dynamics, cognition is redefined as a property of the performer environment system rather than a process that lives within just the performer. This is always the level of analysis we use in ecological dynamics. We don't separate the performer from their environment. This can be seen in the famous William Mace quote, "Ask not what's inside your head about what your head's inside of." Cognition requires looking at the interaction between the organism and its environment, not just internal mental processes within the organism. In this sense, cognition is an emergent property of the system that arises from the system dynamics, not something that we can pull out of the perception action loop. It is a property of the coupling between perception and action or information and movement, if you will. We've already touched on some of the basic ideas. For example, a decision can be thought of as a bifurcation or shift to a different state. The development of a new attractor or a change in attractor strength is the effective past experience, i.e. remembering, etc. Within this view of cognition, representations are not necessary and nonsensical because we're always directly connected to our environment. We don't pull things out of it and leave the environment to process them and then come back and act on it. There's no such thing as action independent processing of information. Information and action are reciprocally coupled. One of the main reasons I like this view personally is that it means that cognition is an observable behavior, not something that's hidden in the black box that is our brain. So that is the big shift for mental processes within the decoupled observer so that we perceive, cognize, then act, to cognition emerging from the dynamics of the performer environment system so that we have reciprocal coupling of perception action and cognition. I know there is appeal to being able to separate and isolate things like mental processing so that are easier to understand, but this is akin to task decomposition of a skill that you're training. So hopefully that sets the stage for understanding. In future episodes, I'm going to illustrate this by looking at specific functions of cognition and how this might be achieved in the brain. For example, the idea of resonance. Okay, that's it for today's episode. Remember, you can contact me at Rob Gray at ASU.edu or follow me on Twitter at checkuates. To find out more about the podcast, please check out perceptionaction.com. Finally, to support the podcast, we'll receive bonus materials, including a monthly coaches meetup, please head over to patreon.com/perceptionaction. This is Rob Gray from ASU, cheers for now, and keep them coupled.