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This chapter provides an introduction to cognitive ecology that gives attention to ecology and the evolution of “cognition,” defining it as the neuronal processes concerned with the acquisition, retention, and use of information. Cognition can be divided into several interrelated and inseparable components including perception, learning, working memory, attention, long-term memory, and decision making. The chapter provides an overview of research programs relating cognition to avian ecology, as well as a brief discussion on cognitive aspects of decisions made within reproduction and antipredator behavior categories. It also shows a link between antipredatory and social behavior by analyzing the alarm calls of meerkats.

This chapter considers the medieval book as an example of embedded creative cognition. Through a detailed case-study analysis of a single opening from the interpolated Livre de Fauvel, the chapter shows how the modern-day reader takes an active part in the cognitive ecology that produced the book. The argument draws on theories of distributed cognition, multimodality, book history, and the writings of Augustine of Hippo to demonstrate the close connections between the mind, the body, and the book that are both still in action and under transformation today.

This final chapter summarizes the arguments and discussions of the book. The chapters in this book have dealt with a huge range of topics in a vast assortment of animals. Learning, memory, and overall behavioral flexibility have been analyzed from a variety of angles. A clear thread has linked the chapters together, and this is the underlying approach of relating cognitive mechanisms to animal ecology and evolution. This final chapter also talks about what is missing from this discussion and looks towards future directions. Overall, it can stated that the major challenge facing future work in cognitive ecology is the further integration of knowledge on the genetic, neurobiological, and endocrinological mechanisms underlying cognition with information about animal ecology and evolution.

The Centre for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) has hypothesized that much human decision making can be described by simple algorithmic process models (heuristics). This chapter explains this approach and relates it to research in biology on rules of thumb, which we also review. As an example of a simple heuristic, consider the lexicographic strategy of take-the-best for choosing between two alternatives: Cues are searched in turn until one discriminates, then search stops and all other cues are ignored. Heuristics consist of building blocks, and building blocks exploit evolved or learned abilities such as recognition memory; it is the complexity of these abilities that allows the heuristics to be simple. Simple heuristics have an advantage in making decisions fast and with little information, and in avoiding overfitting. Furthermore, humans are observed to use simple heuristics. Simulations show that the statistical structures of different environments affect which heuristics perform better, a relationship referred to as ecological rationality. We contrast ecological rationality with the stronger claim of adaptation. Rules of thumb from biology provide clearer examples of adaptation because animals can be studied in the environments in which they evolved. The range of examples is also much more diverse. To investigate them, biologists have sometimes used similar simulation techniques to ABC, but many examples depend on empirically driven approaches. ABC's theoretical framework can be useful in connecting some of these examples, particularly the scattered literature on how information from different cues is integrated. Optimality modeling is usually used to explain less detailed aspects of behavior but might more often be redirected to investigate rules of thumb.

Through a brief reading of Doctor Faustus, the introduction first suggests how characters think through their surroundings on the early modern English stage and how, in turn, playgoers relied upon the same process to orient themselves within the dramatic fiction. Drawing upon the concepts of situated cognition and cognitive ecology, the introduction defines this process of thinking through place as “ecological thinking.” After establishing that characters typically engage in ecological thinking to orient themselves within place, the introduction concludes by suggesting how this emphasis upon embodied and extended thought reframes our understanding of the relationship between space and place on the early modern stage.

In later life This chapter presents an update on a long-term research program examining the rules that young song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) use to decide which songs to learn, retain, and later use, and the role that the social ecology of song sparrows has played in shaping these rules. The strategy of song learning in song sparrows and the mechanisms of song communication between neighboring adult males are shaped by cognitive factors at the proximate level and variables in the species' social ecology at the ultimate level. The chapter presents an argument around the fact that a cognitive ecology perspective captures the key features of song learning and song communication in this species, and will probably do so as well in other species of songbirds. The authors find that understanding the song-learning process may ultimately be the key to understanding why it is that song learning in one life stage parallels song communication stages.

The epilogue returns to the matter of the dead, the embodied memories of the affective past in its physical remains, with a brief consideration of what it meant to think and feel with and through historical things, including the bones and skulls of loved ones. Earlier chapters regularly invoked the language of cognitive ecology to make sense of the social and inter-subjective dynamics of early modern performance. Bringing the dead of St. Paul’s together with the bones of the graveyard scene in Hamlet, the epilogue makes explicit these earlier references to the concepts of distributed cognition and extended mind. Elizabethans regularly relied on affective tools and technologies like popular theater as they sought to understand, in and of themselves, what it felt like to be an Elizabethan.

Despite the new mobility of early modern English society, practices of personal and shared remembering were still anchored in experienced place. Even as technologies and strategies for dealing with past and future altered, memory was richly scaffolded by landscapes, artefacts, architecture, and institutions which themselves bore traces of individual and cultural intervention. This chapter discusses historical variation in two forms of remembering: explicit memories of specific past events, and embodied memories enacted in routine and habitual or skilful action. It is motivated by recent historical scholarship, especially from Nicola Whyte and Andy Wood, on topographies of remembrance in early modern landscape. It connects this new cultural history to the focus on lived bodily experience which characterizes historical phenomenology. It shows personal memory and embodied or habitual memory in play together, interacting in coordinated or competing ways, and assesses the historical utility of the idea of distributed cognitive ecologies.

In the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, poetic invective raises provocative questions about the nature of an authentic Scottish identity, pitting the lowland Dunbar and his heritage of ‘Inglis’ or English poetry against Kennedy and his association with the Gaelic-speaking region of Carrick. This chapter examines the poem in light of current extended mind theories, as part of a distributed cognitive system in which conceptions of national identity are constructed through ongoing processes of collaboration, circulation, and reception that make thinking nation part of everyday life. Rather than functioning divisively, the Flyting’s antagonistic presentation of a debate over cultural authenticity reflects the dynamic character of national culture, shaping the idea of a Scottish nation whose borders contain diverse voices and cultures.

This chapter provides a non-technical preview of the book’s themes and approaches. Using quotations from Montaigne, Milton, and Edward Lear, it focuses on notions of communication, conversation, and the ways speakers seek to alter each other’s cognitive environment. It points to the role of agency, underspecifiction, and inference in communication of all kinds, including literary; it evokes the importance of literary and other counterfactuals; it speaks of the recognition of life (in other creatures, in puppets, etc.) as a defining feature of and motivation for cognition; and, via texts that suggest a haptic engagement with language, it highlights the value of literary works—and literary criticism—as instruments of extended cognition.

The feats of skill exhibited by early modern actors, singers, and dancers can best be approached through the lens of distributed cognition. Complex assemblages of material, social, bodily, and neural resources enabled and constrained the work of early modern performers. Skilled performers were expected not simply to reproduce material; improvisation and spontaneity were more highly valued than rote memorisation. To be a performer was to be an improviser. Improvisation always involved interaction with other performers and with a given text, whether a score, a choreography, or a play text. This chapter analyses a variety of assemblages underpinning the work of a range of early modern performance practice. These include improvised polyphonic music performed in ecclesiastical settings; improvisation in Renaissance dance; the early modern English theatre, and the notation systems used for part-singing. Each of these operates within a specific cognitive ecology, and each places different demands upon the particular assemblages of embodied expertise, environments, and skilled practice. Distributed cognition provides an analytic framework for understanding these accomplishments.

Recent developments in the study of human cognition suggest that, in the context of interacting to accomplish a task together, humans engage in a form of ‘distributed’ or ‘cooperative’ cognition that facilitates their work. A key feature of this type of shared cognition is the capacity for humans to be aware of themselves as members of the cooperating group, and as the need arises, they can also become aware of the group itself when it must be regulated due to some dysfunction. In an attempt to bring new insights to this feature of cooperative cognition, this chapter engages with Buddhist epistemological theories of ‘reflexive awareness’ presented by the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti and his followers, and it points to crucial implications of the Dharmakīrtian notion of reflexivity that may be relevant to understanding the kind of reflexivity that sustains cooperative cognition.

The conclusion draws together the book’s major findings through a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, focusing primarily upon the relationship between place and thought in the theorization of the cogito. Against Descartes’s fantasy of disembodied and placeless mind, the conclusion suggests that early modern English drama stages the impossibility of separating thought from its foundation in embodiment and environment, as well as the consequences—alternately tragic and comic—of attempting to do so. Not only do the plays considered in this book show thinking to be an ecological phenomenon; they also reveal that the act of thinking through place can transform the contours of a location.

As described in the previous chapter, children’s thinking is highly variable. The present chapter focuses on implications of this variability for understanding development. Thinking about a pair of visual metaphors may help facilitate recognition of these implications. The first, which I believe underlies most depictions of development, is the staircase metaphor. The second, which I believe offers a superior alternative, is the overlapping waves metaphor. Cognitive developmentalists have often phrased their models in terms that suggest that children of a given age think about a given task in a single way. W-year-olds are said to have a particular mental structure, a particular processing limit, a particular theory, strategy, or rule that gives rise to a single type of behavior. Change involves a substitution of one mental entity (and accompanying behavior) for another. The basic conceptualization that seems to underlie these models is aptly captured in the title of Robbie Case’s (1992) recent book The Mind’s Staircase. The visual metaphor that this title evokes is, I believe, central to most cognitive-developmental treatments of change: Children are depicted as thinking in a given way for an extended period of time (a tread on the staircase); then their thinking undergoes a sudden, vertical shift (a riser on the staircase); then they think in a different, higher way for another extended period of time (the next tread); and so on. This view of development is most closely identified with Piagetian and neo-Piagetian approaches, such as those of Piaget and Case. Thus, as shown in Figure 4.1, we see development depicted within Piaget’s theory as involving sensorimotor activities from birth to about 2 years; preoperational thinking from 2 to 7 years; concrete operational thinking from 7 to 12 years; and formal operational thinking from 12 years onward. Within Case’s theory, we see thinking depicted as advancing from the sensorimotor level between birth and 18 months, to the relational level from 18 months to 5 years, to the dimensional level between 5 and 11 years, and to the formal level at age 11 and beyond. Although this view of development is associated with the Piagetian and neo-Piagetian traditions, it is far from unique to them.