Cognitive ecology

Cognitive ecology can be defined as "the study of cognitive phenomena in context".

Cognitive theories

TLDR: Studying cognition as a separate system flourished despite concerns about leaving out the context in which the brain processed information. Now, as more is known about the human mind and approaches have changed, cognitive science is including more e.g., anthropological and historical perspectives.

Reductionism vs holism (1950s):

• Cybernetic approach: mind's information loops extend to the world
• Information processing approach: cognition as symbolic events in a computer-like system

Bateson (1970s):

• anthropologist
• research team analyzed a psychiatric interview
• "Nothing never happens": in social interactions, everything is meaningful behavior
• how are all these simultaneous aspects of behavior related?

Gibson (late 1970s-):

• studied ecological approach to visual perception

• psychological processes are a dynamic between an organism and the environment
• thought the information processing approach should be abandoned

Cultural-historical activity theory (1970s-)

• all higher level psychological processes appear twice
• inter-psychological processes (participation in cultural practices) become intra-psychological processes (internalizing those processes)

Synergicism (1980s-)

• ecological psychology + dynamical systems approach to cognition
  • Dynamical system: the brain, body and world in motion
  • successful models of perceptual and motor processes
  • what about higher cognition?

Embodied cognition (1990s-)

• agent-environment interactions
• "perception is something we do, not something that happens to us"

Hutchins, E. Cognitive Ecology in TopiCS Vol 2, issue 4: 705-715 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01089.x