Search Results

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 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.

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 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.

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.