Embodied Decisions

Our early evolutionary ancestors evolved to make embodied decisions, such as, for a lion, which gazelle to chase; or for a goal-keeper, the decision of where to jump to save a penalty kick.

Embodied decisions differ in many respects from "decisions in the lab" (e.g., forced choices between 2 fixed alternatives) that are the focus of most research in psychology and neuroscience. They do not consist in the selection of fixed offers from a preconfigured "menu". Rather, they consist in the selection of affordances whose number and availability change from moment by moment (as - for example - the lion and gazelles move around) - hence forming a dynamical "affordance landscape".

I argued that embodied choices are not easily described by sequential models where decision-making precedes action; rather, they require models in which decisions and action are interleaved and reciprocally influence each other. See my Featured article on action and embodied choice.


Selected pubs:

  • Lepora, N., Pezzulo, G. (2015) Embodied Choice: How action influences perceptual decision making. PLOS Computational Biology 11(4): e1004110 [link]

  • Pezzulo, G., Cisek P. (2016) Navigating the Affordance Landscape: Feedback Control as a Process Model of Behavior and Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (6), 414-424 [link]

Other pubs:

  • Cisek, P and Pastor-Bernier A (2014) On the challenges and mechanisms of embodied decisions. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2014 Nov 5;369(1655):20130479. [link]

  • Yoo, S. B. M., Hayden, B., & Pearson, J. (2020). Continuous Decisions. [link]