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A NeuroEcological Theory of Organism-Environment Cognitive Systems
Abstract: Gibsonian ecological psychology exerted a major influence on radical embodied conceptions of cognition. It offered an alternative to behaviorism’s fixation on the individual’s overt actions and cognitivism’s solipsistic flavor. Instead, the target of inquiry is the organism-environment system and affordances. A long-standing criticism of this approach is the apparent absence of even a sketch of the contributions made by the brain, which has led to the caricatured Gibsonian creature as being filled with “foam rubber” and “wonder tissue.” Here, I provide a path forward to understanding the brain’s contribution to affordances: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). NExT hypothesizes that affordances emerge via the coordination of low-dimensional features of environmental (ecological) information, body synergies, and neural population manifolds. This approach is motivated by recent neuroscience research demonstrating that neural population dynamics are preserved in low-dimensional manifolds within and across animals performing similar actions. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that neural population dynamics map to particular affordance events with regularity. Taken together, the theory of affordances successfully appealed to for decades by Gibsonians is complemented by methods from manifold theory. In this way, ecological psychologists and other proponents of radical embodiment will no longer be accused of believing in creatures filled with foam rubber and wonder tissue.
Biography: Dr. Luis (“Louie”) H. Favela is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine & Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). Prior to IUB, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Cognitive Sciences Program at the University of Central Florida. He has been a fellow at the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, and Duke University’s Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy. He earned graduate degrees in Philosophy (Life Sciences Track) and Experimental Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. His research is interdisciplinary, situated at the intersections of cognitive science, experimental psychology, and the history and philosophy of mind and science. His recent book is The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024).
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