Preference: How Early Evolutionary Aspects Remain Relevant Today

Several different preference theories have had their hand in human development for many many years. Early on in the class we discussed the fact that as humans developed we began to branch out away from the tree tops and on to the ground. As early humans began to explore new environments and make use of new way finding tendencies preference started to come into play more and more. Habitat selection, prospect- refuge and environmental preference began to have more and more weight in human lives. While early humans had to make use of these preference techniques to survive and choose habitats that best suited them, as modern day humans, we may not have strayed as far away from these preference techniques as we think. Although our lives may be extremely different from those of early humans, these preference theories still have a high amount of relevance today and have a hand in our every day lives and activities.
As information seeking beings it is very important for us to have environments that are full of potential in our eyes. In lecture, we discussed preference being about an instantaneous assessment of the information processing potential of a setting, and this idea has weight in almost every aspect of our lives today. We as students at the University of Michigan all chose to come here and we preferred to come here over other schools. While we all have very different reasons to come here (sports, academics, location) we all found the environment and what the university had to offer very cognitively stimulating. The more we are able to create a positive cognitive map of an environment we are more likely to see it as having good information processing potential. So like we all chose the University of Michigan for different reasons, we all chose it because of personal innate preferences we had in our heads. I personally was able to really identify with the University because of the environment that I found myself in when I visited. The environment reminds me of home which goes along with habitat selection they in the sense that I associated the campus with other stimuli. In the sense of the environmental preference model I found the setting at the university to be understandable, allow for exploration and had potential to easily problem solve and wayfind.
While I used the example of the university to illustrate how the environmental preference model still is relevant to modern day humans, what most of us don't realize is that we have been doing it our entire lives. Since birth we have been choosing environments and places that are comfortable for us personally to flourish. As kids we all had places to play that we preferred over others, as adults in college we all have certain places we prefer to study over others on campus and as we grow up and start looking for houses or the perfect place to work we will continue a very similar cognitive process in choosing favorable environment in our lives.