Cognitive niche construction

Supersizing the mind 4장 중에서.

All animals act on their environments and, in so doing, alter those environments in ways that may sometimes change the fitness landscape of the animal itself…. Still further complexity is introduced when organisms collectively build structures that persist beyond their own lifetime. A familiar example is the communally constructed beaver’s dam, whose physical presence subsequently alters selection pressures on both the beaver and its progeny that inherit the dam and the altered river flows it has produced.

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In all these cases, what ultimately matters, as Laland et al. (2000) stress, is the way niche-construction activity leads to new feedback cycles. In the standard cases, these feedback cycles run across evolutionary time…. Important for our purposes, however, this whole process has a direct analog within lifetime learning. Here, the feedback cycles alter and transform processes of individual and cultural reasoning and learning…. The bartender, by creating persisting spatially arrayed stand-ins for the drink orders, actively structures the local environment to press more utility from basic modes of visually cued action and recall. In this way, the exploitation of the physical situation allows relatively lightweight cognitive strategies to reap large rewards.

This is a simple illustration of the power of cognitive niche construction, defined as the process by which animals build physical structures that transform problem spaces in ways that aid (or sometimes impede) thinking and reasoning about some target domain or domains. These physical structures combine with appropriate culturally transmitted practices to enhance Problem solving and, in the most dramatic cases, to make possible whole new forms of thought and reason.