Gilead et al.'s target article is no doubt written in a scholarly and eloquent way, offering conceptual common ground, and a challenge, to BBS readers from cognitive and behavioral science, philosophy, and neuroscience. Quite in the spirit of the key role attributed to abstractness in prospection and time traveling, they involve the reader in a mental travel through a conceptual landscape that is replete with abstract conceptions. The representational substrates of the mind are portrayed as a hierarchy, with manifold qualitative differences “between elements along this hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged, diversity.” In outlining this refined framework, the authors connect various approaches to cognitive psychology at a high level of construal, leaving many abstract concepts “unsaturated,” open for concrete references to methods, empirical findings, and assumptions debatable at lower construal levels. The resulting portrayal is rich and unconstrained, reflecting the virtues of abstract representations with many degrees of freedom and little testable constraints on the predictive brain.
The brevity of this comment does not allow me to discuss so many distinct assumptions critically: Are modality-specific representations really based on perceptual similarity, whereas multimodal representations rely on spatiotemporal contiguity? Do categorical representations really emerge from social interaction? Rather than trying to tie down such abstract ideas to testable assumptions, I will confine myself to a critical comment on abstractness and the predictive brain as chief determinants of the adaptive ability to travel in time and space and to predict the future. This exclusive focus on intrapsychic capacities, I suspect, misses an important point, namely, the crucial role of environmental constraints imposed on cognition and the notion that the predictive environment is antecedent to the predictive brain and the predictive power of abstract mental representations. Although I anticipate that the authors may not contest but rather consider my point self-evident and common sense, the target article excludes the environment in much the same way as it was neglected during the last century of cognitive science.
Consider the authors’ own prominent research program on construal-level theory (Trope & Liberman Reference Trope and Liberman2010), which offers a compelling explanation of abstractness (high construal level) as a key to transcending time and space (Liberman & Trope Reference Liberman and Trope2014). The basic idea is that different levels of abstractness are required at different levels of psychological distance. Just as a local city map represents streets and buildings in more detail at a higher resolution level than a world atlas, a letter to a close friend or partner provides more concrete references to private details than a broad publication. This natural relationship between distance (construal level) and abstractness (vs. resolution level) does not causally reflect any a-priori propensities of the mind or the brain. Instead, it is imposed by the environment. Zooming-in (reducing distance) must increase resolution and concreteness whereas zooming-out (increase distance) must reduce resolution and increase abstractness; field glasses with reverse properties would be fully dysfunctional. Likewise, the convergence of spatial, temporal, social, and evidential distance on a common distance dimension reflects constraints of the physical and social environment (Fiedler et al. Reference Fiedler, Jung, Wänke, Alexopoulos and de Molière2015). What happened many years ago is more likely to have taken place at distant locations with other social partners, embedded in less likely scenarios than what is currently experienced – in the here and now.
Analogous to the primacy of physics in psychophysics, psychological distance is intrinsically entrenched in the physical and social environment, which enforces increasing abstractness (unsaturated, free parameters) when traveling to future, remote, socially unusual, or uncertain destinations. Likewise, the Weber–Fechner law (Dehaene Reference Dehaene2003) – increasing discrimination thresholds with increasing absolute quantities – is not reversible; sensorimotor regulation would break down if thresholds for discriminating grams or milliseconds would be cruder than for discriminating tons and years.
Asymmetric mental construal mirrors asymmetries in the environment. Polarity-correspondence phenomena (Proctor & Cho Reference Proctor and Cho2006) reflect the alignment of memory codes with structural properties in the stimulus world, such that the presence or absence of representational features is aligned with the presence or absence of events. Research inspired by Parducci's (Reference Parducci1965) range-frequency model shows that high-frequency categories are split into two or more subcategories, whereas low-frequency categories are merged into super-categories. Likewise, the lower density of outgroup relative to ingroup observations can explain their impoverished representation (outgroup homogeneity; Konovalova & Le Mens Reference Konovalova and Le Mens2020; Linville et al. Reference Linville, Fischer and Yoon1996). The environment confounds scarceness with distance, distance with value (Pleskac & Hertwig Reference Pleskac and Hertwig2014), and novelty with uncertainty.
Not only does the environment constrain cognitive representations, it also has its own semiotic properties that determine mental representations. Sign systems can have a profound influence on information transmission and social cognition (Fiedler et al. Reference Fiedler, Bluemke, Freytag, Unkelbach, Koch, Kashima, Fiedler and Freytag2008). As abstract distal concepts like risk, honesty, familiarity, or ability are not amenable to direct perception, they must be construed from vectors of proximal cues. For instance, honesty or veracity must be construed from distributive representations across such cues as pupil dilatation, gaze, disfluencies, and amount of detail. Crucially, these cues to honesty overlap considerably with the cues used to construe other distal entities, like self-confidence or social intelligence, creating semiotic confounds in mental representations. Cues to femininity overlap with cues indicating emotionality (Fiedler et al. Reference Fiedler, Bluemke, Freytag, Unkelbach, Koch, Kashima, Fiedler and Freytag2008). Two personality tests, assessing extraversion and leadership, may overlap in items contents, mimicking a non-existing relation between extraversion and leadership. Cue systems offered by the semiotic environment can lead to strongly confounded cognitive representations. At different levels of abstractness, socially or culturally transmitted information takes on the properties of the sign systems used for communication.
Scientists’ reluctance to reserve a place for the environment in comprehensive theories of cognition is reminiscent of the fundamental-attribution error – the preference for dispositional over situational explanations of behavior. The “predictive brain” seems to potentiate this bias, reducing the adaptive beauty of mind travel to the organism's cellular equipment. Proponents of cognitive-ecological approaches (Fiedler Reference Fiedler2014; Pleskac & Hertwig Reference Pleskac and Hertwig2014) have long complained about the neglect of extra-psychic factors, pointing out how analyzing the structure of the environment can enrich comprehensive theories of cognition, especially when it comes to prospection, time-travel, and abstraction.
Gilead et al.'s target article is no doubt written in a scholarly and eloquent way, offering conceptual common ground, and a challenge, to BBS readers from cognitive and behavioral science, philosophy, and neuroscience. Quite in the spirit of the key role attributed to abstractness in prospection and time traveling, they involve the reader in a mental travel through a conceptual landscape that is replete with abstract conceptions. The representational substrates of the mind are portrayed as a hierarchy, with manifold qualitative differences “between elements along this hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged, diversity.” In outlining this refined framework, the authors connect various approaches to cognitive psychology at a high level of construal, leaving many abstract concepts “unsaturated,” open for concrete references to methods, empirical findings, and assumptions debatable at lower construal levels. The resulting portrayal is rich and unconstrained, reflecting the virtues of abstract representations with many degrees of freedom and little testable constraints on the predictive brain.
The brevity of this comment does not allow me to discuss so many distinct assumptions critically: Are modality-specific representations really based on perceptual similarity, whereas multimodal representations rely on spatiotemporal contiguity? Do categorical representations really emerge from social interaction? Rather than trying to tie down such abstract ideas to testable assumptions, I will confine myself to a critical comment on abstractness and the predictive brain as chief determinants of the adaptive ability to travel in time and space and to predict the future. This exclusive focus on intrapsychic capacities, I suspect, misses an important point, namely, the crucial role of environmental constraints imposed on cognition and the notion that the predictive environment is antecedent to the predictive brain and the predictive power of abstract mental representations. Although I anticipate that the authors may not contest but rather consider my point self-evident and common sense, the target article excludes the environment in much the same way as it was neglected during the last century of cognitive science.
Consider the authors’ own prominent research program on construal-level theory (Trope & Liberman Reference Trope and Liberman2010), which offers a compelling explanation of abstractness (high construal level) as a key to transcending time and space (Liberman & Trope Reference Liberman and Trope2014). The basic idea is that different levels of abstractness are required at different levels of psychological distance. Just as a local city map represents streets and buildings in more detail at a higher resolution level than a world atlas, a letter to a close friend or partner provides more concrete references to private details than a broad publication. This natural relationship between distance (construal level) and abstractness (vs. resolution level) does not causally reflect any a-priori propensities of the mind or the brain. Instead, it is imposed by the environment. Zooming-in (reducing distance) must increase resolution and concreteness whereas zooming-out (increase distance) must reduce resolution and increase abstractness; field glasses with reverse properties would be fully dysfunctional. Likewise, the convergence of spatial, temporal, social, and evidential distance on a common distance dimension reflects constraints of the physical and social environment (Fiedler et al. Reference Fiedler, Jung, Wänke, Alexopoulos and de Molière2015). What happened many years ago is more likely to have taken place at distant locations with other social partners, embedded in less likely scenarios than what is currently experienced – in the here and now.
Analogous to the primacy of physics in psychophysics, psychological distance is intrinsically entrenched in the physical and social environment, which enforces increasing abstractness (unsaturated, free parameters) when traveling to future, remote, socially unusual, or uncertain destinations. Likewise, the Weber–Fechner law (Dehaene Reference Dehaene2003) – increasing discrimination thresholds with increasing absolute quantities – is not reversible; sensorimotor regulation would break down if thresholds for discriminating grams or milliseconds would be cruder than for discriminating tons and years.
Asymmetric mental construal mirrors asymmetries in the environment. Polarity-correspondence phenomena (Proctor & Cho Reference Proctor and Cho2006) reflect the alignment of memory codes with structural properties in the stimulus world, such that the presence or absence of representational features is aligned with the presence or absence of events. Research inspired by Parducci's (Reference Parducci1965) range-frequency model shows that high-frequency categories are split into two or more subcategories, whereas low-frequency categories are merged into super-categories. Likewise, the lower density of outgroup relative to ingroup observations can explain their impoverished representation (outgroup homogeneity; Konovalova & Le Mens Reference Konovalova and Le Mens2020; Linville et al. Reference Linville, Fischer and Yoon1996). The environment confounds scarceness with distance, distance with value (Pleskac & Hertwig Reference Pleskac and Hertwig2014), and novelty with uncertainty.
Not only does the environment constrain cognitive representations, it also has its own semiotic properties that determine mental representations. Sign systems can have a profound influence on information transmission and social cognition (Fiedler et al. Reference Fiedler, Bluemke, Freytag, Unkelbach, Koch, Kashima, Fiedler and Freytag2008). As abstract distal concepts like risk, honesty, familiarity, or ability are not amenable to direct perception, they must be construed from vectors of proximal cues. For instance, honesty or veracity must be construed from distributive representations across such cues as pupil dilatation, gaze, disfluencies, and amount of detail. Crucially, these cues to honesty overlap considerably with the cues used to construe other distal entities, like self-confidence or social intelligence, creating semiotic confounds in mental representations. Cues to femininity overlap with cues indicating emotionality (Fiedler et al. Reference Fiedler, Bluemke, Freytag, Unkelbach, Koch, Kashima, Fiedler and Freytag2008). Two personality tests, assessing extraversion and leadership, may overlap in items contents, mimicking a non-existing relation between extraversion and leadership. Cue systems offered by the semiotic environment can lead to strongly confounded cognitive representations. At different levels of abstractness, socially or culturally transmitted information takes on the properties of the sign systems used for communication.
Scientists’ reluctance to reserve a place for the environment in comprehensive theories of cognition is reminiscent of the fundamental-attribution error – the preference for dispositional over situational explanations of behavior. The “predictive brain” seems to potentiate this bias, reducing the adaptive beauty of mind travel to the organism's cellular equipment. Proponents of cognitive-ecological approaches (Fiedler Reference Fiedler2014; Pleskac & Hertwig Reference Pleskac and Hertwig2014) have long complained about the neglect of extra-psychic factors, pointing out how analyzing the structure of the environment can enrich comprehensive theories of cognition, especially when it comes to prospection, time-travel, and abstraction.