ABSTRACT
Our starting point in this chapter is the ecological tradition’s aspiration “to understand how organisms make their way in the world, not how a world is made inside of organisms” (Reed, 1996, p. 11). For an organism, “making one’s way in the world” is a continuous process: It is a behavioral and metabolic continuity whereby the organism–environment relation is regulated in a way that leaves traces in both the organism and the environment. The prerequisite for describing the organism–environment relation as being regulated is that the relation is sufficiently flexible: A living system’s flexible, adaptive behavior is enabled by cognition. Accordingly, a cognitive trajectory intertwines with the organism’s behavioral and metabolic processes. We define this cognitive trajectory as an emergent pattern in a dynamic organism–environment relation, managed by the organism through continuous action–perception cycles. On this view, cognition does not play out in a separate, mediational (mental) realm nor does it constitute a causal power that controls the organism’s metabolic and behavioral states. The chapter opens with a critical review of the mentalist view on cognition and problem solving, partly through a critique of the classic methods of decomposing problem solving and partly through a discussion of Ohlsson’s framework. After that, we present the ecological framework and suggests that from that perspective, problem-solving psychology is the “psychology of the suspended next.” We clarify this view through a presentation of how organism–environment interactivity gives rise to distinct cognitive trajectories in two case examples: one observed under laboratory conditions and one in the “wild.” Our main proposal is that, to understand problem solving, we need to take as a starting point how agents probe their cognitive ecology when their automatized routines fail, and they find themselves confronted with an impasse. Insights, on this view, are not achieved, but enacted.
