Neither mindful nor mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance Segundo Ortin, Miguel Heras Escribano, Manuel Skilled action Affordances Information Habits Radical embodied cognition Direct perception Ecological psychology MSO and MHE are grateful to Annemarie Kalis, Josephine Pascoe, Eline de Groot, Rebecca Zeilstra, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. MSO's research for this article was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project "Mind in Skilled Performance" (DP170102987) and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek VIDI Research Project "Shaping our action space: A situated perspective on self-control" (VI.VIDI.195.116). MHE has written this paper thanks to a 2018 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, BBVA Foundation (The Foundation accepts no responsibility for the opinions, statements and contents included in the project and/or the results thereof, which are entirely the responsibility of the authors), and the research projects FFI2016-80088-P and PID2019-109764RB-I00 funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, and the FiloLab Group of Excellence, University of Granada (Spain). A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision- making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent’s conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them. 2021-07-21T10:26:52Z 2021-07-21T10:26:52Z 2021-06-30 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Segundo-Ortin, M., Heras-Escribano, M. Neither mindful nor mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance. Synthese (2021). [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03238-w] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/69825 10.1007/s11229-021-03238-w eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Springer