Evolution of Cognition and
Cognitive Theories
Minds & Machines
Early Organisms: Perception
and Action, but no Cognition
Sense
Act
Agent
Environment
Next Step: Cognition
Sense
Think
Agent
Environment
Act
Next Step: More (Better) Cognition!
Sense
Think!
Agent
Environment
Act
“Cognition is Thinking”
• Traditionally, Cognitive Science and AI
have seen thinking as the ‘pinnacle’ of
cognition:
– Thinking includes reasoning, problem-solving,
decision-making, and planning
– Sensory perception and motor control is much
less considered, if at all. These are often
considered as ‘peripheral devices’ or ‘addons’ to the central reasoning system, just as
the keyboard and monitor merely ‘relay’ or
‘transduce’ input and output.
Devils, Angels, Aliens, Jesus,
Mary, and … Illinois!
Jesus
Mary
http://jesuspan.com/
An Experiment in Vision
Moral: Perception and
‘Cognition’ are integrated
• It seems that contrary to popular belief,
perception is not a passive kind of datacollection process, passing interpreted
‘snapshots’ on to higher-level ‘cognitive’
processing.
• Rather, high-level processes (such as
background knowledge or desires) affect how
we perceive things (perception is constructive),
and often ‘ask’ the visual system to look for
certain things in the environment that are
needed for the task at hand (perception is
selective).
Situated Cognition
• Situated (or Embodied) Cognition is the view
that we have to take into account the body and
the environment in trying to explain, and think
about, cognition.
• Situated cognition objects to the classical
‘Sense, Plan, Act’ model of cognition, which
many cognitive scientists, most AI researchers,
have assumed in their view of cognition:
– we perceive the world,
– then think about it (i.e. cognize about it!),
– and then act on whatever plan we came up with.
• Instead, Situated Cognition proponents say,
perception and action are integral to cognition.
Catching a Fly Ball
• How do we catch a fly ball in the outfield?
– The traditional solution to this problem would
be to say that we perceive the trajectory of the
ball (Sense), then calculate (Think) where the
ball is going to be when, and finally move to
the right place (Act).
– However, on the situated view, you are much
more interactive with your environment, and
you follow a few simple rules: e.g. if in your
field of vision the ball is moving left, you move
left, and if it moves right, you move right: if
you keep doing this, eventually the ball will
come straight at you, so at least you’re in the
path of the ball.
The World As its own Best Model
• Situated cognition proponents like to point out
that we don’t always form some kind of internal
representation of the outside world
• Example: Blocks Experiment
– In this experiment, subjects had to copy a certain
configuration of blocks by selecting blocks and
dragging them to the corresponding place.
– The finding was that subjects would look at the
original, then select a block, then look back at the
original, and finally place the block.
– On the traditional view of cognition, the third step
would be a surprise. But, on the situated view, it
makes sense.
The World as External Memory
• In fact, some Situated Cognition people say that
the brain often uses the environment as a kind of
‘external memory’. Examples:
– Suppose you are taking apart your computer (or
something else with many parts) and want to make
sure that you can put it together again. One strategy
that many people use is to line up (or otherwise
configure) the parts as they are taking them out, so
that they just need to reverse this.
– Any note that you often write to yourself to remember
something.
– In fact, planners, calendars, even laptops can be
seen as your external memory.
Some Other Examples
• Some other examples to support this view:
– Tetris: People who play Tetris don’t look at
the block, think about how they would have to
rotate or move it, and then act on it. Rather,
people rotate and move the blocks as they
are trying to figure out where it fit.
– Scrabble: People are finding words by moving
the tiles around. If you would handcuff them,
their cognitive ability to ‘think of’ words would
probably decrease. (final project someone?!)
– Long division: We have to use paper and
pencil to do this!
Interaction as an Essential Part of
Cognition
• Based on these examples, some
proponents argue that cognition is
‘implemented’ or ‘realized’ through the
interactions with the environment. That is,
if you couldn’t interact with your
environment, you wouldn’t have certain
cognitive abilities!
• At the very least, the situated cognition
people are claiming that certain cognitive
acts can (only!) be understood and
explained by reference to interactions with
the environment.
Objection: Higher-Order Cognition
without Interactions
• OK, but then what about someone
who is just sitting in a chair,
contemplating something or other?
• What about Stephen Hawking, the
world-famous physicist who is in a
wheelchair and whose motor neuron
disease has left him with hardly any
motor skills left?
A Possible, and Highly Intriguing,
Answer
• Interestingly, even in the case of Stephen
Hawking, situated cognition could argue that his
(first-class!) high-level reasoning abilities
depend on lower-level abilities:
– Maybe the ‘thinking’ or ‘reasoning’ that we do
(including Stephen Hawking) is a kind of ‘internalized
dialogue’: an imagined dialogue in which we discuss
(using language of course) something or other with
some one else, but where we have taken the role of
this other person, and where the brain has simply
made a short-cut between the motor cortex straight to
the perception cortex.
Language: Our Best Tool?
• Language seems to be an especially
powerful tool that we use to enhance our
cognitive abilities:
– Expressions of language can be used to
represent information and thus serve as
external memory (see examples before)
– Expressions of language can be manipulated
and thus reasoning and decision-making can
take place through (logic, mathematics,
science)
Internal Representations
World
World
World
Cognitive
System A
Cognitive
System A
Cognitive System B
Example: Terminator
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUZgPfdkWis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf31v0eiXQk
Not Quite the Terminator ...
The Extended Mind
• Can the ‘boundaries’ of our cognitive self
go beyond the boundaries of our biological
self?
• If you would be willing to include a brain
chip implant to be able to see again as
part of the cognitive being you’re dealing
with, why should it matter whether this
chip is actually inside our skull, or is in
contact with the rest of our brain through
radio-transmitter?
Hammer-Man
• Suppose I have a hammer taped to my hand that never
comes off.
• Maybe it is more natural to draw the line between me
and my environment at the tip of the hammer, rather
than between my hand and the hammer.
• As always in science, we want to ‘parse’ the situation as
naturally as possible so as to most leverage our
explanatory and predictive powers.
• I myself would, just as with the sensory substitution
cases, probably start perceiving the world with the
hammer as part of me, not of my environment.
• Likewise, you would probably view me as ‘hammer-man’!
The Curious Case of Otto
• Otto has amnesia, but uses a notebook to
keep track of his experiences,
appointments, etc. If Otto’s book is
always-present and always-used, maybe it
is better to consider the notebook as part
of the cognitive entity we refer to as ‘Otto’
• “Why did Otto come to the appointment?
Because Otto remembered it.” Such a
description would only make sense if the
notebook is considered part of ‘Otto’.
Is there only one
‘Cognitive Self’?
• The question “Where is the boundary between
my mind and its environment?” assumes that
there is one ‘cognitive self’, one cognitive
system.
• However, what if we drop this assumption?
• Maybe there are various cognitive systems that
one can point to, and that one can usefully refer
to in order to give explanations and predictions
of cognitive behavior.
• This might play out quite nicely:
– The Chinese Room
– Cognitive entities using language (science, math,
tools) to form a new, more cognitively powerful, entity
– The Otto case: ‘Otto1’ and ‘Otto2’
Language, Tools,
Culture, and Cognition
• Whatever your stance on extended cognition or
the self is, this much is clear: Language and
other kinds of tools seem to greatly expand our
cognitive capabilities.
• Moreover, language allowed us to write down
thoughts and skills, and not only pass them to
others around us, but also to people born long
after we are dead: culture!
Cultural Evolution of Cognition
• Once culture is in place, cultural evolution can work on
components of cognition.
• For example, such cognitive ‘building blocks’ as
concepts or ideas, but also fashions and values can be
passed from organism to organism, where they
‘compete’ for existence (certain ideas strike us as better
ones than others’, and can get mutated or combined with
others: all the ingredients that an evolutionary process
requires.
• Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘memes’ for these
kinds of entities that are subject to cultural evolution.
Application of the Idea of
Memes
• The history of science and mathematics is full of cases
where two or more researchers come up with the same
idea or result, but independently so. How strange!!
• However, there is probably a good reason for this, and
that is that the concepts and ideas (the memes) they
needed to put together in order to obtain the theory of
evolution had been developing over time, and were
‘ready’ to be combined at their time, i.e. the discovery
was ‘in the air’. So, if they wouldn’t have come up with it,
someone else probably would have very soon after.
• Note that this makes it rather arbitrary to credit 1
particular person with a particular idea. More likely, ideas
are the natural progression of the work of hundreds of
people preceding the person that ‘puts it all together’.
Wallace’s Paradox
• Alfred Wallace (a contemporary of Charles Darwin who
came up with the theory of evolution independently of
Darwin!) posed the following puzzle:
– Our ancestors from, say, 100,000 years ago had
almost equally big brains (and almost equal genes)
than we have, but basically all they did was hunt for
food: they did no abstract math, build spaceships,
write PhD’s, etc, even though they presumably could
(e.g. if you had a time-machine and were to transport
them to our time, they would probably be doing math,
and writing PhD’s, just like us).
– So what did they need those big brains for? More to
the point: why would evolution push for big brains if
they are not used to the potential that they apparently
can be used for? This seems a waste of resources
and energy that seems to go against basic
evolutionary principles: a paradox!
One Possible Answer to
Wallace’s Paradox
• One possible answer to Wallace’s
Paradox is to say that the hunting and
gathering actually requires a lot more
cognitive power (e.g. sophisticated
perception and action and social
cooperation) than you might think.
• Thus, the implicit assumption in Wallace’s
reasoning is the good old intuition that big
brain = big cognition = reasoning =
mathematics, rockets, and PhD’s
• This may well be a mistaken view on
cognition (e.g. about a full 1/3 of our brain
is devoted to just vision!)
Another Answer to
Wallace’s Paradox
• Another assumption implicit in Wallace’s paradox is the
view that our cognitive capacities are the result of our
brain alone.
• Under this assumption, our cognitive capacities would be
purely the result of genetic factors, and biological (i.e.
genetic) selection may indeed not be able to explain the
drastic increase in cognitive powers.
• However, as argued in previous slides, our cognitive
capacities may be partly derived form the artefacts
(tools, language, and in particular science and math) we
have created around us and pass along from one
generation to the next. So, if we were to be transported
(at birth) to a time 100,000 years ago, we probably
wouldn’t grow up and be doing mathematics either!
• Moreover, the cultural evolution of cognitive building
blocks such as concepts and ideas is *much* faster than
genetic evolution.
Evolution and ‘Perfect’ Cognition
• Where is evolution going to bring us? Cyborgs? The ‘Singularity’?
• Consider the “Perfect Cognizer”, which is a hypothetical organism
with ‘perfect’ perception, ‘perfect’ memory, ‘perfect’ reasoning, etc.
• Thus, the Perfect Cognizer takes in all factors relevant to a certain
situation, and tries to figure out exactly which course of action is the
most advantageous, so one would think that the Perfect Cognizer
would do really well as an organism.
• Maybe evolution will bring us ‘The Perfect Cognizer’?
• Problem: Organisms must often make quick decisions in order to
survive. The Perfect Cognizer probably takes too long to come to
quick decisions!
• So, it is unlikely that we would evolve into perfect cognizers, let
alone that we are perfect cognizers.
• Indeed, the following slide provides some evidence that humans are
not perfectly rational or logical.
• It is exactly these kinds of imperfections to the human mind (just like
imperfections to the human body (the blind spot, the appendix, the
tailbone, the tonsils, etc)) that point to our evolutionary history.
Wason Selection Task
• A deck of cards has a letter on one side, and a number
on the other side.
• You are told that the cards obey the following rule:
– If a card has a vowel on one side, then it must have an even
number on the other side
• Which of the following cards do you need to turn over to
make sure that this rule has not been violated by any of
these cards?
A
6
9
T