Cognitive Attractor Theory

Cognitive Attractor Theory focuses on the environmental patterns that attract thoughts and behaviours of individuals and social collectives. Altering those conditions can affect thinking and behaviour, and so environments can be designed to occasion specific (desired) emergent behaviors of the agents in a system.

Complex Systems Research focuses on systems comprising sets of agents that form unified wholes in their interactions, relationships, or dependencies. Their emergent, global behaviors cannot be predicted on the basis of the rules governing the individual agents. Definitions and descriptions of complex systems revolve around such terms as emergent, adaptive, nonlinear, irreducible, noncompressible, non-decomposable, multi-level, self-organizing, context-sensitive, and adaptive.

Affordance Theory attends to “affordances” – that is, to the range of possibilities that arise when an individual (with specific intentions and needs, and who is oriented by a personal history) interacts with an environment (with specific structures/affordances that help to channel perception and that enable some actions while constraining others).

In Gestaltism, an individual’s mind is seen as a global whole that generates its own reality. Gestaltism embraced notions of self-organization and emergence in descriptions of the mind as arising in the interactions of but transcending its parts. Gestaltism thus rejected Behaviorisms and other theories that rely on Newtonian mechanics to describe and/or explain cognition.