| Summary: | In the recent history of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the notion of habit hasbeen reduced to a stimulus-triggered response probability correlation. In this paper we usea computational model to present an alternative theoretical view (with some philosophicalimplications), where habits are seen as self-maintaining patterns of behavior that shareproperties in common with self-maintaining biological processes, and that inhabit a complexecological context, including the presence and influence of other habits. Far from mechanicalautomatisms, this organismic and self-organizing concept of habit can overcome the dominatingatomistic and statistical conceptions, and the high temporal resolution effects of situatedness,embodiment and sensorimotor loops emerge as playing a more central, subtle and complex rolein the organization of behavior. The model is based on a novel iterant deformable sensorimotormedium (IDSM), designed such that trajectories taken through sensorimotor-space increasethe likelihood that in the future, similar trajectories will be taken. We couple the IDSM to sensorsand motors of a simulated body and environment and show that under certain conditions,the IDSM forms self-maintaining patterns of activity that operate across the IDSM, the body,and the environment. We present various environments and the resulting habits that form inthem. The model acts as an abstraction of habits at a much needed sensorimotor meso-scalebetween microscopic neuron-based models and macroscopic descriptions of behavior. Finally,we discuss how this model and extensions of it can help us understand aspects of behavioralself-organization, historicity and autonomy that remain out of the scope of contemporaryrepresentationalist frameworks.
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