Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition (i.e., culturally salient concepts) are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.
Theoretical basis
Cognitive ecology explores the interactive relationship between organism-environment interactions and its impact on cognitive phenomena. Human cognition in this framework is multimodal and viewed similarly to enactivist perspectives on cognitive processing. For cultural concepts, this emphasizes cognitive distribution across an ecosystem, which is predicated on models of the extended mind thesis.
Ecological psychology
While the multi-faceted nature of cognitive ecology is a consequence of its interdisciplinary history, it primarily derives from early work in ecological psychology. Paradigm shifts from behaviorist orientations of psychology to cognition, or the "cognitive revolution", gave rise to the ecological psychology approach, which distanced itself from mainstream cognitivist views by breaking down the common mind-environment dichotomy of psychological theory.
One particularly influential progenitor of this work was ecological psychologist James Gibson, whose legacy is marked by his ideas on ecological and social affordances. These are the opportunistic features of environmental objects that can be exploited for human use, and are therefore particularly perceptible (e.g., a knob affords twisting, an agreeable social cue affords a warm reaction). Gibson argued further that organisms cannot be disentangled from their environments, and that their cognitive constraints were consequences of a limited set of environmental invariants which shaped them over evolutionary time. An illustrative example for Gibson is the human capacity for three-dimensional visual perception, which he argues is a cognitive concept resulting from the way that people interact with their environment.
Another foreshadowed element of cognitive ecological theory comes from ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who considered the notion of informational feedback loops between mind and environment, particularly their role in generating meaning and awareness of one's surroundings. In an essay, he speculates on how an observer might best delineate the "self" of a blind man. In his treatment, he questions whether one may arbitrarily choose to carve out the man's informational processing loop at his brain or his hands or his walking stick without offering an incomplete view of his cognitive process. This discussion of concept remains influential in modern cognitive ecological considerations of the densely interconnected elements of ecology that play relevant roles in cognition.
Enactivism
An enactive perspective of cognition is fundamental to a cognitive ecological view. Rather than a passive interpretation of internally represented information, cognition is considered to be an active process involving the transformation of information into meaningful relationships between the organism and its environment. For humans then, a perceived environment is only constructed insofar as cognitive constraints will allow. In other words, they "enact a world" by building perspectives out of ecological information, using their evolved cognitive equipment.