Animals in Sociomaterial Processes: An Alternative to Inferential Processes in Animals’ Heads

Abstract

Mindreading and behaviour-reading depict social cognition as an inferential process, taking place inside the individual. This process consists either of mental state ascription (mindreading) or application of general rules (behaviour-reading). In this paper, I develop an alternative to both views, which focuses not on the processes in the animal’s head, but on the sociomaterial processes that animals are in and that organize their ongoing activities. Instead of an individual trying to predict the behaviour of another individual based on inferential abilities, the animal is responsive to affordances and how they are nested within the sociomaterial processes that make up the environment. I argue that this depiction of animal social cognition is preferable, because it is allows us to understand the social abilities of nonhuman animals free from our current understanding of human social cognition.

1. Introduction

A raven pecks a small piece of meat in the ground, covering it with a branch. Looking up, she notices a set of watchful eyes, takes out the food and hides it a few metres further along under the shade of a tree, facing the other with her back. Does the raven know what the other raven believes, desires or sees? Or does she predict what she will do based on behavioural rules? Similarly, a chimpanzee notices a banana in clear view of a dominant’s view and refrains from taking the banana. Is this because he knows what the dominant thinks and perceives, or does he rely on generalizations about behaviour? The former ability to infer others’ mental states is known mindreading or theory of mind ¹ (Dally et al. 2010; Emery & Clayton, 2008; Lurz, 2018). The latter is commonly referred to as behaviour-reading (Povinelli & Vonk, 2004). ² Lurz (2018) formulates the difference clearly:

In the field of animal social cognition, there are two generally recognized types of strategies that animals are understood to use to make such predictions. Behaviour-reading is one type of strategy. This strategy involves predicting the behaviour of others on the basis of observable cues that are perceived, believed, or otherwise represented to obtain without interpreting those cues as signs of underlying mental states (Lurz, 2009, 2011; Povinelli & Vonk, 2003). The observable cues can include bodily appearances (e.g. threatening posture), behaviours (e.g. reaching towards a particular object or place), and environmental relations (e.g. looking in the direction of a particular object or place); and the predictive process itself can be the result of individual learning or innate mechanisms. The other behaviour-predicting strategy is mindreading (aka theory of mind). This strategy involves inferring others’ mental states, such as sensory experiences, desires and beliefs, from represented observable cues, and using this information about others’ mental states to predict their behaviour (Premack and Woodruff, 1978). Here, too, the inferential and predictive processes involved may be the result of individual learning or innate mechanisms. (p. 229)

Despite long-standing debate, the so-called ‘logical problem’ of disentangling these two ‘generally recognized explanations’ remains unsolved (Lurz, 2018, see also Buckner, 2014). What’s more, within the context of human cognition, the theory of mind or mindreading paradigm has been greatly criticized, especially regarding the mind-body dualism that is visible in the difference between mindreading and behaviour-reading strategies (see, e.g. Leudar & Costall (2009, 2004). Accordingly, this paper does not directly confront the logical problem, but aims to make progress in the debate by contributing to a third alternative: being responsive to affordances. ³ The goal is to show that the work usually ascribed to inferential processes like mindreading and behaviour-reading can be done by responsiveness to affordances – opportunities for action – and how they are nested within sociomaterial processes (which is not to deny that some – important – internal processes are going on in animals’ nervous systems, just that those internal processes must not be understood as inferential).

The distinction between anthropogenic and biogenic theories (Lyon, 2005; Lyon & Keijzer, 2007; Lyon & Kuchling, 2021) illustrates why an affordance-based approach is worth pursuing. Anthropogenic approaches try to define essential features of abilities in humans and look for similar features in other animals; a style of reasoning that is ubiquitous in the mindreading debate. The result is a bias towards species that intuitively resemble us in some sense – being social, having large brains and behaving flexibly in a general sense – and that will inevitably be viewed as precursors or otherwise lesser versions of ourselves (Barrett, 2015). Perhaps this is no problem if our goal is to see what typically human-like features are present in nonhuman animals (though what is ‘typically human’ it itself contentious, see, e.g. Andrews, 2016a; Buckner, 2013), but what about comparing two or more nonhuman species, or humans and a nonhuman species without departing from ourselves? Anthropogenic approaches seem less useful here.

In contrast to anthropogenic ones, biogenic approaches assume that cognition ‘is best seen as a biological function’ (Keijzer, 2020). Understood as a biological function, cognition ‘contributes to the persistence and wellbeing of an organism embedded in an ecological niche with which it must continually contend’ (Lyon & Keijzer, 2007, p. 137). The ecological approach (Gibson, 1979/2015) alludes to the same idea, as affordances are defined in relation to the biological ‘constitution’ of animals and their ecological niche. Hence, the social skills of animals must be explained in terms of animal-environment relations, even in cases that intuitively really do seem to require inference. Such an approach opens up a multitude of questions that address similarities and differences between species, and can help us to see ‘what it means to be any kind of animal, and not whether other animals are more or less like us’ (Barrett, 2011, p. 18).

This paper starts by discussing some arguments in the animal social cognition literature that rely on affordances, with the aim of highlighting some important differences with inference-based approaches (Section 2). Then, the importance of understanding the environment as consisting of processed nested within one another is discussed, to enrich the discussion in the second section (Section 3). The next section discusses two examples – humans playing football and ravens re-caching food – as illustrations of individual responsiveness to nested affordances (Section 4). After that, it is discussed how social cognition or social interaction can be understood as an individuals’ know-how of responding to affordances to make distal affordances available, ‘playing the role’ of a process in which affordances are nested (Section 5). I end by arguing how the account outlined here allows us to understand animals’ social skills non-anthropocentrically and by addressing some general implications for future social cognition research in nonhuman animals (Section 6).

2. Affordances and Animal Social Cognition

The ecological approach differs from mindreading and behaviour-reading in its central commitments and general focus. The biggest divergence concerns the role of inference and how perception is characterized. It is helpful to highlight these key differences first.

Mindreading approaches are committed to the idea that something can be inferred from directly perceivable behaviour – namely, mental states such as beliefs, intentions and perspective (Call & Tomasello, 2008; Krupenye & Call, 2019; Krupenye et al. 2016; see also Andrews, 2016b). Mental states are understood as hidden causes of behaviour. Behaviour-reading accounts reject this ‘extra’ inference to mental states in the case of nonhuman animals – notably, without denying the existence of mental states as hidden causes as such (for instance, in the case of humans). As an example, Povinelli writes that a behavioural rule such as ‘Don’t go after the food if the dominant was oriented towards it’ is sufficient, and that ‘One doesn’t need to add the additional ToM clause: “because he has seen it, and therefore knows where it is.”’ (Gallagher & Povinelli, 2012, p. 151), even though humans may sometimes use this ‘additional ToM clause’ as well.

Despite these differences in what nonhuman animals infer, behaviour-reading accounts are similarly committed to the idea that something must be inferred from behaviour – namely, abstract categories or rules. As Povinelli writes, ‘the behavioral account does require a hidden premise; namely, the behavioral rule, the result of some process of abstraction. In this respect, the behavioral rule hypothesis, as much as the ToM account, understands the process to involve inference.’ (p. 151). This agreement can be attributed to the assumption that ‘the information available to sensory systems is impoverished, ambiguous, and otherwise insufficient to support perception’ and that therefore ‘these theories assume construction of representations or inferences to supplement the information.’ (Gibson & Pick, 2000, p. 10).

The ecological approach rejects this characterization of perception as the passive reception of stimuli and, consequently, the necessity of inference to enrich those stimuli (Gibson, 1979/2015; Gibson & Pick, 2000). Perception, instead, is understood as an organism’s responsiveness to the environment’s affordances (Gibson, 1979/2015; Chemero, 2009; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). Affordances or opportunities for action are what animals perceive – see, hear, smell, touch, etc. – most fundamentally and what constrains or organizes their actions (Gibson, 1979/2015, p. 411; Costall, 1995, p. 470). Additionally, perceiving – in contrast with mindreading and behaviour-reading – is understood as something that takes place over time and goes on. Action and perception are thus inseparable; perception presupposes action and vice versa. In other words, perceiving is continuous, perceptually controlled activity. ⁴ Finally, ‘perceiving’ is not first and foremost consciously attending to something, but often bodily, non-deliberative activity. For instance, instead of seeing something brown-ish, shaped like two connected ovals, roughly textured, and about two centimetres in length which is categorized as ‘a peanut’, a bird responds to the peanuts ‘edibility’, which is both ‘perceiving’ it and preparing to pick up and eat the thing. As Costall (1995) has put it, ‘What, fundamentally, we attend to in our surroundings are not shapes, colours and orientations of surfaces in our surroundings, but rather the meaning of things for action.’ (p. 470).

Affordance-based accounts are uncommon in the animal cognition literature in general, and in the debate on mindreading and behaviour-reading specifically. Nonetheless, Gallagher and Vincent (2018; see also Gallagher & Povinelli, 2012), as well as Barrett and Henzi (2005) and Barrett et al. (2007) provide several interest insights into the work that affordances can do specifically in the context of animal cognition, to put mindreading and behaviour-reading out of work. Their accounts overlap in some ways and diverge on others – and do so as well in relation to ecological psychology – but nonetheless provide a good starting point, which I later aim to enrich with a discussion of the nested structure of the environment, drawing on work in ecological psychology and process thinking.

Gallagher & Vincent (2018) give the example of the affordances a subordinate chimpanzee is responsive to in the presence of a dominant in a food-competition false belief task. In such settings, the authors argue, chimpanzees do not infer ‘hidden mental states’, but rely on ‘other’s posture, movements, gestures, facial expressions, gaze directions, vocal intonations, etc.’ (p. 281). This is no behaviour-reading, since it does not require inference: the subordinate does not first consider (either consciously or subconsciously) that the dominant is gazing in a particular direction and has an aggressive posture and then decides what he should or should not do by relying on behavioural rules. The interaction is better construed in terms of ongoing coordination, where ‘my perceptions are feeding my responses or potential responses to you, and I perceive your actions in terms of our continuing interactions’ (Gallagher & Povinelli, 2012, p. 162). Social interaction, then, is a matter of ‘practical or pragmatic (and specifically social) reason – being able to see what is possible in a socially constrained situation.’ (Gallagher & Vincent, 2018, p. 283). Social interaction is guided primarily situational and developmental constraints, and so does not need to be ‘supplemented’ with inferences. Those constraints pertain to the chimpanzees’ ways of living together – their ways of doing things, of interacting with each other in particular situations (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Andrews, 2016a).

A second and related difference with inference-based accounts, is that the chimpanzees ‘are not primarily observers but rather participants with respect to social cognition’ (Gallagher & Vincent, 2018, p. 281). Elaborating on their case, they write that, Much of what unfolds in this food-competition experiment has to do with the social roles of the chimpanzees, that influence the subordinate chimpanzees’ perception with respect to possibilities for action. […] From previous interactions with the dominant chimpanzee and other group mates, the subordinate chimpanzees have become just that: subordinate. A subordinate’s perception of the mutually observable food item is already informed by her history of interactions.’ (Gallagher & Vincent, 2018, p. 282/3)

What Gallagher and Vincent (2018) suggest here is that the chimpanzee becomes a subordinate through a history of interactions with dominant chimpanzees. Interacting with a dominant increasingly organizes the behaviour of the subordinate, making the subordinate responsive to what to do and what not to do given the situation at hand, including the dominant’s posture, gaze, and so on. In becoming subordinate, that is, and given particular circumstances, the chimpanzee will continue take advantage of some affordances (such as grabbing food when the dominant’s gaze is not turned towards the food) and refrain from taking some affordances in other circumstances (such as grabbing food in plain sight of the dominant). So, although the latter set of affordances continues to be available as well, pre-existing social practices constrain subsequent actions – that is, the actual taking advantage of those affordances. ⁵ The fact that the subordinate perceives the world in terms of those rather than other possibilities, because he has his own history, demonstrates also that he cannot simply be regarded as an observant. Ecological psychologists – more so than Gallagher here – also emphasize that being a participant indispensably involves actual movement: animals move to change the situation and their relation to others, and this too may avert the need for inferences (Reed, 1996; Heft, 2001; see also Section 5).

These situational constraints on perception and action are similarly emphasized by Barrett et al. (2007). Writing in the context of monkeys’ social interactions, they argue that individual animals ‘do not need to hold abstract conceptual notions of ‘bonds’ or track others’ relationships because they can gauge circumstances directly by looking at what is happening around them [e.g. distance to others, grooming to get into zone of tolerance of dominant, etc.]: the spatial structuring of the animals in their environment may obviate the need for certain kinds of high-level processing in the animals themselves.’ (p. 568) Though animals need to develop a sensitivity to how spatial structuring constrains actions within their population, it is the structure of the environment that organize the actions of individuals, rather than inferences about the behaviour or mental states of individuals. As Barrett et al. (2007) suggest, this kind of ‘just in time’ learning – responding to circumstances as they occur – is much less demanding than ‘just in case’ learning – which requires pre-conceived ideas about the world. Affordance based approaches therefore also take issue with the individualistic assumptions of mindreading and behaviour-reading approaches: the idea that social cognition means predicting what another individual will do. Often, inference-based prediction is unnecessary: what is required is sensitivity to social context. Being responsive to what is happening in the environment (including what other animals are doing) and what oneself therefore can do, can ‘take over’ the function usually ascribed to mindreading and behaviour-reading.

3. The Sociomaterial Nesting of Affordances

The previous section described affordances as opportunities for action that constrain or organize the actions of animals. In addition, the importance of learning to attend to relevant aspects of situations that constrain action was highlighted. This section argues for the importance of recognizing the environment as consisting of nested processes for understanding how affordances organize animals’ social interactions, rendering inference unnecessary (see Van Dijk and Rietveld, 2021; Van Dijk, 2021b; Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016; Gastelum, 2020; Palatinus & Michaels, 2014). Note that I talk here about responsiveness to affordances, not the ‘ontology’ of affordances. ⁶

Affordances, though sometimes discussed as such, do not occur in isolation (Gibson, 1979/2015). Affordances are always ‘nested’ within other processes on larger and smaller spatiotemporal scales. As Heft (2018) puts it: ‘From an ecological point of view, the environment has a nested structure, and any action-environment transaction needs to be assessed in relation to the environmental structures that are relevant to the action. Actions in human habitats are coupled to structure not only at the level of affordances but also at the level of structures within which affordances are nested.’ (p. 119). This nested structure is not fixed but consists of processes occurring over multiple timescales. For instance, whether a peanut will be available to eat for a bird depends on its nesting (e.g. safe place to eat, the activities of fungi, chemical processes going on inside the peanut itself). The bird’s own activity, too, can be viewed as a process that makes the affordance available or unavailable. This implies that affordances (such as the ‘edibility’ of the peanut) can in fact also be understood as a (temporarily stable) process, nested within, and becoming available in relation to, these other processes.

Another helpful example that shows how affordances are nested is switching lanes with your car. The affordance of switching lanes is available (or unavailable) in relation to the position, movement and speed of cars surrounding you as well as your own position and speed over some period of time. This affordance persists – remains available – by either slowing down or speeding up depending on how fast the other cars are going. As long as certain relations hold between processes, the affordance of lane-switching is available for the driver (cf. Barrett, Henzi & Rendall’s observation about ‘just-in-time’ learning). Or consider a third example (one that will be taken up later): a football affords passing, depending on where one’s teammates and the opponents are running to, and hence is also a temporarily stable opportunity for action within other ongoing processes. Despite the fact that sometimes affordances can be described apart from their nesting, then, in real-life situation there is no clear separation of being responsive to affordances of the material environment and the wider situation in which the affordance is nested (Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017) because the availability of affordances always depends on this wider context. Moreover, situations consist not just of single affordances but a multitude of affordances that animals can simultaneously respond to see Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017, p. 2; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Rietveld, Denys & Van Westen, 2018), as these examples show (e.g. in the car: giving gas, steering, watching behind you through the mirror and switching lanes).

What the football and car driving example also illustrate, is that in most situations nesting of affordances in not just ‘material’ but sociomaterial. In Heft’s (2018) discussion of ‘places’, he does not refer just to the ‘material’ or ‘physical’ space but equally to the regular social practices that inseparably belong to those places, something that Gallagher & Vincent (2018) and Barrett et al. (2007) do too. ⁷ In fact, if we return to the edibility of the peanut, the activities of other animals can be understood as processes alongside other processes that influence whether the bird will perceive the peanut as edible. That is to say, some processes are other animals responding to affordances in the same situation. In species with hierarchical social structures, for instance, a superordinate’s actions – his response to affordances in the place – constrains a subordinate’s taking advantage of the ‘edibility’ affordance. In this way, affordances ‘become nested and hang together’ (Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2021, p. 4).

The fact that affordances are nested within sociomaterial processes makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Animals adapt to environments that have always already been tainted by the activities of other animals – both what they are actually doing and how they modify the landscape. As Costall (1995) put it, ‘the nature we confront is nature already transformed […] Any ecological psychology worth the name has to include living beings within the natural order of things, and recognize the difference they make. Otherwise, the social, the cultural, and perhaps life itself, are destined to become the secondary qualities of ecological realism’ (Costall, 1995, 478; see also Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017; Costall & Leudar, 1996; Costall, 2001; Ingold, 1996; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2021; Heft, 2018). There is only one environment, and that environment is sociomaterial.

Therefore, on an affordance-based approach, social situations in which one interacts with other animals require, in a basic sense, the same skills as those required for responsiveness to a peanut’s edibility. In this vein, Gibson (1979/2015) wrote that ‘animals and other persons can only give off information about themselves insofar as they are tangible, audible, odorous, testable and visible’ (p. 135), making the point that the means that animals have available to understand other animals are the same means by which they navigate the ‘material’ environment (see also Reed, 1996, p. 98, Leudar & Costall, 2009). Far from reducing animate beings to inanimate matter, however, or denying the major differences that exist between living and non-living entities, an ecological perspective points to the intertwinement of material and social aspects of the environment as sociomaterial for understanding social interaction. As Van Dijk & Rietveld (2017) write, social interaction ‘includes both being responsive to the opportunities for action, the affordances, offered by the material environment and to the opportunities for social engagement offered by other people. […] there is no clear separation of the two because in acting skilfully one is attuned to the situation as a whole.’ (Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017, p. 2). So, while ‘The richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment are provided by other animals and, for us, other people’ (Gibson, 1979/2015, p. 127), the availability of these affordances too cannot be separated from their wider context, and interacting with other animals includes both what others affords (such as grasping them, say) and how their actions make other affordances of the situation available. Again, from an evolutionary perspective, this sociomaterial intertwinement seems plausible: what has evolved are more refined and elaborate systems for perceiving and acting that allow animals to respond flexibly in complex and changing sociomaterial situations, instead of a cognitive capacity specifically and narrowly as a ‘cognitive solution’ for specific ‘problems’ such as the difficulties of social life (cf. Cisek, 2019).

Concretely, this sociomaterial intertwinement implies that to understand social interactions the structure of the environment – as consisting of nested, sociomaterial processes – must be taken into account. Understanding social interaction should thus start with an understanding of how affordances are nested within sociomaterial processes, that is, how those processes constrain or control individuals’ responsiveness to affordances. ⁸

4. On Football Players and Ravens’ Responsiveness to Affordances

The theoretical background sketched, in this section two examples of individuals’ responsiveness to sociomaterially nested affordances are described and compared: the human activity of football and the corvid activity of caching. The former is described to make the latter more intuitive, because the pre-reflective kind of engagement that characterizes football and other sports is, I believe, a helpful analogy for thinking about nonhuman animals.

Consider this example: From an individual perspective – that of the right winger, say – affordances continuously become available and unavailable based on ongoing processes, and constrain or organize his activities. Some affordances are more persistent than others. The field affords walking on for him, clearly, and it does as long as the ground will be there and the opponent won’t break his legs. Similarly, the ball affords kicking for him as long as he is in ball possession. The goal affords scoring if he manages to come close enough. The defender on the winger’s team coming in ball possession on the far right, affords positioning oneself to the right. This affordance shows up as a possibility for action in relation to the momentary position of the defender, the winger himself and the opponent, but could become unavailable just as quickly. Running towards the corner flag, the space in the penalty box affords passing to while the goal stops to afford scoring. Throughout this action, affordances come and go as the situation unfolds and the ‘place’ – as the intertwining of the ‘material’ field and the ‘social’ activities of players – continues to change. ⁹

As anyone who has ever played football – or any other sport, for that matter – will know, players are not deliberately aware of the effects of their actions on the game at large. As Heft (2018) writes, ‘places are “backgrounds of tacit understanding”, so we’re mostly unaware of them’ (p. 100). Nor are individuals deliberately planning their actions or aware of future possibilities; they let their actions be organized by the ongoing situation, by what is happening around them, based on extensive prior experience. This is not only true for immediately available affordances, such as kicking the ball, but also for positioning oneself at the best possible spot – and action that requires responsiveness to multiple affordances and to how affordances are nested. As one becomes more experienced, a player learns to take more of the wider situations into account, thereby tuning in on the best possibilities for action given that situation.

Before explaining the matter of taking more of the ongoing situation into account (see Sections 4 and 5), we can draw a comparison here with re-caching ravens. Being a re-caching raven, I believe, is not quite unlike being a football player – or at the very least, the analogy helps to make sense of raven’s pilfering strategies. First of all, it is well-known that members of the corvid family use several anti-theft strategies. Grodzinski & Clayton (2010):

When observed, western scrub-jays preferentially cache in trays placed in the shade compared with those placed in well-lit areas (Dally et al. 2004), and in trays placed far from the observer compared with those placed closer to it (Dally et al. 2005b). Ravens tend to be further away from other individuals during caching than at other times (Bugnyar & Kotrschal, 2002a). Thus, storers act to decrease the quality of the information available to the observer (Dally et al. 2005b). When it is possible to altogether deny others of visual information by caching out of view, ravens preferentially cache behind objects that prevent observers from seeing (Bugnyar & Kotrschal, 2002a; see also Bugnyar & Heinrich, 2005) and scrub-jays prefer a tray that is out of view compared with an equidistant tray in view of the observer (Dally et al. 2005b). Scrub-jays do not make these distinctions when the observer’s view is blocked completely and caching is performed ‘in-private’ (Dally et al. 2004, 2005a), or when caching in far or close trays is observed by the jays’ partner (Dally et al. 2006b). Thus, jays do not simply prefer to cache in those locations that happen to deprive observers from information. Rather, they incorporate the pilfering risk (and aversity) specific to each caching event and act only when it is relevant (p. 981).

In addition, throughout development, corvids clearly do learn to take the wider situation into account in some way, just like football players who improve their skills. Whereas, the simple act of caching is already performed by very young corvids (such as the simple act of kicking a ball is performed by complete amateur players ¹⁰ ) it does improve with experience. As Grodzinski & Clayton (2010) write,

[I]mprovements of caching efficiency in corvids, including cache-protection strategies, require experience (Emery & Clayton, 2001; Bugnyar et al. 2007a). Young storers need to learn what makes a good cache site, how to cache different food items (e.g. killing or paralysing prey before caching) and how to deal with the risk of pilfering. After they have mastered their techniques, adult corvids incorporate many factors into their caching decision-making. (p. 977)

It is precisely the incorporation of many factors – which include the activities of other ravens (Grodzsinki & Clayton, 2010; Dally et al. 2010) – during caching and especially re-caching that leads to the idea that ravens, as well as other corvids such as jays, are mindreaders or behaviour-readers. Surely, in taking such factors into account, these animals must infer what the other will do, as they cannot perceive, at this moment, what the other is up to – something they clearly seem to know, given their non-random habits of re-caching? Considering the analogy between wingers and ravens, we can also describe this behaviour in terms of their responsiveness to nested affordances.

Consider, by analogy with both the football example and Grodzinski & Clayton’s (2010) description above, a raven (the cacher) who notices being watched by another raven (the pilferer) while caching a piece of meat. From the perspective of the cacher, affordances continuously become available and unavailable for some time based on ongoing processes, and constrain or organize his activities. Some affordances, again, are more persistent than others. The ground affords walking on, most of the time. The branches of trees afford landing on. But also, the pilferer’s behaviour affords going a few steps in the opposite direction. The pilferer’s watchful eyes afford as-if caching. This latter possibility for action shows up in relation to the momentary position of the pilferer in relation to the cacher herself, but could disappear just as quickly as the pilferer moves forward. The shades of a large tree a few metres further away affords actual caching, just as the place behind a tiny rock, given that the pilferer’s view is obstructed. Throughout this action, affordances come and go as the situation unfolds, as the place – again, the intertwining of the ‘material’ situation and the ‘social’ activities of the pilferer – changes.

Similar to the right winger, we can understand the raven’s activity in terms of responsiveness to affordances nested in ongoing situations; activity without deliberate planning and unaware of their ‘tacit understanding’ of the situation, but nonetheless keenly attuned to the situation based on prior experience. This holds up not merely for actions like walking, but also for finding a good spot to cache to minimize the chances of pilfering. The cacher understands the pilferer not by abstracting from the situation – becoming better at inferring concealed intentions or behavioural rules based on the other’s behaviour – but by being more attuned or attentive to the ongoing situation as a whole which includes the actions of the other. As mentioned, in such social interactions, being responsive to ‘material’ and ‘social’ affordances can in real-life situations not be pulled apart. In other words, the animal learns to attend to those processes in which affordances are nested. As Costall and Leudar (1996) have put is, ‘the situations alternative would be to regard development not as the individualization and increased isolation of the subject, but as the increasing ability to partake of what the social world can afford an individual’ (p. 104). Animals do not merely look at, but also participate in and influence social situations. The next section will discuss, in more detail, how this responsiveness develops in animals.

5. Making Affordances Available Through Activity

How does one know how to act in order to make certain affordances available? For instance, how does the winger know how passing the defender on the right will get him into scoring position? And how does the raven know how walking a few metres along in the shadows will decrease the chances of pilfering? The answer to all of these questions is that animals, through practice, have become attuned to ongoing processes in which affordances are nested, including, essentially, their own activities. Or rather, one is continuously moving in coordination with other ongoing processes to make affordances available.

The key difference with mindreading and behaviour-reading then is that animals become increasingly better at attending to relevant aspects of ongoing sociomaterial processes, rather than abstracting from the behaviours of animals. Mindreading accounts are inclined to postulate an inferential process precisely because they start from a ‘frozen perspective’. In analysing social interaction, they bring to a stop, theoretically speaking, what is in fact an ongoing process and try to explain the interaction by considering the kind of processes going on in the head of the animal. But frozen perspectives, as Gibson (1979/2015) observed, are uncommon. He noted that not moving at all is a special case – a pause in action – rather than the other way around, even if action is only minimal: ‘if an animal has eyes at all it swivels its head around and it goes from place to place’, and the reason for this is that ‘The single, frozen field of view provides only impoverished information about the world.’ (p. xiv). To gain more information about the world and to perceive affordances, animals move. Uncertainty about how to act in situations, including social situations, can be reduced by actually moving, provoking a reaction, changing one’s perspective – that is, by activity in the world, rather than thinking, activity in the head (see also Dewey, 1958/2000). This seemingly trivial observation has important implications.

Given that individuals join a world where affordances have become nested within sociomaterial practices in certain ways, they can, put colloquially, learn to ‘play the role’ of that process. They learn not only to be sensitive to unfolding processes, but to regulate those processes themselves through their own activities (see Reed, 1996, p. 138). Put differently, since one’s own activities are also processes in which affordances are nested, responding to affordances is never just an end but also a means to make other affordances available. Each response to an affordance is a means to make other affordances available or unavailable. Importantly, even responding to an immediately available affordance is a process that takes time: a raven can be responsive to the edibility of a piece of meat, but the actual response takes time. With experience, this process can become extended spatiotemporally. While compared to immediately available affordances (e.g. a raven eating a piece of meat right in front of her) one has less ‘control’ over such distal affordances since they become (un)available depending on more ongoing processes, the basic structure of making affordances available is preserved across longer timescales.

The difference between responding to immediate as compared to distal affordances is a question of the spatiotemporal scale that we take into account: some affordances require activity over longer timescales to become available (cf. Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016; Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017; Gastelum, 2020). As Gibson & Pick (2000) write, ‘Achievement of a primary affordance, the function of the task overall, is accomplished with greater complexity as subunits that involve use of varied means begin to be nested within the task as a whole. The means for accomplishing a task is learned as an affordance itself, but it can later develop into a subunit embedded in the larger and longer task structure’. (p. 151). That is, the activity of responding to an affordance becomes nested within – a subunit of – responding to another, distal affordance. If we understand activities as processes that make affordances available, then longer activities are processes that can make distal affordances available.

To illustrate, reconsider the affordance of scoring for the right winger. This affordance is nested within his own activity of passing the defender and the actions of other defenders. Passing the defender makes the affordance of scoring available. The winger, through practice, has learnt that acting on this affordance (itself a process) makes other affordances available, given other ongoing processes. Relations between affordances indeed form a complex meshwork, since each animal’s activities changes the activities of others on the field. ¹¹ For instance, the winger’s own movement are, for the defender, also processes that make some affordances available or unavailable – setting the defender up to respond in particular ways. Therefore, the winger must continuously stay in touch with those processes as they ‘change direction’ and make the affordance unavailable again.

Now what is it that animals are learning, exactly, in becoming responsive to distal affordances? To illustrate this, it helps to make a contrast with mindreading and behaviour-reading accounts. Mindreading and behaviour-reading accounts would say that animals become better at inferring, from behaviour, mental states or behavioural rules. They learn to abstract from particularities: deducing mental states or behavioural rules, which are then applied to novel situations. An affordance-based approach would argue for precisely the opposite: animals become better at attending to those processes in which affordances are nested. What they learn – though far from being all there is to learning on an ecological approach ¹² – hence, is ways of attending coupled to ways of acting, which is what becoming responsive to distal affordances entails. Put differently, animals do not abstract from particular situations; instead, they become better at distinguishing situations in increasingly effective ways, through patterned and economic ways of attending (Gibson & Pick, 2000). Such situations are not distinguished like a game of ‘find the differences’, of course; situations go on, and hence animals learn to perceive, given what is happening around them and what they are doing themselves, which affordances are and can be made available. Being attentive to processes in which affordances are nested, one thus doesn’t need to continuously track all ongoing processes. What is learnt is to look for sufficient information for one’s ongoing activities. Much like knowing that something which disappears behind an object will reappear after a particular amount of time (see also Heft, 2020), temporarily attending to different aspects of the ongoing situation is often enough to know how those processes will unfold. One becomes better at where and how long to attend to, responding increasingly to the minimal, optimal information available (Gibson & Pick, 2000, p. 157). As Gibson & Pick (2000) write, ‘Not all available information is relevant for differentiating affordances (100).

A comparison between novice and expert behaviour may help to further illustrate the development responsiveness to distal affordances. Someone who just starts playing football doesn’t know where to look, with the result that if he receives the ball, he must pay full attention to the ball at his feet and keeping the ball there while dribbling. Therefore isn’t prepared for what best to do next and needs a lot of time for his subsequent actions. Improving his game means that he will need to focus less on his feet and learns to shift his attention and move across the field. That is, he has reduced the information to specify dribbling with the ball – from visual (looking at the ball) and tactile (feeling with his feet), say – to only the minimal information required to know where the ball is given one’s ongoing actions – such that he can start to look around for ongoing processes in which distal affordances are nested. With more practice, then, attentional patterns continue to improve, tuning in on those affordances that are most likely to lead to scoring chances. An expert looks at the defence, but before that he has already looked at the opponent’s defence line and the striker and midfielder’s position – ongoing processes – and does not need to look at his feet. Looking around, what he sees is implicitly recognized as temporary moments within larger-scale processes in which affordances are nested. As such, when the professional comes into posession, he needs barely any time to act – he has drastically reduced the opportunities for action by looking continuously at relevant aspects of the unfolding situation. Prior experience thus narrows down affordances by means of an increased attunement to how affordances are nested and hang together.

The case for the raven is not quite unlike that of the right winger. We might think of a newborn individual as being guided by immediately available affordances, such as picking up things, hopping a few metres along, drilling food in the soil, and so on. These are the first affordances that a raven young might learn, unresponsive to how these are nested in other processes including the practices of other ravens. The ‘state’ of a ‘novice’ is not knowing what to attend to and thus having too many opportunities for action. She has the food in her beak, for instance, and caching requires all her attention – looking, feeling, perhaps smelling and hearing too. Through experience she reduces the information required to respond to this affordance, only needing to feel what is going on, such that she can attend to other ongoing processes that are going on around her at the time of caching, thus becoming better at perceiving how affordances are nested. The affordance of re-caching is nested within her own activity of moving a few metres away from the other. Walking a few metres away makes the opportunity for caching available. Through practice, she learns that acting on this affordance (itself a process) makes other affordances available. She has learnt to play these and other roles. Again, this availability is given other ongoing processes, such as what the other raven does in response to her moving away – as moving away for the pilferer is a process that makes the affordance of pilfering unavailable. Like the right winger, the raven must stay in touch with those processes as they change direction and make the affordance unavailable.

It is worth mentioning again that being responsive to distal affordances based on the affordances one is currently responding to, is quite unlike watching a movie and thinking ‘I’ve seen this movie before, I know what will happen next’. It is not deductive, and one doesn’t reach a conclusion that subsequently evokes a response. Instead, someone’s activities are continuously organized not only by the affordances that one can immediately act on, but by means of the distal affordances that such actions make available. As such, attending to relevant aspects of ongoing processes already presupposes acting in a certain way to be able to attend in a certain way. One’s current position is always already informed by what has been and is currently going on. So, the ongoing process organize the animal’s activity as much as his activity organizes what he attends to. It is a continuous coordination, informed by prior experience, rather than a linear process, such as mindreading and behaviour-reading. Moving to another spot is responding continuously to affordances as they come and go, as the processes in which those affordances are nested – the activities of the other(s) in the situation – unfold.

Proponents of mindreading and behaviour-reading might object that, by focussing not just on the prediction of individual behaviour, social interaction is no longer the main subject. However, from an ecological perspective, subjects are often not isolated as they are on cognitivist views: one of my points throughout this paper has been that social cognition is not about predicting individual behaviour, but about learning to act in situations that involve others, that is, becoming responsive to affordances nested within sociomaterial processes. Animals do not learn what other individuals will do by means of behavioural rules of mental states. They learn how they are regulated by and, more importantly, can regulate ongoing sociomaterial situations through action. Indeed, it is action in ‘socially constrained situations’ (Gallagher & Vincent, 2018) – that is, an animal’s actions in situations that include the actions of others that make certain possibilities for action temporarily (un)available for each other – that is most important to understand the ‘social skills’ of animals, not inference.

6. Conclusion

In Section 1 I mentioned, echoing Barrett & Henzi (2005) and Barrett (2011) that an affordance-based approach avoids a bias towards species that intuitively resemble us (and that will therefore be inevitably viewed as precursors or otherwise lesser versions of ourselves) and, relatedly, that it allows us to understand the social skills of nonhuman animals free from our current understanding of how human cognition works. We can now see that it does so by providing the necessary constraints for thinking about the social skills or sociocognitive abilities of animals, in the sense that ‘perception-action mechanisms constrain (in the sense of canalize) the evolution of high-level processes’ (Barrett et al. 2007, p. 569, see also Osvath et al. 2014). What we call ‘social cognition’ emerges dynamically and over time, out of the practices of animals with their abilities for perceiving and acting in their particular niches. Once such practices have become relatively stable in a population, affordances can become nested in them. An example is case was how the interaction between pilferer and cacher in corvids can be described as interconnected processes – alongside several other processes – in which the affordance of re-caching is nested, and newborn individuals become attuned to and learn to play the role of such processes, thus learning how to make caching affordances available. It is thus the nested structure of the – sociomaterial – environment, that animals can rely on to know what to do given their goals. In other words, if we understand the sociomaterial processes within a population – processes that itself have emerged out of the situated practices of those individuals – and understand how individuals become organized by these processes, there is no need to postulate inferential processes. Hence, the social skills of animals remain firmly tied to their biological constitution and ecological niche – there is no need for mental processes that operate largely independently of such biological and ecological constraints (Van Woerkum 2021). Indeed, evolutionarily speaking, such a close interrelation between organism and environment, the animals using perception and action flexibly to act in a complex, changing environment which includes other living beings, makes more sense than the evolution of a mindreading or behaviour-reading capacity that is specifically dedicated to the problems of social life only (alongside other dedicated capacities for solving other problems).

If one accepts this approach, action and perception – or, perceptually controlled action – are fundamentally and constitutively important for complex social interaction, because by moving and the world moving around them, animals become attuned to affordances and the processes in which affordances are nested. Action and exploration is often extremely limited in mindreading experiments, however, likely due to the implicit assumption that sociocognitive processes, in some sense, reside in the heads of individuals. This means that we fail to learn a great deal about the flexibility of their behaviour, the different things they would do given ongoing processes in the situation. Improving our understanding on this point, means that we ought to look not merely at whether animals pass or fail a test, but also to questions such as: What are they attending – moving and perceiving – to during re-caching? (cf. Barret, Henzi & Rendall, 2007). How do their attentional skills change throughout development? Do they have different patterns of movement and attention in different environments or in the presence of different individuals? When do they refrain from caching and decide on a different course? We can also start to ask similar questions about other animals, gathering knowledge about important sociomaterial processes in their niches, how their skills develop during development and how their actions vary with changing circumstances. By focussing on action and perception in sociomaterial practices, we have a method to understand nonhuman animals free from our ideas about how we navigate social situations.

As a final note, the view I have defended here fits well within current research that aims to put mindreading or theory of mind back in context. Understanding others in terms of mental states, for instance, might only be possible if one inhabits an environment similar to humans (see Andrews, 2016a; Barrett, 2011; Gallagher, 2021; Hutto & Myin, 2017; Moyal-Sharrock, 2019; McGeer, 2007; Zawidski, 2018). From this perspective, we can also start to understand why, where and when we use mindreading as opposed to our more basic abilities to respond to nested affordances that we share with many nonhuman animals (Andrews, 2011; 2016a). However, although these basic abilities may be shared in a general sense, they are also unique – specific to the sociomaterial processes that our niche consists of and our specific ways of perceiving and acting – just like they are for all other animals.