With rising consumption and environmental problems, there is an increasing need for green consumption. From a micro perspective, the influence of environmental cognition on consumers’ green consumption behaviors and the related mechanisms are examined through multilayer linear analysis and 2010 China General Social Survey microdata with the theory of planned behavior as the model framework. The study shows that environmental cognition positively influences attitudes toward green consumption, green consumption subjective norms, and green consumption perceived behavioral (...) control, which leads to increased intentions to engage in green consumption and actual green consumption behaviors. Environmental cognition can either promote the intention toward and lead to green consumption behavior or directly promote green consumption behavior. The more developed a region’s economy is, the stronger people’s attitudes toward green consumption will be; additionally, the greater the perceived external pressure to engage in green consumption becomes, the greater the likelihood that people will develop the intention to engage in green consumption behavior. Regional environmental quality inhibits green consumption intention to a certain extent. The influence of environmental cognition on green consumption shows regional heterogeneity. (shrink)

This article defends the view that knowledge is type-identical to cognitive achievement. I argue, pace Duncan Pritchard, that not only knowledge, but also cognitive achievement is incompatible with environmental luck. I show that the performance of cognitive abilities in environmental luck cases does not distinguish them from non-abilities per se. For this reason, although the cognitive abilities of the subject are exercised in environmental luck cases, they are not manifested in any relevant sense. I conclude by showing (...) that this explanation is not ad hoc as it can be generalized to apply to causal features besides cognitive abilities. (shrink)

Despite the rising interest in environmental strategies, few studies have examined how managerial cognition of such strategies influences actual innovation capability development. Taking a managerial cognition perspective, this study investigates how managers’ perceptions of institutional pressures relate to their focus on proactive environmental strategy, which in turn affects firms’ realized innovation capability. The findings from a primary survey and three secondary datasets of publicly listed companies in China reveal that managers’ perceived business and social pressures are (...) positively associated with their focus on proactive environmental strategy, which consequently fosters innovation capability development. Moreover, state ownership and government administrative control weaken the impact of managerial focus on proactive environmental strategy on innovation capability. These findings have important implications for how managerial cognition supports environmental strategy and organizational capability building under the influence of institutional pressures and government intervention. (shrink)

This empirical paper examines individual-level cognitive factors associated with developing an orientation to sustainable development issues among a population of business practitioners from France. Across two studies, we survey 180 financial managers and 83 finance students, as well as 144 managers from other business disciplines and 117 non-finance business students. We consider ability and motivation variables integrated and adapted into a cognitive elaboration model for sustainable decision making. Specifically, we examine the degree of influence of two factors on the ethical (...) sensitivity to sustainability: the moral maturity of the individual, and the perceived moral intensity of a sustainability issue. Our investigation offers insights into how financial managers perceive the importance of sustainability for corporate strategy. (shrink)

The paper presents evidence in bacteria for the utility of Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis, using certain kinds of signal transduction systems as proxies for cognitive/behavioral complexity. Microbiologists already accept that the number of signal transduction proteins in a bacterial genome indicates the level of ecological complexity to which the organism is subject: the more signalling proteins, the greater the complexity. Sheer numbers are not always a reliable indicator of behavioral complexity, however. The paper proposes a new, ECT-based procedure for (...) identifying, from genomic sequence and signalling repertoire, novel bacterial candidates likely to exhibit behavioral complexity in response to a complex ecological niche. (shrink)

One problem faced in discussions of the evolution of intelligence is the need to get a precise fix on what is to be explained. Terms like "intelligence," "cognition" and "mind" do not have simple and agreed-upon meanings, and the differences between conceptions of intelligence have consequences for evolutionary explanation. I hope the papers in this volume will enable us to make progress on this problem. The present contribution is mostly focused on these basic and foundational issues, although the last (...) section of the paper will look at some specific models and programs of empirical work. (shrink)

Modern cognitive and clinical psychology offer insight into how people deal with natural disasters. In my methodological paper, I make a strong case for incorporating experimental findings and theoretical concepts of modern psychology into environmental historical disaster research. I show how psychological factors may influence the production and interpretation of historical sources with respect to perceptions of and responses to disasters. While previous psychological approaches to history mostly involve psychoanalysis, I focus on empirical psychology. Specifically, I review a number (...) of well documented heuristics, biases, and memory modulations as described by cognitive psychology. Moreover, I argue that including investigations on disaster related mental disorders would complement the environmental historical research of natural disasters. My approach highlights a strong potential for interdisciplinary collaborations among environmental historians and psychologists. (shrink)

Some recent studies have highlighted a link between a favorable childhood environment and the strengthening of neuronal resilience against the changes that occur in natural aging neurodegenerative disease. Many works have assessed the factors —both internal and external — that can contribute to delay the phenotype of an ongoing neurodegenerative brain pathology. At the crossroads of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors, these relationships are unified by the concept of cognitive reserve (CR). This review focuses on the protective effects of (...) maintaining this CR through the cognitive aging process, and emphasizes the most essential time in life for the development and strengthening of this CR. The in-depth study of this research shows that early stimulation with regard to social and sensory interactions, contributes to the proper development of cognitive, affective and psychosocial capacities. Childhood thus appears to be the most active phase in the development of CR, and as such we hypothesize that this constitutes the first essential period of primary prevention of pathological aging and loss of cognitive capacities. If this hypothesis is correct, early stimulation of the environment would therefore be considered as a true primary prevention and a public health issue. The earlier identification of neurodevelopmental disorders, which can affect personal and professional development across the lifespan, could therefore have longer-term impacts and provide better protection against aging. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that language contributes to humans' ability to orient using landmarks and shapes their use of frames of reference for memory. However, the role of environmental experience in shaping spatial cognition has not been investigated. This study addresses such a possibility by examining the use of FoRs in a nonverbal spatial memory task among residents of an Andean community in Peru. Participants consisted of 97 individuals from Ancash Quechua-speaking households who spoke Quechua and/or Spanish and (...) varied considerably with respect to the extent of their experience in the surrounding landscape. The results demonstrated that environmental experience was the only factor significantly related to the preference for allocentric FoRs. The study thus shows that environmental experience can play a role alongside language in shaping habits of spatial representation, and it suggests a new direction of inquiry into the relationships among language, thought, and experience. (shrink)

Behavioral innovations induced by the social or physical environment are likely to be of great functional and evolutionary importance, and thus warrant serious attention. Innovation provides a process by which animals can adjust to changed environments. Despite this apparent adaptive advantage, it is not known whether innovative propensities are adaptive specializations. Furthermore, the varied psychological processes underlying innovation remain poorly understood.

Extant literature suggested that executive cognitive ability is a critical perspective to answering why and how enterprises perform business model innovation. However, the effect of executive cognitive ability on business model innovation is still insufficiently explored. Drawing on entrepreneurial bricolage theory, we developed a moderated mediation model which takes entrepreneurial bricolage as the mediating mechanism and environmental dynamics as the moderating mechanism to explain how executive cognitive ability influences business model innovation. We collected the data of 316 executives of (...) Chinese start-ups through questionnaires for the model test. Results showed that new venture executives' cognitive ability significantly positively affects business model innovation by mediating with entrepreneurial bricolage. Environmental dynamism positively moderates the effect of executives' cognitive ability on business model innovation. Moreover, environmental dynamism positively moderates the mediating role of entrepreneurial bricolage in executive cognitive ability and business model innovation. This study broadens the research scope of entrepreneurial bricolage theory from the perspective of cognitive ability and provides ideas for new ventures' business model innovation. (shrink)

The type of principles which cognitive engineers need to design better work environments are principles which explain interactivity and distributed cognition: how human agents interact with themselves and others, their work spaces, and the resources and constraints that populate those spaces. A first step in developing these principles is to clarify the fundamental concepts of environment, coordination, and behavioural function. Using simple examples, I review changes the distributed perspective forces on these basic notions.

Research on brain or cognitive/affective processes, culture, social interaction, and structural analysis are overlapping but often independent ways humans have attempted to understand the origins of their evolution, historical, and contemporary development. Each level seeks to employ its own theoretical concepts and methods for depicting human nature and categorizing objects and events in the world, and often relies on different sources of evidence to support theoretical claims. Each level makes reference to different temporal bandwidths (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, (...) years, decades, and centuries) and focuses on different spatio-temporal activities and controlled and non-controlled stimulus conditions. Biological mechanisms and environmental pressures for survival simultaneously created a gradual intersection and enhancement of cognitive/affective skills, cultural practices, and changes in collaborative social interaction and communicative skills. The evolution of a given level of analysis is assumed to have been incremental and overlapping. These innovative and independent ways humans have learned to characterize their brain or cognitive/affective and social/economic/political life often depend on unexamined, representational re-descriptions or cognitive/affective and socio-cultural devices and forms of communication that facilitate the depiction of practices and beliefs we attribute to respondents or subjects and research colleagues. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 193-234.

This study employs an experiment investigating cognitive mapping of fifth-grade children living in a remote village environment, wherein characteristics of the landscape included paths, landmarks, nodes, edges, and districts. Two aspects of analysis were salient in this study. First, important landscape characteristics and their frequency of appearance in the cognitive maps were tabulated and illustrated as a layout map. Second, inaccurate cognitive maps were structurally analyzed to account for any incompleteness, distortions, and augmentation of actual environments found in some map (...) samples. Focus on gender differences in children’s environmental cognition in terms of symbolic representation skills utilized in cognitive mapping is of special interest in this case study. Results confirm Piaget’s theory that older children, aged ten or more, begin to use projective and Euclidean concepts. Furthermore, boys used a greater variety of symbols to represent a particular landscape characteristic, a cultural temple, than did the girls. Finally, we hypothesize that the ‘hunter–gatherer’ social divisions of labor between men and women in the village’s early historical social structure are consequentially related to gender discrepancies in cognitive mapping symbolic representation skills, in non-English-speaking children. (shrink)

A lot of research in cognition and decision making suffers from a lack of formalism. The quantum probability program could help to improve this situation, but we wonder whether it would provide even more added value if its presumed focus on outcome models were complemented by process models that are, ideally, informed by ecological analyses and integrated into cognitive architectures.

Cognitive frames help companies make sense of the intrinsic tensions of sustainability issues and influence how they respond to calls for sustainability over time. Yet, cognitive frames have been investigated as a static feature and previous studies have overlooked the evolutionary dynamics that can lead an organization to change its own frame. This study observes the evolution of life cycle management implementation through the theory of cognitive frames. We conducted a longitudinal multiple case study of 10 SMEs involved in a (...) European‐funded project. Over a three‐year period we examined how cognitive approaches to sustainability issues changed according to different learning mindsets. A total of three cognitive frames and two learning mindsets were revealed from the analysis, thus providing two important contributions. First, cognitive frames are not static in time, but can change to give more importance to the environmental sustainability of a life cycle. Second, the type of learning mindsets that managers in SMEs share can trigger changes in organizational cognitive frames. (shrink)

We taxonomize the varieties of representational reuse and point out that all the sorts of reuse that the brain engages in (1) involve something like a model (or schema or simulator), and (2) are effected in bodily and external media, as well as neural media. This suggests that the real fundamental organizational principle is not neural reuse, but model reuse.

The author investigates the content of the notion of subject from the evolutionary-epistemological point of view. She claims that evolutionary epistemology does not clarify this problem by itself and argues that this state of affairs raises a number of problems such as absolutization of adaptationism, biologism in knowledge, lack of a clear demarcation between animal cognition and human cognitive activity. It is argued that a man is the only subject of cognition in evolutionary epistemology. Inasmuch as person constructs (...) and enriches the environment he becomes a pressure factor by himself. This claim is argued to counter the thesis of adaptation. So adaptationist interpretation of the evolution of human cognitive activity is insufficient. The phenomenon of environmental change through the development of cognitive abilities by the person is represented in society, communication and culture. Cognition is determined by anticipating the result of purpose. In this connection, the constructive activity of the cognitive person confronted with the limitations of her own cognitive capabilities and environmental restricting factors. Thus, the evolution of man is considered as self-development, which is carried out through the creative overcoming external and internal constraints through the constructive activity of the agent of cognition. (shrink)

How do individuals rationalize the cognitive dissonance between their environmental awareness and the maintenance of environmentally unfriendly behaviors? The main goal is to explore the rationalization strategies used by individuals in order to maintain their current behaviors. The secondary goal is to understand if it is possible to induce cognitive consonance, and how this influences intention to change. We present a study with three experimental conditions: inconsistency, control, and consistency. The method to induce inconsistency and consistency was inspired by (...) the paradigm of induced hypocrisy. Results demonstrated that induced inconsistency elicits two main barriers in participants: considering the change as unnecessary, and perceiving to lack knowledge about how to change. Induced consistency elicits tokenism, resulting in a licensing effect. However, behavioral intentions did not differ among experimental groups. Results are discussed considering methodological limitations and possible intervening variable. (shrink)

Much recent cognitive neuroscientific work on body knowledge is representationalist: “body schema” and “body images”, for example, are cerebral representations of the body (de Vignemont 2009). A framework assumption is that representation of the body plays an important role in cognition. The question is whether this representationalist assumption is compatible with the variety of broadly situated or embodied approaches recently popular in the cognitive neurosciences: approaches in which cognition is taken to have a ‘direct’ relation to the body (...) and to the environment. A “direct” relation is one where the boundaries between the body and the head, or between the environment and the animal are not theoretically important in the understanding of cognition. These boundaries do not play a theoretically privileged role in cognitive explanations of behavior. But representationalism appears to put a representational veil between the locus of cognition and that which is represented, making cognitive relations to the body and to the environment be indirect, with a high associated computational load. For this reason, direct approaches have tried to minimize the use of internal representations (Suchman 1987; Barwise 1987; Agre and Chapman 1987; Brooks 1992; Thelen and Smith 1994; van Gelder 1995; Port and van Gelder 1995; Clark 1997, 1999; Rupert 2009, p. 180). Does a cognitive neuroscience committed to direct relations rule out a representationalist approach to body knowledge? Or is direct representationalism possible? (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 634-648, July 2022.

The extended mind thesis (EM) asserts that some cognitive processes are (partially) composed of actions consisting of the manipulation and exploitation of environmental structures. Might some processes at the root of social cognition have a similarly extended structure? In this paper, I argue that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management—the negotiation and management of ‘‘we-space”—and that some of the expressive actions involved in the negotiation and management of we-space (gesture, touch, facial and whole-body (...) expressions) drive basic processes of interpersonal understanding and thus do genuine social-cognitive work. Social interaction is a kind of extended social cognition, driven and at least partially constituted by environmental (non-neural) scaffolding. Challenging the Theory of Mind paradigm, I draw upon research from gesture studies, developmental psychology, and work on Moebius Syndrome to support this thesis. (shrink)

According to the thesis of the extended mind (EM) , at least some token cognitive processes extend into the cognizing subject's environment in the sense that they are (partly) composed of manipulative, exploitative, and transformative operations performed by that subject on suitable environmental structures. EM has attracted four ostensibly distinct types of objection. This paper has two goals. First, it argues that these objections all reduce to one basic sort: all the objections can be resolved by the provision of (...) an adequate and properly motivated criterion—or mark—of the cognitive. Second, it provides such a criterion—one made up of four conditions that are sufficient for a process to count as cognitive. (shrink)

When extended cognition is extended into mainstream epistemology, an awkward tension arises when considering cases of environmental epistemic luck. Surprisingly, it is not at all clear how the mainstream verdict that agents lack knowledge in cases of environmental luck can be reconciled with principles central to extended cognition.

The relationship between people and nature is one of the most important current issues of human survival. This circumstance makes it necessary to educate young people who are receptive to global challenges and ready to solve the urgent problems of our time. The purpose of the article is to analyze the experience of the environmental behavior of young people in the metropolis. The authors studied articles and monographs that contain Russian and international experience in the environmental behavior of (...) citizens. The following factors determine people’s behavior: the cognitive capabilities of people who determine the understanding and perception of nature and the value-affective component that determines the attitude towards nature. The next task of the study is surveying young people through an online survey and its analysis. The research was realized in Ekaterinburg, the administrative center of the Sverdlovsk region (Russia). The study of the current ecological situation in Ekaterinburg made it possible to conclude that the environmental problem arises not only and not simply as a problem of environmental pollution and other negative influences of human economic activity. This problem grows into transforming the spontaneous impact of society on nature into a consciously, purposefully, systematically developing harmonious interaction with it. The study results showed that, from the point of view of the youth of Ekaterinburg, the city’s ecological situation is one of the most pressing problems. Despite minor improvements over the past 3–5 years, this problem has not lost relevance, and regional authorities and city residents should be responsible for its solution. Young people know environmental practices, but they often do not apply them systematically. Ecological behavior is encouraged and discussed among friends/acquaintances. The key factors influencing the formation of environmental behavior practices are the mass media and social networks. The most popular social network for obtaining information on ecological practices among young people is Instagram, and the key persons are bloggers. This study did not reveal the influence of the socio-demographic characteristics of young people on the application of eco-behavior practices, which may indicate the need for a survey of a larger sample. (shrink)

A crucial question for artificial cognition systems is what meaning is and how it arises. In pursuit of that question, this paper extends earlier work in which we show that emergence of simple signaling in biologically inspired models using arrays of locally interactive agents. Communities of "communicators" develop in an environment of wandering food sources and predators using any of a variety of mechanisms: imitation of successful neighbors, localized genetic algorithms and partial neural net training on successful neighbors. Here (...) we focus on environmental variability, comparing results for environments with (a) constant resources, (b) random resources, and (c) cycles of "boom and bust." In both simple and complex models across all three mechanisms of strategy change, the emergence of communication is strongly favored by cycles of "boom and bust." These results are particularly intriguing given the importance of environmental variability in fields as diverse as psychology, ecology and cultural anthropology. (shrink)

The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC)—that many cognitive processes are carried out by a hybrid coalition of neural, bodily and environmental factors—entails that the intentional states that are reasons for action might best be ascribed to wider entities of which individual persons are only parts. I look at different kinds of extended cognition and agency, exploring their consequences for concerns about the moral agency and personal responsibility of such extended entities. Can extended entities be moral agents and (...) bear responsibility for actions, in addition to or in place of the individuals typically held responsible? What does it mean to be autonomous when one’s cognition is influenced and supported by a milieu of environmental factors? To answer these questions, I explore strong parallels between HEC’s critique of individualism in cognition, and feminist critiques of individualist accounts of self, agency, and autonomy. This relational and social conception of autonomous agency, as scaffolded and supported (or undermined and impaired) by a milieu of social, relational, and normative factors, has important lessons for HEC. Drawing together these two visions of distributed and decentralized aspects of personhood highlights how cognition, action, and responsibility are inextricably linked. It also encourages a reconceptualization of all cognition and all concerns about responsibility for actions, not simply as sometimes extended around individuals, but as fundamentally communal, social, and normative, with individual cognition and individual moral responsibility being derivative special cases, not the paradigm examples. Individuals are merely one of many possible loci of cognition, action, and responsibility. (shrink)

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose (...) a new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

Cross-culturally, misfortune is often attributed to witchcraft despite the high human and social costs of these beliefs. The evolved cognitive features that are often used to explain religion more broadly, in combination with threat perception and coalitional psychology, may help explain why these particular supernatural beliefs are so prevalent. Witches are minimally counter intuitive, agentic, and build upon intuitive understandings of ritual efficacy. Witchcraft beliefs may gain traction in threatening contexts and because they are threatening themselves, while simultaneously activating coalitional (...) reasoning systems that make rejection of the idea costly. This article draws possible connections between these cognitive and environmental features with an eye toward future empirical examination. (shrink)

Cognitive science is, of course, not really a new discipline, but a recognition of a fundamental set of common concerns shared by the disciplines of psychology, computer science, linguistics, economics, epistemology, and the social sciences generally. All of these disciplines are concerned with information processing systems, and all of them are concerned with systems that are adaptive—that are what they are from being ground between the nether millstone of their physiology or hardware, as the case may be, and the upper (...) millstone of a complex environment in which they exist. Systems that are adaptive may equally well be described as “artificial,” for as environments change, they can be expected to change too, as though they were deliberately designed to fit those environments (as indeed they sometimes are).The task of empirical science is to discover and verify invariants in the phenomena under study. The artificiality of information processing systems creates a subtle problem in defining empirical invariants in such systems. For observed regularities are very likely invariant only within a limited range of variation in their environments, and any accurate statement of the laws of such systems must contain reference to their relativity to environmental features. It is a common experience in experimental psychology, for example, to discover that we are studying sociology—the effects of the past histories of our subjects—when we think we are studying physiology—the effects of properties of the human nervous system. Similarly, business cycle economists are only now becoming aware of the extent to which the parameters of the system they are studying are dependent on the experiences of a population with economic events over the previous generation.In artificial sciences, the descriptive and the normative are never far apart. Thus, in economics, the “principle of rationality” is sometimes asserted as a descriptive invariant, sometimes as advice to decision makers. Similarly, in psychology, the processes of adaptation (learning) have always been a central topic, at one time a topic that dominated the whole field of research. Linguistics, too, has suffered its confusions between descriptive and normative attitudes towards its subject. But we must avoid the error, in studying information processing systems, of thinking that the adaptive processes themselves must be invariant; and we must be prepared to face the complexities of regression in the possibility that they themselves may be subject to improvement and adaptation.It might have been necessary a decade ago to argue for the commonality of the information processes that are employed by such disparate systems as computers and human nervous systems. The evidence for that commonality is now overwhelming, and the remaining questions about the boundaries of cognitive science have more to do with whether there also exist nontrivial commonalities with information processing in genetic systems than with whether men and machines both think. (shrink)

To accept that cognition is embodied is to question many of the beliefs traditionally held by cognitive scientists. One key question regards the localization of cognitive faculties. Here we argue that for cognition to be embodied and sometimes embedded, means that the cognitive faculty cannot be localized in a brain area alone. We review recent research on neural reuse, the 1/f structure of human activity, tool use, group cognition, and social coordination dynamics that we believe demonstrates how (...) the boundary between the different areas of the brain, the brain and body, and the body and environment is not only blurred but indeterminate. In turn, we propose that cognition is supported by a nested structure of task-specific synergies, which are softly assembled from a variety of neural, bodily, and environmental components (including other individuals), and exhibit interaction dominant dynamics. (shrink)

Questions about fish consciousness and cognition are receiving increasing attention. In this paper, I explain why one must be careful to avoid drawing conclusions too hastily about this hugely diverse set of species.