Abstract
In the recent history of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the notion of habit has been reduced to a stimulus-triggered response probability correlation. In this paper we use a computational model to present an alternative theoretical view (with some philosophical implications), where habits are seen as self-maintaining patterns of behavior that share properties in common with self-maintaining biological processes, and that inhabit a complex ecological context, including the presence and influence of other habits. Far from mechanical automatisms, this organismic and self-organizing concept of habit can overcome the dominating atomistic and statistical conceptions, and the high temporal resolution effects of situatedness, embodiment and sensorimotor loops emerge as playing a more central, subtle and complex role in the organization of behavior. The model is based on a novel “iterant deformable sensorimotor medium (IDSM),” designed such that trajectories taken through sensorimotor-space increase the likelihood that in the future, similar trajectories will be taken. We couple the IDSM to sensors and motors of a simulated robot, and show that under certain conditions, the IDSM conditions, the IDSM forms self-maintaining patterns of activity that operate across the IDSM, the robot's body, and the environment. We present various environments and the resulting habits that form in them. The model acts as an abstraction of habits at a much needed sensorimotor “meso-scale” between microscopic neuron-based models and macroscopic descriptions of behavior. Finally, we discuss how this model and extensions of it can help us understand aspects of behavioral self-organization, historicity and autonomy that remain out of the scope of contemporary representationalist frameworks.
Highlights
Our mental life is populated by myriads of often covert, fluid and inconspicuous patterns of behavior that have slowly grown on us, continuously sustained by repetition and scaffolded by reliable environmental structures
If we are to take mental life as the main object of study of human neuroscience, it is worth considering the deep analogy with life that the notion of habit makes possible in the realm of psychology and behavioral neuroscience: just as self-sustaining, far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures, such as auto-catalytic metabolic chemistry, have been considered an essential building block of minimal living organization (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977; Kauffman, 2000; Virgo, 2011), so could we explore the possibility of self-sustaining, “far-from-equilibrium,” dissipative www.frontiersin.org sensorimotor patterns as the most basic building blocks of mental life (Barandiaran, 2007, 2008
MODEL For the purpose of this paper we take habits to be patterns of behavior that are reinforced by their repetition. To model these properties in a sensorimotor-focused framework, we developed an Iterant Deformable Sensorimotor Medium (IDSM), a plastic, selfmodifying dynamical system that when coupled to a robots sensors and motors, (1) causes the robot to repeat behaviors that it has performed in the past, and (2) allows for the reinforcement of patterns of behavior through repetition, such that the more frequently and recently a pattern of behavior has been performed, the more likely it is to be performed again in the future
Summary
Our mental life is populated by myriads of often covert, fluid and inconspicuous patterns of behavior that have slowly grown on us, continuously sustained by repetition and scaffolded by reliable environmental structures. That habit is “second nature” was well understood by Greek philosophers; i.e., that in contrast to the nature of vegetative function, psychological nature was made of history-dependent ecological (i.e., agent-environment relational) entities in which physiological aspects of the organism (brain and body) were intertwined, through practice, with environmental resources, forming “natural” structures of behavior. In this sense, James stated that “animals are bundles of habit” (James, 1890, p.104) and considered habits to be the building block of the main object of psychology (and neuroscience): “the Science of Mental Life” (James, 1890, p.1). Cognitive and neural sciences have been witnessing a paradigmatic change for the last two decades, moving away from the computer metaphor and becoming increasingly aware of the role of sensorimotor interaction for neural function (Engel et al, 2013), of self-organization in brain dynamics (Kelso, 1995; Freeman, 2001), plasticity and multiscale dynamics (Hurley and Noë, 2003), or the role of embodiment for cognition (Maturana and Varela, 1980; Pfeifer et al, 2007; Chemero, 2009)
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