Impulsive Action: Emotional Impulses and their control

In many situations, experts at work act successfully, yet without deliberation. Architects, for example, perceive immediately the opportunities offered by the site of a new project, and intuitively improve the size of the door in one of their designs. One could label these manifestations of expert intuition as higher-level cognition, but still these experts are just acting unreflectively. The two central ideas behind my VIDI-proposal are (a) that these episodes of higher cognition can be understood along the same lines as everyday skillful unreflective activities, such as grasping a coffee cup or riding a bike; and (b) that our surroundings contribute to skillful action and cognition in a far more fundamental way than is generally acknowledged within philosophy and cognitive science. My overarching aim is to use these ideas to develop a novel conceptual framework for enactive cognitive science (Thompson, 2007; cf. Chemero, 2009). The cognition we find in expert intuition consists of responsiveness to multiple possibilities for action provided by our surroundings, or affordances. A cup affords grasping, the extended hand of a visitor invites a handshake, and the door solicits making it higher. My project is innovative in showing how high embodied cognition can reach. Thanks to my affordance-based framework, findings that were thought to be exclusively valid for everyday unreflective action (or for sensorimotor behavior) can now be applied to skilled higher cognition. Moreover, it brings the social back into cognitive science by clarifying how available affordances for action and cognition depend on socio-cultural practices. My project will also show how this broad philosophical framework can have concrete, real-world applications in the domains of architecture and psychiatry respectively. A PhD-project will advance the convergence of these ideas with influential work within cognitive neuroscience on the anticipating brain in which affordances (Friston, et al., 2012) are also central.

We accept generic sentences like ‘Sharks are dangerous’, although sharks only seldomly attack us. It is important to understand why, because stereotypes are also expressed by such generic sentences. We want to investigate whether the acceptance of such generalizing sentences, or generics,. can be explained by the way expectations are learned.

We are living in an era of accelerating social and environmental change, one that calls for greater change-ability: skilled ways of coordinating with a rapidly changing world. Yet people and the communities they form often find change hard to realise and sustain in their lives. This project aims to open up a new perspective on change-ability, starting from the insight that what people do is both enabled and constrained by the affordances of their surroundings. Affordances are possibilities for action provided by the living environment. Every activity from sitting in a chair to making architecture is enabled by affordances. Less recognised is the fact that affordances also constrain people’s ability to change what they do. Even when people know that excessive sitting is unhealthy, offices filled with desks and chairs make them less inclined to explore other possibilities. We will create a conceptual framework for understanding change-ability in affordance-based terms that spans different scales: from the dynamics of active individuals, to communities and the living environment. The framework will be applied to learn about obstacles to change in communities and how affordance-based architectural interventions can reduce such impediments. Our philosophical method is unique in integrating findings from diverse scientific and artistic disciplines. We will participate in and reflect on the making of architectural interventions that allow visitors to experience what it would be like to live in entirely different ways. This will be done at RAAAF, an internationally renowned, award-winning studio for experimental architecture I co-founded. We will break new ground by showing how affordance-based interventions in the living environment can increase openness to exploring unconventional possibilities that could spark collective behavioural change. By scaling from change-able individuals to communities, we seek lessons for how to break down obstacles to collective change at a time when it is urgently needed.