Novel and known affordances in the brain

The next in-person meeting of the seminar “Philosophy of Cognitive Science” will take place on June 5th at 10:30 AM (Warsaw time, CET). The seminar will be held at Staszic Palace (IFiS, PAN), room 161.

Our guest will be Olgierd Borowiecki (Uniwersytet w Białymstoku). We will discuss a draft, titled: “Novel and known affordances in the brain.”

From introduction: This work reconceptualises affordances as distributed along an exploration-exploitation spectrum, reflecting the range of potential actions an organism can undertake. By applying this spectrum to the concepts of environments and niches, I propose that environments are characterised by exploratory affordances—novel possibilities for action—while exploitative affordances or well-established actions define niches. Together, environments and niches form the broader concept of surroundings, encompassing the complete set of potential futures an organism can achieve based on its evolutionary (phylogenetic) and developmental (ontogenetic) history. Additionally, I suggest a neural basis for these surroundings by drawing on computational neuroscience research on action learning and execution, proposing that the limbic and associative striatum supports exploratory affordances, while exploitative affordances rely on the sensorimotor striatum. This framework offers a new perspective for understanding how organisms adaptively balance exploration and exploitation in dynamically changing and ecologically relevant contexts.

Novel and known affordances in the brain

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