Date: March 13, 5:00 pm (Warsaw time)
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Join live: s. 3099, Wydział Geologii UW, ul. Żwirki i Wigury 93
What is NExT for affordances? Taking brains seriously in organism-environment system
Abstract
Gibsonian ecological psychology can be viewed as 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 systematic relationships between environmental (ecological) information and low-dimensional neural 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 will no longer be accused of believing in creatures filled with foam rubber and wonder tissue.
Reading
Favela, L. H. (2024). What is NExT for affordances? Taking brains seriously in organism-environment systems. In The modern legacy of Gibson’s affordances for the sciences of organisms.
This talk is a part of the Traincrease Lecture Series (D4.2).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952324.
