Abstract
This paper examines some of the methods animals and humans have of adapting
their environment. Because there are limits on how many different tasks
a creature can be designed to do well in, creatures with the capacity
to redesign their environments have an adaptive advantage over those who
can only passively adapt to existing environmental structures. To clarify
environmental redesign I rely on the formal notion of a task environment
as a directed graph where the nodes are states and the links are actions.
One natural form of redesign is to change the topology of this graph structure
so as to increase the likelihood of task success or to reduce its expected
cost, measured in physical terms. This may be done by eliminating initial
states hence eliminating choice points; by changing the action repertoire;
by changing the consequence function; and lastly, by adding choice points.
Another major method for adapting the environment is to change its cognitive
congeniality. Such changes leave the state space formally intact but reduce
the number and cost of mental operations needed for task success; they
reliably increase the speed, accuracy or robustness of performance. The
last section of the paper describes several of these epistemic or complementary
actions found in human performance.
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