Evaluation of the Perceived Benefits of a Peer Support Group for People with Mental Health Problems

This paper reports on a service evaluation of PeerTalk, a nationwide charity that organises and facilitates peer support groups for individuals with depression. Therefore, the aim was to gather and synthesise benefits perceived by support group attendees. Thematic analysis was undertaken following the collection of data from two group interviews comprising PeerTalk support group attendees. Once those data were analysed, five key themes emerged: (1) talking/listening, (2) socialising, (3) contrast with other services, (4) personal benefits, and (5) structure and accessibility. Two further minor themes were also identified: (6) wider benefits and (7) areas for development that could lead to overall improvements to the service. PeerTalk's support groups provide multiple opportunities for attendees to meet others who have similar experiences within an environment that does not require formal engagement or commitment. Those that attend find benefit from supporting others and socialising within the group. These benefits are complementary to mainstream services that they may concurrently be involved with, rather than replacing or hindering them. Peer support groups can therefore provide a resource for healthcare professionals to which they can direct individuals who may feel benefit from engaging with other individuals with similar experiences. Sheffield Hallam University granted ethics approval for the study (ER:59716880) prior to its commencement (16 February 2024).

'Snakes and ladders' in paleoanthropology: From cognitive surprise to skillfulness a million years ago

A paradigmatic account may suffice to explain behavioral evolution in early Homo. We propose a parsimonious account that (1) could explain a particular, frequently-encountered, archeological outcome of behavior in early Homo - namely, the fashioning of a Paleolithic stone 'handaxe' - from a biological theoretic perspective informed by the free energy principle (FEP); and that (2) regards instances of the outcome as postdictive or retrodictive, circumstantial corroboration. Our proposal considers humankind evolving as a self-organizing biological ecosystem at a geological time-scale. We offer a narrative treatment of this self-organization in terms of the FEP. Specifically, we indicate how 'cognitive surprises' could underwrite an evolving propensity in early Homo to express sporadic unorthodox or anomalous behavior. This co-evolutionary propensity has left us a legacy of Paleolithic artifacts that is reminiscent of a 'snakes and ladders' board game of appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular archeological traces of Paleolithic behavior. When detected in the Early and Middle Pleistocene record, anthropologists and archeologists often imagine evidence of unusual or novel behavior in terms of early humankind ascending the rungs of a figurative phylogenetic 'ladder' - as if these corresponded to progressive evolution of cognitive abilities that enabled incremental achievements of increasingly innovative technical prowess, culminating in the cognitive ascendancy of Homo sapiens. The conjecture overlooks a plausible likelihood that behavior by an individual who was atypical among her conspecifics could have been disregarded in a community of Hominina (for definition see Appendix 1) that failed to recognize, imagine, or articulate potential advantages of adopting hitherto unorthodox behavior. Such failure, as well as diverse fortuitous demographic accidents, would cause exceptional personal behavior to be ignored and hence unremembered. It could disappear by a pitfall, down a 'snake', as it were, in the figurative evolutionary board game; thereby causing a discontinuity in the evolution of human behavior that presents like an evolutionary puzzle. The puzzle discomforts some paleoanthropologists trained in the natural and life sciences. They often dismiss it, explaining it away with such self-justifying conjectures as that, maybe, separate paleospecies of Homo differentially possessed different cognitive abilities, which, supposedly, could account for the presence or absence in the Pleistocene archeological record of traces of this or that behavioral outcome or skill. We argue that an alternative perspective - that inherits from the FEP and an individual's 'active inference' about its surroundings and of its own responses - affords a prosaic, deflationary, and parsimonious way to account for appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular behavioral outcomes and skills of early humankind.

The future of psychological treatments: The Marburg Declaration

Although psychological treatments are broadly recognized as evidence-based interventions for various mental disorders, challenges remain. For example, a substantial proportion of patients receiving such treatments do not fully recover, and many obstacles hinder the dissemination, implementation, and training of psychological treatments. These problems require those in our field to rethink some of our basic models of mental disorders and their treatments, and question how research and practice in clinical psychology should progress. To answer these questions, a group of experts of clinical psychology convened at a Think-Tank in Marburg, Germany, in August 2022 to review the evidence and analyze barriers for current and future developments. After this event, an overview of the current state-of-the-art was drafted and suggestions for improvements and specific recommendations for research and practice were integrated. Recommendations arising from our meeting cover further improving psychological interventions through translational approaches, improving clinical research methodology, bridging the gap between more nomothetic (group-oriented) studies and idiographic (person-centered) decisions, using network approaches in addition to selecting single mechanisms to embrace the complexity of clinical reality, making use of scalable digital options for assessments and interventions, improving the training and education of future psychotherapists, and accepting the societal responsibilities that clinical psychology has in improving national and global health care. The objective of the Marburg Declaration is to stimulate a significant change regarding our understanding of mental disorders and their treatments, with the aim to trigger a new era of evidence-based psychological interventions.

A Process-Based Approach to Transtheoretical Clinical Research and Training

Background

The science and practice of psychopathology and psychological intervention of today is more like an island archipelago than it is a single land mass, and connections between different traditions are both limited and fraught with misunderstanding.

Method

Our analysis and solution to the problem is process-based therapy (PBT). PBT defines psychopathology as failed adaptation processes to a given context. Therapy involves adaptation through context-dependent or context-altering applications of biopsychosocial strategies that allows a goal to be met.

Results

This coherent approach to more transtheoretical and integrative concepts of clinical training and practice provides a firm foundation by targeting biopsychosocial processes of change, analyzing these processes using an idiographic complex network analytic approach, and organizing findings on the intellectual agora of multi-dimensional and multi-level evolutionary science.

Conclusion

PBT is a new empirical form of functional analysis, resulting in interventions and trainings that are built on elements or kernels of direct relevance to client's specific needs. In PBT, case formulation continues as long as treatment persists.

The adaptive stochasticity hypothesis: Modeling equifinality, multifinality, and adaptation to adversity

Neural phenotypes are the result of probabilistic developmental processes. This means that stochasticity is an intrinsic aspect of the brain as it self-organizes over a protracted period. In other words, while both genomic and environmental factors shape the developing nervous system, another significant-though often neglected-contributor is the randomness introduced by probability distributions. Using generative modeling of brain networks, we provide a framework for probing the contribution of stochasticity to neurodevelopmental diversity. To mimic the prenatal scaffold of brain structure set by activity-independent mechanisms, we start our simulations from the medio-posterior neonatal rich club (Developing Human Connectome Project, n = 630). From this initial starting point, models implementing Hebbian-like wiring processes generate variable yet consistently plausible brain network topologies. By analyzing repeated runs of the generative process (>107 simulations), we identify critical determinants and effects of stochasticity. Namely, we find that stochastic variation has a greater impact on brain organization when networks develop under weaker constraints. This heightened stochasticity makes brain networks more robust to random and targeted attacks, but more often results in non-normative phenotypic outcomes. To test our framework empirically, we evaluated whether stochasticity varies according to the experience of early-life deprivation using a cohort of neurodiverse children (Centre for Attention, Learning and Memory; n = 357). We show that low-socioeconomic status predicts more stochastic brain wiring. We conclude that stochasticity may be an unappreciated contributor to relevant developmental outcomes and make specific predictions for future research.

The Road Not Taken: What Developmental Psychology Might Learn From Darwin's Insights Concerning Sexual Selection

Developmental Psychology is the branch of psychology that studies, not only human behavior, but how and why human behavior changes over time. This essay seeks to review to what extent Developmental Psychology has failed to perceive human behavior through the lens of evolutionary theory in general, and in particular sexual selection as first described by Darwin and later elaborated on by many, including Robert Trivers and Geoffrey Miller; the essay asserts that this failure has resulted in many wrong turns and missed opportunities. In some cases, major developmental theorists (e.g., Freud, Erikson) were bedeviled by sex-based differences which they saw but could not explain and which compromised the parsimony of their stage theories. In the case of stage theories of moral development, some major theorists (e.g., Piaget, Kohlberg) were able to offer simpler explanations of moral development only by limiting their studies to male subjects. And, while Developmental Psychology textbooks thoroughly describe sex differences in the timing of morphological changes in puberty, writers seldom discuss why the timing is different in the two sexes, universally, and functionally. On the other hand, several domains of developmental focus, including play, mate choice, parenting, and spatial cognition, have seen successful research efforts that utilized sexually selected predispositions as foundational assumptions. The essay concludes with a discussion of how a more evolutionary and functional view of human behavior might move the field of Developmental Psychology to an even more robust and accurate understanding of how humans change over the course of a lifetime.

Applying the Free Energy Principle to Complex Adaptive Systems

The free energy principle (FEP) is a formulation of the adaptive, belief-driven behaviour of self-organizing systems that gained prominence in the early 2000s as a unified model of the brain [...].

Integrating Evolutionary, Cultural, and Computational Psychiatry: A Multilevel Systemic Approach

This paper proposes an integrative perspective on evolutionary, cultural and computational approaches to psychiatry. These three approaches attempt to frame mental disorders as multiscale entities and offer modes of explanations and modeling strategies that can inform clinical practice. Although each of these perspectives involves systemic thinking, each is limited in its ability to address the complex developmental trajectories and larger social systemic interactions that lead to mental disorders. Inspired by computational modeling in theoretical biology, this paper aims to integrate the modes of explanation offered by evolutionary, cultural and computational psychiatry in a multilevel systemic perspective. We apply the resulting Evolutionary, Cultural and Computational (ECC) model to Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) to illustrate how this integrative approach can guide research and practice in psychiatry.

Consciousness in active inference: Deep self-models, other minds, and the challenge of psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution

Predictive processing approaches to brain function are increasingly delivering promise for illuminating the computational underpinnings of a wide range of phenomenological states. It remains unclear, however, whether predictive processing is equipped to accommodate a theory of consciousness itself. Furthermore, objectors have argued that without specification of the core computational mechanisms of consciousness, predictive processing is unable to inform the attribution of consciousness to other non-human (biological and artificial) systems. In this paper, I argue that an account of consciousness in the predictive brain is within reach via recent accounts of phenomenal self-modelling in the active inference framework. The central claim here is that phenomenal consciousness is underpinned by 'subjective valuation'-a deep inference about the precision or 'predictability' of the self-evidencing ('fitness-promoting') outcomes of action. Based on this account, I argue that this approach can critically inform the distribution of experience in other systems, paying particular attention to the complex sensory attenuation mechanisms associated with deep self-models. I then consider an objection to the account: several recent papers argue that theories of consciousness that invoke self-consciousness as constitutive or necessary for consciousness are undermined by states (or traits) of 'selflessness'; in particular the 'totally selfless' states of ego-dissolution occasioned by psychedelic drugs. Drawing on existing work that accounts for psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution in the active inference framework, I argue that these states do not threaten to undermine an active inference theory of consciousness. Instead, these accounts corroborate the view that subjective valuation is the constitutive facet of experience, and they highlight the potential of psychedelic research to inform consciousness science, computational psychiatry and computational phenomenology.

An Active Inference Model of Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence, an emergent phenomenon in which a composite system of multiple interacting agents performs at levels greater than the sum of its parts, has long compelled research efforts in social and behavioral sciences. To date, however, formal models of collective intelligence have lacked a plausible mathematical description of the relationship between local-scale interactions between autonomous sub-system components (individuals) and global-scale behavior of the composite system (the collective). In this paper we use the Active Inference Formulation (AIF), a framework for explaining the behavior of any non-equilibrium steady state system at any scale, to posit a minimal agent-based model that simulates the relationship between local individual-level interaction and collective intelligence. We explore the effects of providing baseline AIF agents (Model 1) with specific cognitive capabilities: Theory of Mind (Model 2), Goal Alignment (Model 3), and Theory of Mind with Goal Alignment (Model 4). These stepwise transitions in sophistication of cognitive ability are motivated by the types of advancements plausibly required for an AIF agent to persist and flourish in an environment populated by other highly autonomous AIF agents, and have also recently been shown to map naturally to canonical steps in human cognitive ability. Illustrative results show that stepwise cognitive transitions increase system performance by providing complementary mechanisms for alignment between agents’ local and global optima. Alignment emerges endogenously from the dynamics of interacting AIF agents themselves, rather than being imposed exogenously by incentives to agents’ behaviors (contra existing computational models of collective intelligence) or top-down priors for collective behavior (contra existing multiscale simulations of AIF). These results shed light on the types of generic information-theoretic patterns conducive to collective intelligence in human and other complex adaptive systems.

Whether Mirror and Conceptual Neurons are Myths? Sparse vs. Distributed Neuronal Representations

Multi-layer neural networks, mirror neurons, and gnostic neurons are concepts that assign neural representations to mental representations of percepts and inner sensations. However, none of these approaches alone can explain the higher mental functions, which we observe in natural minds from the third and first-person perspectives through introspection. Recent concepts of preservation of chemical traces of sensory stimuli and hierarchical structures of postsynaptic associations represented by specifically organized groups of neurons combine these concepts and effectively explain much more complex mental functions. To find an operative model and understand how knowledge in the mind creates conscious sensations, we explain how perceptions, sensory impressions, and environment models gain their neural representations. It was pointed out ways to detect the similarity of structures representing previously remembered patterns to the mental and neuronal representations of new perceptions, ways of their associations, and principles of information processing. Supplemented, presented in earlier works, concepts of competition of representations stimulation and factors stimulating their action explain the mind's complex functions, including speech production and recognition. We postulate that using new methods of modelling the neural network's functions through the parallel physical process allows creating a physical model of natural and artificial, conscious, intelligent minds.

Deeply Felt Affect: The Emergence of Valence in Deep Active Inference

The positive-negative axis of emotional valence has long been recognized as fundamental to adaptive behavior, but its origin and underlying function have largely eluded formal theorizing and computational modeling. Using deep active inference, a hierarchical inference scheme that rests on inverting a model of how sensory data are generated, we develop a principled Bayesian model of emotional valence. This formulation asserts that agents infer their valence state based on the expected precision of their action model-an internal estimate of overall model fitness ("subjective fitness"). This index of subjective fitness can be estimated within any environment and exploits the domain generality of second-order beliefs (beliefs about beliefs). We show how maintaining internal valence representations allows the ensuing affective agent to optimize confidence in action selection preemptively. Valence representations can in turn be optimized by leveraging the (Bayes-optimal) updating term for subjective fitness, which we label affective charge (AC). AC tracks changes in fitness estimates and lends a sign to otherwise unsigned divergences between predictions and outcomes. We simulate the resulting affective inference by subjecting an in silico affective agent to a T-maze paradigm requiring context learning, followed by context reversal. This formulation of affective inference offers a principled account of the link between affect, (mental) action, and implicit metacognition. It characterizes how a deep biological system can infer its affective state and reduce uncertainty about such inferences through internal action (i.e., top-down modulation of priors that underwrite confidence). Thus, we demonstrate the potential of active inference to provide a formal and computationally tractable account of affect. Our demonstration of the face validity and potential utility of this formulation represents the first step within a larger research program. Next, this model can be leveraged to test the hypothesized role of valence by fitting the model to behavioral and neuronal responses.

Searching for Models for Psychological Science: A Possible Contribution of Simulation

The problem of the theoretical precariousness of psychology requires defining, at an epistemological level, its concepts and languages and the use of models for finding core concepts and building more or less 'hard' theories. After reviewing some main aims and models of psychology, and comparing them with those of other sciences, the commentary deals with the possibility of simulating life as a tool for building evolutionary psychological models. In particular, evolutionary and developmental robotics and the evo-devo models can simulate the simultaneous adaptation effects of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of the embodied mind in response to the characteristics of the environment. The simulation using Artificial Intelligence and robotics could contribute significantly to the definition, experimentation, and validation of the models that make up the theories of psychology in its different domains, enhancing the interdisciplinarity with other sciences that study the same objects. Further studies, both epistemological and empirical, are suggested to confirm whether this evo-devo approach can be integrated with "evolutionary psychology" and contribute to a unifying meta-theory of psychological science.

Psychology: a Giant with Feet of Clay

The aim of the current study has been to highlight the theoretical precariousness of Psychology. The theoretical precariousness has been evidenced through a review of psychological "core-constructs" whose definitions were thoroughly searched in 11 popular introductory textbooks of psychology edited between 2012 and 2019 and in an APA dictionary of Psychology (VandeBos 2015). This analysis has shown unsatisfactory or discordant definitions of psychological "core-constructs". A further epistemological comparison between psychology and three "harder" sciences (i.e., physics, chemistry and biology) seemed to support the "soft" nature of psychology: a minor consensus in its "core" and a minor capacity to accumulate knowledge when compared to the former "harder" sciences (Fanelli in PLoS One, 5, e10068, 2010; Fanelli and Glänzel in PLoS One, 8, e66938, 2013). This comparison also seemed to support the "pre-paradigmatic" condition of psychology, in which conflicts between rival schools of thought hamper the development of a real unified paradigm (Kuhn 1970). To enter a paradigmatic stage, we propose here evolutionary psychology as the most compelling approach, thanks to its empirical support and theoretical consistency. However, since the skepticism about "grand unifying theories" is well disposed (Badcock in Review of General Psychology, 16, 10-23, 2012), we suggest that evolutionary psychology must be intended as a pluralistic approach rather than a monolithic one, and that its main strength is its capacity to resolve the nature-nurture dialectics.

Variational ecology and the physics of sentient systems

This paper addresses the challenges faced by multiscale formulations of the variational (free energy) approach to dynamics that obtain for large-scale ensembles. We review a framework for modelling complex adaptive control systems for multiscale free energy bounding organism-niche dynamics, thereby integrating the modelling strategies and heuristics of variational neuroethology with a broader perspective on the ecological nestedness of biotic systems. We extend the multiscale variational formulation beyond the action-perception loops of individual organisms by appealing to the variational approach to niche construction to explain the dynamics of coupled systems constituted by organisms and their ecological niche. We suggest that the statistical robustness of living systems is inherited, in part, from their eco-niches, as niches help coordinate dynamical patterns across larger spatiotemporal scales. We call this approach variational ecology. We argue that, when applied to cultural animals such as humans, variational ecology enables us to formulate not just a physics of individual minds, but also a physics of interacting minds across spatial and temporal scales - a physics of sentient systems that range from cells to societies.

The hierarchically mechanistic mind: an evolutionary systems theory of the human brain, cognition, and behavior

The purpose of this review was to integrate leading paradigms in psychology and neuroscience with a theory of the embodied, situated human brain, called the Hierarchically Mechanistic Mind (HMM). The HMM describes the brain as a complex adaptive system that functions to minimize the entropy of our sensory and physical states via action-perception cycles generated by hierarchical neural dynamics. First, we review the extant literature on the hierarchical structure of the brain. Next, we derive the HMM from a broader evolutionary systems theory that explains neural structure and function in terms of dynamic interactions across four nested levels of biological causation (i.e., adaptation, phylogeny, ontogeny, and mechanism). We then describe how the HMM aligns with a global brain theory in neuroscience called the free-energy principle, leveraging this theory to mathematically formulate neural dynamics across hierarchical spatiotemporal scales. We conclude by exploring the implications of the HMM for psychological inquiry.

The hierarchically mechanistic mind: A free-energy formulation of the human psyche

This article presents a unifying theory of the embodied, situated human brain called the Hierarchically Mechanistic Mind (HMM). The HMM describes the brain as a complex adaptive system that actively minimises the decay of our sensory and physical states by producing self-fulfilling action-perception cycles via dynamical interactions between hierarchically organised neurocognitive mechanisms. This theory synthesises the free-energy principle (FEP) in neuroscience with an evolutionary systems theory of psychology that explains our brains, minds, and behaviour by appealing to Tinbergen's four questions: adaptation, phylogeny, ontogeny, and mechanism. After leveraging the FEP to formally define the HMM across different spatiotemporal scales, we conclude by exploring its implications for theorising and research in the sciences of the mind and behaviour.

Tinkering with cognitive gadgets: Cultural evolutionary psychology meets active inference

Cognitive Gadgets offers a new, convincing perspective on the origins of our distinctive cognitive faculties, coupled with a clear, innovative research program. Although we broadly endorse Heyes' ideas, we raise some concerns about her characterisation of evolutionary psychology and the relationship between biology and culture, before discussing the potential fruits of examining cognitive gadgets through the lens of active inference.

Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as "shared expectations," the "selective patterning of attention and behaviour," "cultural evolution," "cultural inheritance," and "implicit learning" are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process "thinking through other minds" (TTOM) - in effect, the process of inferring other agents' expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism.

Regimes of Expectations: An Active Inference Model of Social Conformity and Human Decision Making

How do humans come to acquire shared expectations about how they ought to behave in distinct normalized social settings? This paper offers a normative framework to answer this question. We introduce the computational construct of 'deontic value' - based on active inference and Markov decision processes - to formalize conceptions of social conformity and human decision-making. Deontic value is an attribute of choices, behaviors, or action sequences that inherit directly from deontic cues in our econiche (e.g., red traffic lights); namely, cues that denote an obligatory social rule. Crucially, the prosocial aspect of deontic value rests upon a particular form of circular causality: deontic cues exist in the environment in virtue of the environment being modified by repeated actions, while action itself is contingent upon the deontic value of environmental cues. We argue that this construction of deontic cues enables the epistemic (i.e., information-seeking) and pragmatic (i.e., goal- seeking) values of any behavior to be 'cached' or 'outsourced' to the environment, where the environment effectively 'learns' about the behavior of its denizens. We describe the process whereby this particular aspect of value enables learning of habitual behavior over neurodevelopmental and transgenerational timescales.

After phrenology: Time for a paradigm shift in cognitive science

Anderson (2014) uses an impressive, consolidating review of the literature to argue for major changes in cognitive science. Arguably, however, much of what he proposes is not particularly new. He also neglects important predictive coding approaches that call his perspective of the brain into question, and his misconstrual of evolutionary psychology devalues an influential paradigm that promises to complement his own.

Answering Schrödinger's question: A free-energy formulation

The free-energy principle (FEP) is a formal model of neuronal processes that is widely recognised in neuroscience as a unifying theory of the brain and biobehaviour. More recently, however, it has been extended beyond the brain to explain the dynamics of living systems, and their unique capacity to avoid decay. The aim of this review is to synthesise these advances with a meta-theoretical ontology of biological systems called variational neuroethology, which integrates the FEP with Tinbergen's four research questions to explain biological systems across spatial and temporal scales. We exemplify this framework by applying it to Homo sapiens, before translating variational neuroethology into a systematic research heuristic that supplies the biological, cognitive, and social sciences with a computationally tractable guide to discovery.

Bridging Evolutionary Biology and Developmental Psychology: Toward An Enduring Theoretical Infrastructure

Bjorklund synthesizes promising research directions in developmental psychology using an evolutionary framework. In general terms, we agree with Bjorklund: Evolutionary theory has the potential to serve as a metatheory for developmental psychology. However, as currently used in psychology, evolutionary theory is far from reaching this potential. In evolutionary biology, formal mathematical models are the norm. In developmental psychology, verbal models are the norm. In order to reach its potential, evolutionary developmental psychology needs to embrace formal modeling.

Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention

In this paper we outline a framework for the study of the mechanisms involved in the engagement of human agents with cultural affordances. Our aim is to better understand how culture and context interact with human biology to shape human behavior, cognition, and experience. We attempt to integrate several related approaches in the study of the embodied, cognitive, and affective substrates of sociality and culture and the sociocultural scaffolding of experience. The integrative framework we propose bridges cognitive and social sciences to provide (i) an expanded concept of ‘affordance’ that extends to sociocultural forms of life, and (ii) a multilevel account of the socioculturally scaffolded forms of affordance learning and the transmission of affordances in patterned sociocultural practices and regimes of shared attention. This framework provides an account of how cultural content and normative practices are built on a foundation of contentless basic mental processes that acquire content through immersive participation of the agent in social practices that regulate joint attention and shared intentionality.

Bridging developmental systems theory and evolutionary psychology using dynamic optimization

Interactions between evolutionary psychologists and developmental systems theorists have been largely antagonistic. This is unfortunate because potential synergies between the two approaches remain unexplored. This article presents a method that may help to bridge the divide, and that has proven fruitful in biology: dynamic optimization. Dynamic optimization integrates developmental systems theorists' focus on dynamics and contingency with the 'design stance' of evolutionary psychology. It provides a theoretical framework as well as a set of tools for exploring the properties of developmental systems that natural selection might favor, given particular evolutionary ecologies. We also discuss limitations of the approach.