The History and Philosophy of Ecological Psychology

Abstract

Ecological Psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representational approach pioneered by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson. This theory aims to offer a third way beyond cognitivism and behaviorism for understanding cognition. The theory started with the rejection of the premise of the poverty of the stimulus, the physicalist conception of the stimulus, and the passive character of the perceiver of mainstream theories of perception. On the contrary, the main principles of ecological psychology are the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as unit of analysis, the study of affordances as the objects of perception, combined with an emphasis on perceptual learning and development. In this paper, first, we analyze the philosophical and psychological influences of ecological psychology: pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. Second, we summarize the main concepts of the approach and their historical development following the academic biographies of the proponents. Finally, we highlight the most significant developments of this psychological tradition. We conclude that ecological psychology is one of the most innovative approaches in the psychological field, as it is reflected in its current influence in the contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences, where the notion of affordance and the work of E. J. Gibson and J. J. Gibson is considered as a historical antecedent.

Presence Promotes Performance on a Virtual Spatial Cognition Task: Impact of Human Factors on Virtual Reality Assessment

“…However, others views of cognition are worth discussing since they might reverse the spatial cognition and performance relationship. The ecological theories of cognition, sometimes called enactivist or embedded theories (Thompson, 2007;Rowlands, 2010;Lobo et al, 2018), consider that cognition emerges through a continuous interaction between an acting organism and its environment. Inspired by psychologists like Gibson, phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty or philosophers like Heidegger, these views consider representations as secondary or even inexistent, and cognition-perception directed toward the ability to act, called affordances (Gibson, 1977(Gibson, , 1979.…”

Convergently Emergent: Ecological and Enactive Approaches to the Texture of Agency

“…The concept of emergence, which is usually deployed in reference to the self-organization of systems under various conditions, appears to fulfill our starting criteria. Both enactive and ecological researchers refer to their approach, or key aspects, as involving “emergence” or “emergent properties” at various times ( Turvey et al, 1981 ; Stoffregen, 2003 ; Thompson, 2007 ; Di Paolo et al, 2010 ; Lobo et al, 2018 ) typically in order to affirm a non-reductiveness of their account. Emergent properties define their own scale, they are not to be explained away with reference to processes at a single different (usually smaller) scale of description, but must be acknowledged and addressed on their own terms.…”

Ecological approaches to perceptual learning: learning to perceive and perceiving as learning

“…This experiment launched a whole new research field on dynamic (effortful) touch (cf. Carello & Turvey, 2000; see also a summary of this field of ecological research by Lobo, Heras-Escribano, & Travieso, 2018). These now-classic experiments can be regarded as the starting points for a chain of pioneering ideas involving the role of selective attunement, differentiation, education of attention, and active exploration as essential aspects of perceptual learning.…”