Adapting the Environment Instead of Oneself

Abstract

This article examines some of the methods used by animals and humans to adapt their environment. Because there are limits on the number of different tasks a creature can be designed to do well in, creatures with the capacity to redesign their environments have an adaptive advantage over those who can adapt only passively to existing environmental structures. To clarify environmental redesign, l rely on the formal notion of a task environment as a directed graph in which the nodes are states and the links are actions. One natural form of redesign is to change the topology of this graph structure so as to increase the likelihood of task success or to reduce its expected cost, measured in physical terms. This may be done by eliminating initial states, hence eliminating choice points; by changing the action repertoire; by changing the consequence function; and, lastly, by adding choice points. Another major method for adapting the environment is to change its cognitive congeniality. Such changes leave the state space formally intact but reduce the number and cost of mental operations needed for task success; they reliably increase the speed, accuracy, or robustness of performance. The last section of the article describes several of these epistemic or complementary actions found in human performance.

Keywords

adaptation task environment redesign epistemic actions;complementary actions

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Batali, J. , & Kitcher, P. (1995). Evolution of altruism in optional and compulsory games. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 175, 161-171.

Brandon, R.N. (1990). Adaptation and environment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Butler, D.R. (1995). Zoogeomorplcology: Animals as geomorphic agents . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Diaper, D. (Ed.). (1989). Task analysis for human computer interaction. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood.

Duffy, T. M. , & Jonassen, D. H. (Eds.). (1992). Constructivism and the technology of instruction: A conversation. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Elster, J. (1979). Ulysses and the sirens: Studies in rationality and irrationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Fisher, Sir R. A. (1930). The genetical theory of natural selection. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Gigerenzer, G. , & Hoffrage, U. (1995). How to improve Bayesian reasoning without instruction: Frequency formats. Psychological Review, 102, 684-704.

Hammond, K.J. , Converse, T.M. , & Grass, J.W. (1995). The stabilization of environments. Artificial Intelligence, 72, 305-327.

10.

Harel, D. (1987). Algorithmics: The spirit of computation. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

11.

Horn, H.S. (1979). Adaptation from the perspective of optimality . In A. T. Solbrig , S. Jain , G. B. Johnson & P. H. Raven (Eds.), Topics in plant population biology. New York: Columbia University Press.

12.

Howard, R.A. (1966). Information value theory. IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics, 2, 22-26.

13.

Hunt, G.R. (1996). Manufacture and use of hook-tools by New Caledonian crows [letter to editor]. Nature, 379, 249.

14.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

15.

Kirsh, D. (1990). When is information explicitly represented? In P Hanson (Ed.), Information, language, and cognition: The Vancouver studies in cognitive science (vol 1). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

16.

Kirsh, D. (1995a). Complementary strategies: Why we use our hands when we think. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

17.

Kirsh, D. (1995b). The intelligent use of space. Artificial Intelligence, 73, 31-68.

18.

Kirsh, D. , & Maglio, P. (1994). On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic actions . Cognitive Science, 18, 513-549.

19.

Koza, J.R. , Rice, J.P. , & Roughgarden, J. (1992). Evolution of food-foraging strategies for the Caribbean Anolis lizard using genetic programming. Adaptive Beltavior, 1(2), 171-199.

20.

Kroemer, K.H.E. (1993). Fitting the workplace to the human and not vice versa (use of ergonomics in work area design). Industrial Engineering, 25(3), 56.

21.

Kummar, H. (1995). In quest of the sacred baboon: A scientist's journey (M. A. Biederman-Thorson, Trans.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

22.

Lao-Tze. (1898). Tao-teh-king, Chinese- English. (With introduction and transliteration and notes by Paul Carus.) Chicago: Open Court.

23.

Larkin, J.H. , & Simon, H.A. (1987). Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words. Cognitive Science, 11(1), 65-100.

24.

Lewontin, R.C. (1978). Adaptation and natural selection. Scientific American, September.

25.

McFarland, D. , & Houston, A. (1981). Quantitative ethology: The state space approach . Boston: Pitman Advanced Publishing Program.

26.

Newell, A. (1973). Production systems: Model of control structure . In W. C. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing. New York: Academic Press.

27.

Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

28.

Newell, A. , & Simon, H.A. (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

29.

Norman, D.A. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.

30.

Norman, D.A. (1991). Cognitive artifacts. In J. M. Carroll (Ed.), Designing interaction: Psychology at the human-computer interface. [Cambridge series on human-computer interaction, no. 4.] Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

31.

Papadimitriou, C. (1995). Computational complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley

32.

Royama, T. (1992). Analytical population dynamics. London: Chapman & Hall.

33.

Simon, H. (1955). Behavior and the structure of the environment . [Reprinted in H. Simon , Models of thought (vol 1), 1984.]

34.

Simon, H. (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment . Psychological Review, 63:129-38. [Reprinted in H. Simon , Models of thought (vol 1), 1984.]

35.

Simon, H. (1973). The structure of ill-structured problems. Artificial Intelligence, 4, 181-201.

36.

Simon, H. (1981a). The sciences of the artificial (2nd ed). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

37.

Simon, H. (1981b). The architecture of complexity. [Reprinted in The sciences of the artificial (2nd ed).] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

38.

Simon, H.A. (1976). Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organization (3rd ed). New York: Free Press.

39.

Suchinan, L. (1986). Situated cognition. Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press.

40.

Teichner, W.H. , & Olson, D.E. (1971). A preliminary theory of the effects of task and environmental factors on human performance. Human Factors , 13(4), 295-344.