Sanjay Chandrasekharan, Terry Stewart

Organisms across species use the strategy of generating structures in their environment to lower cognitive complexity. Examples include pheromones, markers, colour codes, etc. Distributed Cognition theory has argued that studying such ‘epistemic structures’ can provide insights into the development and nature of internal representations, and cognition itself. We develop this claim by providing a model of the origin of such structures, and present a simulation where organisms with only reactive behaviour learn, within their lifetime, to add such structures systematically to their world to lower cognitive load. This implementation is then extended to show that the same underlying process could generate traces of the world in an ‘internal environment’ to lower cognitive load. We then examine two implications of this internal trace model. First, it provides a novel account of the origin of internal representations. Further, as both external and internal traces lower cognitive load and are generated using the same mechanism, the location of the structure becomes opportunistic, and a matter of utility. This supports the ‘extended mind’ hypothesis. Second, the stored internal traces develop entirely out of actions. They thus encapsulate action components and could activate actions. This feature explains the origin of enactable and action-oriented mental content.