Conscious Reflection versus Embodied Habits: Human Cognition From a Nonhuman Perspective

Most of our cognitive abilities—remembering, deciding, thinking—are enabled by ‘subpersonal’ factors: small-scale interactive processes between our brains, bodies and environments of which we cannot become conscious. Nonetheless, our understanding of cognitive abilities is largely based on the familiar conscious part of our minds. This implicitly leads to the anthropomorphic assumption that nonhuman animals think, decide, judge and remember in ways that resemble human, brain-based conscious reflection, which turns the evolution of cognition on its head. The aim of this project is to alleviate this problem by developing a framework that casts cognitive abilities in terms of ‘sensorimotor habits’: self-regulating and context-sensitive ways of coordinating action and perception. This view is intrinsically less anthropomorphic because it pays more attention to how the different bodies, senses and niches of nonhuman animals shape their cognitive abilities.