Context: An adaptive perspective

From an adaptive perspective, context construction is construable as a way of handling variation in the external environment. As such, it is as part of the action selection process, which is governed by adaptive values. This contribution examines in what way context results from the intervention of such values. By contrast with more mainstream approaches, which tend to favour a personal level of analysis, this project views context in terms of perceptual and conceptual categorization, attention selection and decision making. The underlying assumptions are drawn mainly from Damasio’s model of decision making (Damasio 1994) and Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (Edelman 1989, 1992), both of which are concerned with how the brain – as a selective system – handles contextual change.