A potential mechanism for Gibsonian resonance: behavioral entrainment emerges from local homeostasis in an unsupervised reservoir network

While the cognitivist school of thought holds that the mind is analogous to a computer, performing logical operations over internal representations, the tradition of ecological psychology contends that organisms can directly “resonate” to information for action and perception without the need for a representational intermediary. The concept of resonance has played an important role in ecological psychology, but it remains a metaphor. Supplying a mechanistic account of resonance requires a non-representational account of central nervous system (CNS) dynamics. Towards this, we present a series of simple models in which a reservoir network with homeostatic nodes is used to control a simple agent embedded in an environment. This network spontaneously produces behaviors that are adaptive in each context, including (1) visually tracking a moving object, (2) substantially above-chance performance in the arcade game Pong , (2) and avoiding walls while controlling a mobile agent. Upon analyzing the dynamics of the networks, we find that behavioral stability can be maintained without the formation of stable or recurring patterns of network activity that could be identified as neural representations. These results may represent a useful step towards a mechanistic grounding of resonance and a view of the CNS that is compatible with ecological psychology.