Some commentators have recently argued that scientific psychology is overly reliant on artificial laboratory-based activities and that it undervalues field-based investigations. However, it remains unclear how a field-based programme of psychological research might be organized in a scalable way. We examine and compare two existing field-based approaches: Roger Barker's behaviour settings programme and Edwin Hutchins's distributed cognition programme.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile we applaud Bruineberg et al.'s analysis of the differences between Markov blankets and Friston blankets, we think it is not carried out to its ultimate consequences. There are reasons to think that, once Friston blankets are accepted as a theoretical construct, they do not do the work proponents of free energy principle (FEP) attribute to them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYarkoni correctly recognizes that one reason for psychology's generalizability crisis is the failure to account for variance within experiments. We argue that this problem, and the generalizability crisis broadly, is a necessary consequence of the stimulus-response paradigm widely used in psychology research. We point to another methodology, perturbation experiments, as a remedy that is not vulnerable to the same problems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe free energy principle (FEP) has been presented as a unified brain theory, as a general principle for the self-organization of biological systems, and most recently as a principle for a theory of every thing. Additionally, active inference has been proposed as the process theory entailed by FEP that is able to model the full range of biological and cognitive events. In this paper, we challenge these two claims.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWithin the ecological and enactive approaches in cognitive science, a tension exists in how the process of skill learning is understood. Skill learning can be understood in a narrow sense, as a process of bodily change over time, or in an extended sense, as a change in the structure of the animal-environment system. We propose to resolve this tension by rejecting the first understanding in favor of the second.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe applaud the ambition of Veissière et al.'s account of cultural learning, and the attempt to ground higher order thinking in embodied theory. However, the account is limited by loose terminology, and by its commitment to a view of the child learner as inference-maker.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe agree with Heyes that an explanation of human uniqueness must appeal to cultural evolution, and not just genes. Her account, though, focuses narrowly on internal cognitive mechanisms. This causes her to mischaracterize human behavior and to overlook the role of material culture.
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