Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans build novel tools, external knowledge structures (markers, maps etc.), and internal structures (analogies, mentalmodels etc.) to facilitate cognition. Humans also recombine these building strategies to suit any task. Other organismsgenerate such structures as well, but they use them to optimize single tasks. This suggests that the human species’ cognitiveadvantage stems from the capability to recombine built structures, and the resulting extended mind. Chandrasekharan& Stewart (2007) hypothesized that this capacity could emerge from reinforcement learning. We tested this proposal,by studying three foraging models, which examined whether novel recombinations of building (external and internalnavigation structures) emerged in reactive agents, from just reinforcement learning. Results showed that recombinationdoes not emerge with just reinforcement. This was because the building of external structures provided a very high rewardprofile, including free riding, thus acting as an attractor, blocking the recombination strategy. We discuss the implicationsof these results.