COG 401 H1: Seminar in Cognitive Science

Conceptual Foundations for the Science of Consciousness

Class 11: Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science I - Affordances, Affective Bias and
Mindfulness
This will be our first of two discussions on cross-cultural cognitive science. The purpose of these
discussions is to think critically about what might be gained by approaching the science of
consciousness from the perspective of other cultures with deep philosophical roots.
In our own case, we will take up the question (now an industry unto itself, really) of how Buddhist
philosophical psychology and practice can help us come to grips with the nature of consciousness.
Today we will approach this topic from the point of view of mindfulness practice. Next class we will
address the topic of the nature of the self.
We begin with a discussion of affordances. This will help orient us around the issue of how our
perception of the world is importantly normative in some respects. With this discussion under our
belts we will take a look at the neuroscientific research paradigm of affective bias. Finally we will
integrate these discussions into a consideration of the Buddhist construct of mindfulness.
I. Affordances: Enacting a World of Value
The notion of an 'affordance' is a useful construct for thinking not only about the normative nature of
the content of perception but also about the contribution made by individual organisms to
evolutionary change. We will briefly discuss both of these points.
Gibson's Original Proposal
J.J. Gibson was the psychologist who first gave a systematic theoretical treatment to the notion of
affordances.
Affordances: The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or
furnishes either for good or ill" (Gibson 1986, 127).

An affordance is a way of thinking about the world insofar as it is available to organisms who
inhabit it.

An object might count as an affordance of one type for one organism, an affordance of another
type to another and not at all to yet another. Affordances are ways of categorizing objects in an
organism relative way.

Making precise sense of what this amounts to is actually really hard. After we get some
basic terminology on the table and explore some of Gibson's attempts to explain this
idea, we will look at some subsequent discussions about the metaphysics of affordances.

Niche: A place where an organism lives. A set of affordances that define a horizon of relevance for an
organism.

A niche is to be distinguished from a habitat; the former is a procedural notion referring to how
organisms live. A habitat is a geographical notion that refers to where organisms in fact live.
The niche is thus a relational matrix in which an organism and a set of affordances
mutually contribute to a specification of the creature-world dynamic.

In Gibson's words: "The niche implies a kind of animal, and the animal implies a
kind of niche" (128).

Examples of Affordances: A river might afford the satiation of thirst, or possible drowning; a tree
might afford shelter or an obstacle; an open plain might afford the opportunity to exercise or an
interminable distance between oneself and the safety of cover and thus circumstantially, the open
expanse upon which one meets their end at the claws of a predator...
Problem: Because of this mutual specification, it is quite difficult to get a grip on what affordances
are. Are they properties of mind-independent objects? Are they internal properties of an organism
projected somehow onto the world?
Gibson's Proposal (129): An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are
in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be
subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor
a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjectiveobjective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact
of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the
environment and to the observer.
Whatever can this mean?
Bootstrapping Affordances
Anthony Chemero's (2003) article on affordances is a nice attempt to work through some of the ways
that thinkers after Gibson have tried to clarify the nature of affordances.
Chemero's View in a Nutshell: "...affordances are relations between the abilities of animals and
features of the environment. As relations affordances are both real and perceivable but are not
properties of either the environment or the animal (Chemero 2003, 181).
In order to understand this claim we need to specify a post-Gibsonian hermeneutical dialectic and
define the relevant terms.
Dialectical Context: Affordances are properties of the environment. According to Chemero, most
post-Gibsonian affordance theorists agree on this (182). What they disagree about is twofold:
i) What kind of animal relevant properties are affordances?
Selectionism: Affordances are resources in the environment, properties of objects that have the
potential of being utilized by organisms (182-3). These resources constitute selection pressures on
animals, making affordances prior to the organisms they put pressure on.
Dispositionalism: Affordances are dispositional properties of the environment. "Dispositional
properties are tendencies to manifest some other property in certain circumstances" (183). In this
context, those other properties would be the behavioral properties of organisms.

The relevant dispute here is that selectionists about affordances believe that they are
independent of the organisms possible behaviors. Affordances are properties of objects and they
continue to be even if there are no organisms to exploit the affordance.

Dispositionalists think that without the possible presence of an organism, an object cannot be
said to have an affordance as a property.

ii) What is it about animals that affordances are relevant to?

Effectivities: An animal's ability to effectively make use of an affordance determines whether or not
the property of an object is an affordance. Affordances are dispositional properties that are relative
to behavioral capacities of organisms.
Body-scale: Affordances are relative to the body-scale of an organism. The proportion of the
organism's body to the potential affordance in the relevant object.
Both sets of disagreements have a shared presupposition: affordances are animal-relevant properties
in the environment.
Some Definitions:
Properties: characteristics of entities.
To perceive a property (Chemero's example is perceiving that your car is dented) you need to: "...(a)
perceive a particular entity; (b) know its identity, that it is your car; (c) know what it is to be dented;
and (d) perceive that this particular entity (your car) has this particular property (being dented)
(185).
Features or feature-placing involve(s), "...no need to know anything about any particular entity.
All that is necessary is the ability to recognize a feature of situations (raininess)...consider that the it
in 'it is raining' is never the same thing; it refers to a situation (what is going on right here, right now)
that will never appear again" (ibid).
So properties are by definition indexed to objects understood as such by perceivers while features
are indexed to situations, which do not necessarily require object specificity.
So what?
Thinking of perceiving affordances as placing features helps to resolve the above conflicts in that the
idea of needing to index the affordance in some way to some object is rejected. It further solves the
problem of 'two minds'.
Problem of Two Minds: "If perception is direct, and two individuals can perceive the same object,
then how can their minds be truly separate?" (186).

Note the assumption (shared by Gibson and most post-Gibsonian affordance theorists) that
perception is direct rather than representational. It is this assumption that generates the
disputes about how to index affordances to objects as well as (obviously) the problem of twominds.

Solution: "To solve the problem of two minds, suppose that perceivables are relations between
perceivers and aspects of situations. If that is true, you and I can both perceive the potability o the
Guinness, without our perceptions overlapping. You will perceive the relation between you and the
pint, whereas I will perceive the relation between me and the pint, and our perceptions can remain
private. The key to this solution, though is that what we perceive, the affordance potability, is not the
environment alone. It i, instead, the relation between the perceiver and the environment" (ibid).

New Definition: Affordances are relations between the abilities of organisms and features of
environmental situations.
Last Question: Do affordances exist without animals?
Being lovely vs. being suspect: The key is that being lovely depends on a potential observer, not an
actual act of observation...To be suspect, something actually has to be under suspicion" (193).
Putting Affordances to Work
In Denis Walsh's article 'Situated Adaptationism' (2012) we see an attempt to put affordances to
work in a theory of evolutionary change. So far, our discussion of affordances has been mostly
descriptive; that is, we have discussed affordances in the context of trying to understand the content
of perception in a more sophisticated way.

Walsh's contribution is to apply this lesson to the process of evolution through natural selection.

The Adaptationist Conceptions of Evolution:

Adaptationism is the view that evolutionary change is determined by environmental pressure and
that successful phenotypes (species-level traits) are preserved by genetic programming. The
organism, as an agent within its niche, is nothing more than a medium through which environmental
selection pressures are delivered to the genetic replicators. These replicators carry forward the
programming code necessary to build organisms with traits that are well-adapted to the pressures of
the external environment. Organisms on this view are just the output of genetic super computers.

Proponents of this view (i.e. Richard Dawkins) are sometimes front-and-center in the media
in rejecting religious beliefs in God. Whatever we might think about the rhetoric of the newatheists, those of them who are committed to adaptationist conceptions of evolution share
more with their religious counterparts then one might think.

Specifically, there is a tantalizing isomorphism between the two views. Namely, that both
advert to an external force as the agent of organismal change.

"There is to be sure, some quibbling between the two congregations concerning who
or what molds biological form - God or natural selection - but set against the deep
concurrence on the nature of the project, this looks somewhat like and idle dispute
over the more doctrinal details" (Walsh 2012, 91).

3 Adaptationist Commitments:
i. Sub-organicism: organisms are not the canonical unit of biological organization and
evolutionary success, genetic replicators are.
"Replicators make high-fidelity copies of themselves, transmit them from parent to offspring,
whereupon the replicates build whole new organisms. Replicators are thus the unity of inheritance
and the units of phenotypic control" (92).
ii. Organism-environment autonomy: "Put crudely, replicators cause inheritance and
development, while the environment causes adaptive change. This division of labor requires a degree
of causal autonomy between the activities of replicators and those of the environment" (93).

iii. Explanatory externalism: Explanations of evolutionary change are external to the organism.
The environment molds biological form and genes help well-adapted organisms to sustain their form
in the face of such changes. The environment, "...is a self-standing, extra-ogranismal entity that has
the power to manipulate and alter biological form. The result, by a sort of natural providence, is
biological adaptation" (ibid).
Against Adaptationism:
Walsh thinks that by applying insights gleaned from the enactive view of the mind, that we can retool our understanding of environmental change to integrate our consideration of affordances and
give organisms an actual role to play in an explanation of how they evolve.

If our previous analyses of perceptual normativity and affordances are right, then there cannot
be as sharp a distinction between organisms and environments as the adaptationist contains.

Additionally, Walsh explains that there are many examples of evolutionary change (his main one
here is the transition from single-celled to multi-cellular organisms) that occurs with no change
in genetic potential across the evolving systems.

The novel affordance landscapes initiated by cell aggregation are sufficient to confer on
these new organisms the ability to produce a battery of new structures" (104).

Evolutionary change is a result of an ontogenetic change in organismal form with no

genetic change between the previous system and the newly adapted one.

Therefore, genetic replicators are not the only means by which organisms become
well-adapted to their environments. The organism's capacity to negotiate its
affordance landscape must be given primary significance.

Moving Forward: We must now think about how this dynamical process of survival is enabled on
the side of the subject.
II. Affective Bias: Perceiving the World selectively with Feeling
Question: What makes an organism prone towards or away from an affordance?
The brick wall affords hand-crushing were I to punch it with full force (alas I am not a kung-fu
master). There is something about affordances that solicits approach and avoidance behavior from
us, not just in terms of what is possible given our abilities but also our needs.
It is our felt needs for food when hungry, for drink when thirsty that motivate perceptual attention
and behavior in search of those things which will afford us the means to meet those needs.
Some relevant definitions:
Affectively-Biased Attention: "attentional biases that give rise to preferential perception of a
particular category of stimulus based on its relative affective salience" (Todd et al. 2012, 365).

Importantly, our attention becomes affectively biased before we perceive objects, which is part of
the reason why some things 'stick out' for us more than others.
Affective salience is, "the tendency of an item to stand out relative to its neighbours due to an
associated between its semantic meaning and emotional arousal" (ibid).

It is our ability to perceive affordances as affectively salient and our propensity to have our
perceptual attention affectively biased by such salience landscapes that allows the subject to
flourish within its niche.

In their first article, Rebecca Todd et al. (2012) argue that affectively biased attention is a kind of
proactive emotion regulation and contrast this with the view that affectively biased attention is
merely a reactive emotional response to affectively charged situations.
Note:

Affective bias is reflexive in that it is more or less automatic and triggered by the presence of
relevant stimulus types; thus it seems to be 'bottom-up'.

However, insofar as it functions as a constraint the neurophysiological level on sensory cortex

function, it has a kind of 'top-down' function as well.

Thus, affectively biased perceptual attention is a strange kind of middle-ground between bottomup and top-down attention (367).

Preliminary Evidence:

Humans are pre-tuned to focus on emotionally charged facial expressions (like angry or smiling
faces) and home in on these even when presented with complex scenes (ibid).

Further, this proposal helps us understand the role of the amygdala in experience, which
becomes activated in situations where subjects were asked to respond to celebrity names.

Specifically, "...the amygdala responded preferentially to names of celebrities that

participants felt positive about when they were asked to evaluate positivity and to names
of celebrities they felt negative about when asked to rate negativity" (368).

Lastly, amygdala response is higher in children over teenagers in response to smiling faces. "This
finding suggests that, in contrast to adults, young children may find smiling expressions considered to be rewarding in their own right - to be more salient than angry ones" (ibid).

Case Study: PTSD soliders (Todd et al. 2015)

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data is collected by measuring the electromagnetic fields

generated by ionic flow in neurons and neuronal assemblies. MEG has a very high-temporal
resolution allowing for real-time feedback of neural activation.

In this experiment: "[MEG] data were collected while participants identified two targets in a
rapidly presented stream of words. The first target was a number and the second target was
either a combat-related or neutral word. The difference in accuracy for combat-related versus
neutral words was used as a measure of attentional bias" (1).
This experiment is an attentional blink paradigm (AB) that utilizes that fact that subjects
often miss targets within a ~500 ms window after an initial target capture.

There were 3 groups that were tested: 1. PTSD suffering soliders, 2. non-PTSD suffering
soldiers and 3. non-military controls.

Results:

Both military groups had a decreased attentional blink when the second target was a combatrelated word. There was also greater accuracy for combat versus non-combat words, but with
overall accuracy decreases compared to non-military controls (4).

"Crucially, soldiers with PTSD also rated combat-related words as significantly more arousing
relative to neutral words than soliders without PTDS, indicating a greater subjective emotional
response to the words" (6).

Why it matters: We are pre-tuned to the world by phylogenetic endowment (affordance sensitivity)
and individual development (previous emotionally intense experiences). These factors radically
condition our attentional control sets, and create biases that have an impact on the structure of the
phenomenal field.
Our affectively biased attention helps to sculpt the contours of our affordance
landscape/phenomenal field.

We carry our trauma with us in our very perceptions of the world, because those perceptions
are affectively biased and our affective biases are developed through our experiences and
reactions. This can be helpful and harmful.

Helpful: We are pre-tuned to the relevant in a way that helps us intelligently ignore those things
that are not necessary for us to survive.
Harmful: This process of salience construction is fallible and profoundly dependent on our habits
of reaction to intense situations. Our habits of reaction are not always for the best and these have as
much impact on our attention sets and thus what shows up as affectively salient as do niche binding
affordance sensitivities.
Some Synthesis:

Affordances and Affective bias are ways of thinking about the object-ish and subject-ish side of
the dynamical self-world relation that we have discussed in previous classes. It's a way of
describing the mutual implication of self and world in the process of reality.

Affordances are objects qua available for interaction with organisms and affective bias is the
manner in which agents/subjects/selves are hedonically perturbed and poised with respect to the
a world of value.

Given all the normativity stitched into this account, some questions arise:
How ought we to deal with reality best? What constitutes flourishing in such a dense and
dynamical matrix of affectively charged relations? How might we best traverse the affordance
landscape?
III. Mindfulness: Decreasing and Re-tuning Affective-Bias

The practice of mindfulness is relevant to our discussion because it involves the idea that attention is
plastic. That is, attention is a skill that can be developed. Our capacities for endogenous attention
can be modulated with training. Mindfulness practice represents one way in which this can occur.
Mindfulness (as we will use the term) is an English rendering of the Pli term sati. To understand
this notion we need to embed it in its explanatory context. This will involve delving into the world of
Buddhist philosophical psychology.
Four Noble Truths and their Tasks: the core of Buddhist philosophical psychology.
1. The truth of dukkha (misery, suffering, unsatisfactoriness) - symptom
Task: This truth must be completely understood experientially.
It has 3 levels:
1. Occasional and obvious misery
Examples: physical pain, mental anguish, old age, sickness, death, etc.
2. Change and impermanence
Examples: Being separated from loved ones, being united with hated ones. Even the pleasant
situations in life eventually transform into unpleasant situations.
3. Constant conditionality
Examples: This is the subtlest level of dukkha. It is equated with 'The Five Aggregates affected by
clinging (we will discuss the five-aggregates in the last class).
The point here is that there is a level at which we are constantly subjected to dukkha because the very
fabric of the mental continuum is fraught with certain habits and patterns that create cognitive
dissonance and subtle forms of agitation that pervade experience with a kind of background
existential malaise.
2. The truth of the cause of dukkha: Tah (craving) - diagnosis
Task: This truth must be completely relinquished and abandoned.
We have a tendency is to cling to things, even if they are ultimately not good for us. Mindfulness
practice ultimately leads to a radical kind of detachment, one that is not usually emphasized in much
of the contemporary hype.
3. The truth of the cessation of dukkha: nirodha - prognosis
Task: This truth must be experientially realized.
The more common name for this is the Sanskrit term nirva or in Pli: nibbna. This notion refers
to the end of dukkha that is realized when someone is able to completely let go of craving.
4. The truth of the path that leads to the cessation of dukkha - prescription

Task: This path has 8 parts and 3 divisions and must be cultivated in order for the fruit of cessation
to be realized. This path is a way of living, and thus embodies a practical approach to life rather than
a set of propositions to be believed.
Eightfold Noble Path: ariyo ahagiko maggo

1. Right View
2. Right Intention

Division 1: Pa - Insight, Understanding or Wisdom

3. Right Speech
4. Right Action

Division 2: Sla - Morality

5. Right Livelihood

6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness

Division 3: Samdhi - Concentration

8. Right Concentration

Some Notes on the Cultivation of Pa:

Pa is both the beginning and end of the path in the sense that one must start from a basic
understanding of the system if one is to work properly.

Additionally, the culmination of the path is an insight into the causal structure of experience
within the framework of one's own body.

The details of this are beyond the scope of our discussion here. What is important is that all three
divisions mutually reinforce each other and that within each division, each factor supports the
other.

Mindfulness of Breathing in 16-stages:

Tetrad 1: The Body

Tetrad 2: Feelings/Sensations

(1) Long Breaths

(5) Joy

(2) Short Breaths

(6) Happiness

(3) Feeling the entire body

(7) Feeling mental formations

(4) Calming Bodily formation

(8) Calming and abandoning mental formations

Tetrad 3: Mind/Mood

Tetrad 4: Mental Structures

(9) Experiencing the mind

(13) Impermanence

(10) Gladdening the mind

(14) Dispassion

(11) Concentrating the mind

(15) Cessation

(12) Liberating the mind

(16) Letting go

Each of themes is called a satipahn or a foundation of mindfulness. On the following page, you
will find an analysis of how each of these foundations is to be engaged with in practice.
Upshot: Using mindfulness practice to train attention has the potential to decrease the negative
impact of affective bias.
Evidence:

Improved ability to hold objects stable in binocular rivalry tasks.

Improved ability to detect second targets in attentional blink paradigms, correlated with more
efficient neural processing of the first target. These results suggest that improved performance
on T2 is a result of using less attentional resources for detection of T1 (Davis and Thompson, 18).

Increased awareness of micro facial expressions (23).

Improved emotional awareness correlated with increased awareness of interoceptive sensations

in the body (ibid).

Important Point:
Scientific investigations of practices derived from Buddhist traditions have focused to date primarily
on how various forms of attention training alter cognitive and affective processes...Yet Buddhist
teachings include many other methods for training practitioner's habits of mind.
Examples: moral restraint, death, impermanence, lack of self, detachment

Attenuating the Distortions in Attention and Memory:

On this view, developing mindfulness helps to attenuate affective biases in both attention and
memory, which have the potential to distort our sense of ourselves and the world and lead to
suffering.
Thus, "...by increasing phenomenal consciousness of subtle internal and external stimuli, one makes
one's cognitive awareness more complete. On the other hand, to the degree that attention and
memory are affectively biased, one is less likely to consciously experience subtle emotional stimuli
that do not fit one's biases" (24).