Adapting the Environment Instead of Oneself

Abstract

This article examines some of the methods used by animals and humans to adapt their environment. Because there are limits on the number of 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 adapt only passively to existing environmental structures. To clarify environmental redesign, l rely on the formal notion of a task environment as a directed graph in which 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 article describes several of these epistemic or complementary actions found in human performance.