From foraging to autonoetic consciousness: The primal self as a consequence of embodied prospective foraging

The ability to adjust how often an animal explores new options versus sticking with known resources is widespread and likely a key driver of cognitive evolution. This review draws parallels between external foraging in physical space and internal foraging over mental representations, noting shared behaviors such as area-restricted search—focusing search where resources were previously found and moving away from poor areas—which can produce movement patterns resembling Lévy flights. These behaviors share a neural basis across animals, suggesting an evolutionary link between external and internal foraging. A specific form called embodied prospective foraging allows prediction by searching mental models of the environment, which requires a primitive sense of self to distinguish real from simulated actions, with implications for the evolution of self-awareness.

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Abstract

The capacity to adapt to resource distributions by modulating the frequency of exploratory and exploitative behaviors is common across metazoans and is arguably a principal selective force in the evolution of cognition. Here we (1) review recent work investigating behavioral and biological commonalities between external foraging in space and internal foraging over envi- ronments specified by cognitive representations, and (2) explore the implications of these commonalities for understanding the origins of the self. Behavioural commonalities include the capacity for what is known as area-restricted search in the ecological literature: this is search focussed around locations where resources have been found in the past, but moving away from locations where few resources are found, and capable of producing movement patterns mimicking Levy flights. Area-restricted search shares a neural basis across metazoans, and these biological commonalities in vertebrates suggest an evolutionary homology be- tween external and internal foraging. Internal foraging, and in particular a form we call embodied prospective foraging, makes available additional capacities for prediction based on search through a cognitive representation of the external environment, and allows predictions about outcomes of possible future actions. We demonstrate that cognitive systems that use embodied prospec- tive foraging require a primitive sense of self, needed to distinguish actual from simulated action. This relationship has implica- tions for understanding the evolution of autonoetic consciousness and self-awareness (Current Zoology 61 (2): 368-381, 2015). Keywords Self-projection, Mental time travel, Episodic future thinking, Foraging, Consciousness