The computational approach is the orthodoxy in psychological science. We try and understand the mind using the metaphors of information processing and the storage and retrieval of representations. These ideas are so common that it is easy to forget that there is any alternative. Andrew Wilson is on a mission to remind us that there is an alternative – a radical, non-representational, non-information processing take on what cognition is.

I sent him a few questions by email. After he answered these, and some follow up questions, we’ve both edited and agreed on the result, which you can read below.

Q1. Is it fair to say you are at odds with lots of psychology, theoretically? Can you outline why?

Psychology wants to understand what causes our behaviour. Cognitive psychology explanations are that behaviour is caused by internal states of the mind (or brain, if you like). These states are called mental representations, and they are models/simulations of the world that we use to figure out what to do and when to do it.

Cognitive psychology thinks we have representations because it assumes we have very poor sensory access to the world, e.g. vision supposedly begins with a patchy 2D image projected onto the back of the eye. We need these models to literally fill in the gaps by making an educated guess (‘inference’) about what caused those visual sensations.

My approach is called radical embodied cognitive psychology; ‘radical’ just means ‘no representations’. It is based on the work of James J Gibson. He was a perceptual psychologist who demonstrated that there is actually rich perceptual information about the world, and that we use this information. This is why perception and action are so amazingly successful most of the time, which is important because failures of perception have serious consequences for your health and wellbeing (e.g. falling on ice)

The most important consequence of this discovery is that when we have access to this information, we don’t need those internal models anymore. This then means that whatever the brain is doing, it’s not building models of the world in order to cause our behaviour. We are embedded in our environments and our behaviour is caused by the nature of that embedding (specifically, which information variables we are using for any given task).

So I ask very different questions than the typical psychologist: instead of ‘what mental model lets me solve this task?’ I ask ‘what information is there to support the observed behaviour and can I find evidence that we use it?’. When we get the right answer to the information question, we have great success in explaining and then predicting behaviour, which is actually the goal of psychology.

Q2. The idea that there are no mental representations is hard to get your head around. What about situations where behaviour seems to be based on things which aren’t there, like imagination, illusions or predictions?

First, saying that there are no mental representations is not saying that the brain is not up to something. This is a surprisingly common mistake, but I think it’s due to the fact cognitive psychologists have come to equate ‘brain activity’ with ‘representing’ and denying the latter means denying the former (see Is Embodied Cognition a No-Brainer?).

Illusions simply reveal how important it is to perception that we can move and explore. They are all based on a trick and they almost always require an Evil Psychologist™ lurking in the background. Specifically, illusions artificially restrict access to information so that the world looks like it’s doing one thing when it is really doing another. They only work if you don’t let people do anything to reveal the trick. Most visual illusions are revealed as such by exploring them, e.g by looking at them from a different perspective (e.g. the Ames Room).

Imagination and prediction are harder to talk about in this framework, but only because no one’s really tried. For what it’s worth, people are terrible at actively predicting things, and whatever imagination is it will be a side-effect of our ability to engage with the real world, not part of how we engage with the real world.

Q3. Is this radical approach really denying the reality of cognitive representations, or just using a different descriptive language in which they don’t figure? In other words, can you and the cognitivists both be right?

If the radical hypothesis is right, then a lot of cognitive theories will be wrong. Those theories all assume that information comes into the brain, is processed by representations and then output as behaviour. If we successfully replace representations with information, all those theories will be telling the wrong story. ‘Interacting with information’ is a completely different job description for the brain than ‘building models of the world’. This is another reason why it’s ‘radical’.

Q4. Even if I concede that you can think of the mind like this, can you convince me that I should? Why is it useful? What does this approach do for cognitive science that the conventional approach isn’t or cant’?

There are two reasons, I think. The first is empirical; this approach works very, very well. Whenever a researcher works through a problem using this approach, they find robust answers that stand up to extended scrutiny in the lab. These solutions then make novel predictions that also perform well – examples are topics like the outfielder problem and the A-not-B error [see below for references]. Cognitive psychology is filled with small, difficult to replicate effects; this is actually a hint that we aren’t asking the right questions. Radical embodied cognitive science tends to produce large, robust and interpretable effects which I take as a hint that our questions are closer to the mark.

The second is theoretical. The major problem with representations is that it’s not clear where they get their content from. Representations supposedly encode knowledge about the world that we use to make inferences to support perception, etc. But if we have such poor perceptual contact with the world that we need representations, how did we ever get access to the knowledge we needed to encode? This grounding problem is a disaster. Radical embodiment solves it by never creating it in the first place – we are in excellent perceptual contact with our environments, so there are no gaps for representations to fill, therefore no representations that need content.

Q5. Who should we be reading to get an idea of this approach?

‘Beyond the Brain’ by Louise Barrett. It’s accessible and full of great stuff.

‘Radical Embodied Cognitive Science’ by Tony Chemero. It’s clear and well written but it’s pitched at trained scientists more than the generally interested lay person.

‘Embodied Cognition’ by Lawrence Shapiro that clearly lays out all the various flavours of ‘embodied cognition’. My work is the ‘replacement’ hypothesis.

‘The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception’ by James J Gibson is an absolute masterpiece and the culmination of all his empirical and theoretical work.

I run a blog at http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/ with Sabrina Golonka where we discuss all this a lot, and we tweet @PsychScientists. We’ve also published a few papers on this, the most relevant of which is ‘Embodied Cognition is Not What You Think It Is‘

Q6. And finally, can you point us to a few blog posts you’re proudest of which illustrate this way of looking at the world

What Else Could It Be? (where Sabrina looks at the question, what if the brain is not a computer?)

Mirror neurons, or, What’s the matter with neuroscience? (how the traditional model can get you into trouble)

Prospective Control – The Outfielder problem (an example of the kind of research questions we ask)