AAP2010 Abstracts
Use the form below to search abstracts by Author, Institue or Keyword.
| Title | Dr |
| First Name | Karola |
| Surname | Stotz |
| Institution | University of Sydney |
| Title of Paper | Human Nature and Cognitive-developmental niche construction |
| Select a Stream | Other |
| Abstract | Recent theories in cognitive science have begun to focus on the active role of organisms in shaping their own environment, and the role of these environmental resources for cognition. Approaches such as embodied and embedded, distributed and particularly extended cognition look beyond ‘what is inside your head’ to the old Gibsonian question of ‘what your head is inside of’ and with which it forms a wider whole – its internal and external cognitive niche. Since these view have been treated as a radical departure from the received view of cognition, their proponents have looked to similar extended views within (the philosophy of) biology, most notably the niche construction thesis. This paper argues that there is an even closer perspective, developmental systems theory and ontogenetic niche construction. They ask not ‘what is inside the genes you inherited’, but ‘what the inherited genes are inside of’ and with which they form a wider whole – their internal and external ontogenetic niche, understood as the set of epigenetic, social, ecological and symbolic legacies inherited by the organism as necessary developmental resources. To the cognizing agent the epistemic niche presents itself not just as a partially self-engineered selective niche, as the niche construction paradigm will have it, but even more so as a partially self-engineered ontogenetic niche, a problem-solving resource for individual development and learning (both in term of modified informational environments and informational processing equipment). This move should be beneficial for coming to grips with our own (including cognitive) nature: what is most distinctive about humans is their developmentally plastic brains immersed into a well-engineered, cumulatively constructed cognitive-developmental niche. |
