Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut, USA.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2009 Dec;35(6):1811-32. doi: 10.1037/a0014510.
Explaining how the cognitive system can create new structures has been a major challenge for cognitive science. Self-organization from the theory of nonlinear dynamics offers an account of this remarkable phenomenon. Two studies provide an initial test of the hypothesis that the emergence of new cognitive structure follows the same universal principles as emergence in other domains (e.g., fluids, lasers). In both studies, participants initially solved gear-system problems by manually tracing the force across a system of gears. Subsequently, they discovered that the gears form an alternating sequence, thereby demonstrating a new cognitive structure. In both studies, dynamical analyses of action during problem solving predicted the spontaneous emergence of the new cognitive structure. Study 1 showed that a peak in entropy, followed by negentropy, key indicators of self-organization, predicted discovery of alternation. Study 2 replicated these effects, and showed that increasing environmental entropy accelerated discovery, a classic prediction from dynamics. Additional analyses based on the relationship between phase transitions and power-law behavior provide converging evidence. The studies provide an initial demonstration of the emergence of cognitive structure through self-organization.
解释认知系统如何创造新结构一直是认知科学的一大挑战。非线性动力学理论的自组织为这一显著现象提供了一种解释。两项研究初步检验了这样一个假设，即新认知结构的出现遵循与其他领域（如流体、激光）相同的普遍原则。在这两项研究中，参与者最初通过手动追踪力在齿轮系统中的传递来解决齿轮系统问题。随后，他们发现齿轮形成交替序列，从而展示了一种新的认知结构。在这两项研究中，对解决问题过程中动作的动力学分析预测了新认知结构的自发出现。研究 1 表明，熵的峰值，随后是负熵，这是自组织的关键指标，预测了交替的发现。研究 2 复制了这些效果，并表明环境熵的增加加速了发现，这是动力学的经典预测。基于相变和幂律行为之间关系的其他分析提供了趋同的证据。这些研究初步证明了通过自组织出现认知结构。
