Ecological Psychology Research Articles

Bouncing bones-ancient wisdom meets modern science in a new take on locomotion.

Recognizing that conventional understanding of animal and human locomotion is based on a dated and reductionist machine modeling of organisms, we set out to create a theory of locomotion by reasoning from first principles. We center on the constraints necessitated by 1) the 2nd law of thermodynamics, 2) the theory of evolution, 3) a systems science view of organisms, and 4) the laws of motion, but we also look for compatibility these constraints might find in emerging areas of scientific inquiry (ecological psychology, processual biology, soft matter, biotensegrity), and in the wisdom embedded in various movement traditions and ancient philosophy. Applying and synthesizing these, we propose an updated "bouncing bones" (BB) model for walking and running, which corresponds with maximum efficiency and conservation of energy.

Fracturing the affordance space: an account of digitalized alienation.

This paper investigates the lived experience of alienation as a form of mental strife or pathology as it is connected to the digitalization of modern life. To do so, I deploy the concept of affordances from ecological psychology, phenomenology, and embodied cognition. I propose an affordance-based model for understanding digitalized alienation. First, I argue that the lived sense of alienation is best understood as a fracturing of the affordance space, where possibilities for action are lived as disconnected from one another and therefore from one's personal development and search for meaning. Using this model, I show how the process of digitalization can lead to a lived sense of alienation for modern subjects. On this model, digitalization is alienating insofar as it fractures the affordance space into disconnected fields that invite determinate, separate, and repeatable tasks-swiping, clicking, scrolling, etc.-rather than offering opportunities for the development of new cognitive and bodily skills that are mutually informing and enriching across different affordance fields.

Synergy Makes Direct Perception Inefficient.

A typical claim in anti-representationalist approaches to cognition such as ecological psychology or radical embodied cognitive science is that ecological information is sufficient for guiding behavior. According to this view, affordances are immediately perceptually available to the agent (in the so-called "ambient energy array"), so sensory data does not require much further inner processing. As a consequence, mental representations are explanatorily idle: perception is immediate and direct. Here we offer one way to formalize this direct-perception claim and identify some important limits to it. We argue that the claim should be read as saying that successful behavior just implies picking out affordance-related information from the ambient energy array. By relying on the Partial Information Decomposition framework, and more concretely on its development of the notion of synergy, we show that in multimodal perception, where various energy arrays carry affordance-related information, the "just pick out affordance-related information" approach is very inefficient, as it is bound to miss all synergistic components. Efficient multimodal information combination requires transmitting sensory-specific (and not affordance-specific) information to wherever it is that the various information streams are combined. The upshot is that some amount of computation is necessary for efficient affordance reconstruction.

Influences of sociocultural and historical constraints on athletes’ developmental experiences: a case study of baseball in Japan

Many observers have pointed out how baseball in Japan is narrated, taught, and played differently from its counterpart in North America. Hard-work, selfless behaviors, and defensive and collectivistic strategies are described as the basic tenets of Japanese baseball, often referred to as ‘Samurai Baseball’. This paper aims to investigate sports and non-sporting constraints that define this distinct way of perceiving the game. Ecological psychology, arguing individuals’ actions should be investigated at the level of interactions which happen between them and their environment, provides the epistemological foundation for this study, while the Skilled Intentionality Framework, proposing behaviours occur amid specific sets of promoted values, gives the ontological base for investigating proximal and distal influences on Japanese ballplayers’ development. Using Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model as a theoretical framework, this paper demonstrates how coaches’ strategies and training proposals, as well as players’ skill-acquisition processes, are constrained by socio-cultural-historical features of the culture of reference.

A practitioner's field guide to the behaviour settings method.

Since the 1950s, Roger Barker's theory of behaviour settings has been useful for a wide number of disciplines. Few realize, however, that behaviour settings theory is also a methodology. Barker fully describes how to identify, describe and measure behaviour settings in his seminal book Ecological psychology: concepts and methods for studying the environment of human behavior (1968), and this method is further delineated in Phil Schoggen's Behavior settings: a revision and extension of Roger G. Barker's ecological psychology (1989). Nevertheless, beyond these two (rather expensive) books there are few other resources available to twenty-first century researchers who wish to systematically describe and measure behaviour in its ecological context using the principles of behaviour settings theory. In this article, I offer a practitioner's field guide to implementing the behaviour settings method, which includes a contemporary illustration of defining a behaviour setting using a recent observational study of an art gallery in Lethbridge, Canada. I discuss how researchers can use Barker's original methodology to determine what is a behaviour setting and how to define its boundaries, and I suggest best practices, offering practitioners the tools to replicate Barker's procedures. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things, and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'.

People, places, things and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century.

Trends and developments in recent behavioural and cognitive sciences demonstrate the need for a well-developed theoretical and empirical framework for examining the ecology of human behaviour. The increasing recognition of the role of the environment and interaction with the environment in the organization of behaviour within the cognitive sciences has not been met with an equally disciplined and systematic account of that environment (Heft 2018 Ecol. Psychol. 30, 99-123 (doi:10.1080/10407413.2018.1410045); McGann 2014 Synth. Philos. 29, 217-233). Several bodies of work in behavioural ecology, anthropology and ecological psychology provide some frameworks for such an account. At present, however, the most systematic and theoretically disciplined account of the human behavioural ecosystem is that of behaviour settings, as developed by the researchers of the Midwest Psychological Field Station (see Barker 1968 Ecological psychology: concepts and methods for studying the environment of human behavior). The articles in this theme issue provide a critical examination of these theoretical and methodological resources. The collection addresses their theoretical value in connecting with contemporary issues in cognitive science and research practice in psychology, as well as the importance of the methodological specifics of behaviour settings research. Additionally, articles diagnose limitations and identify points of potential extension of both theory and methods, particularly with regard to changes owing to the advance of technology, and the complex relationship between the individual and the collective in behaviour settings work. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things, and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'.

The perception of affordances; towards an ecological-enactive model of teacher noticing, expertise and development

ABSTRACT This article builds on nascent ecological approaches to teacher noticing by drawing on the ecological psychology and enactivist concept of ‘affordance’ – meaning opportunity for action – and offers a new definition of teacher noticing; the perception of affordances. This perspective provides a deeper understanding of what noticing is, particularly why it is so fundamentally situated, and moreover provides a mechanism by which expert noticing is acquired and thereby points to concrete ways in which noticing can be developed. I argue that an ecological-enactive approach offers a productive, and more comprehensive model of teacher noticing.

Guided attention strategies for developing teacher sight

ABSTRACT It is often argued that skilled teachers see or perceive their teaching environments differently from novice teachers. However, few teacher development approaches seek explicitly to develop this ‘teacher sight’. This article draws on the ecological psychology concept of perceptual learning – the process of coming to perceive affordances (opportunities for action) in a performance environment. A key element of perceptual learning is the ‘education’ or ‘guidance’ of attention. This article explores how the concept of guided attention might be used to adapt two existing teacher development strategies – video-based noticing development and coteaching – in order to develop early-career teachers’ capacity to perceive relevant affordances in their practice environment, i.e. to develop their teacher sight.

The predictive effect of cultural orientation and perceived school climate on the formation of teachers’ growth mindsets

This study aimed to examine the predictive effect of cultural orientation and perceived school climate on the formation of teachers’ growth mindsets. A total of 811 middle school teachers (26.88% females; mean age = 29.77) from Shanghai City, mainland China, participated in the study. The growth mindset inventory, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, and the school-level environment questionnaire were used to assess teachers’ growth mindset beliefs, cultural orientations, and perceptions of school climates, respectively. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were applied to test the hypothesized roles of teachers’ cultural orientations and perceived school climates in predicting the formation of their growth mindsets. Two interesting findings were obtained. First, regarding the effect of cultural orientation, teachers’ growth mindset belief was positively predicted by the Confucian dimension of cultural value in relation to long-term orientation but negatively predicted by the dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Second, regarding the predictive effect of school climate, growth mindset was positively predicted by three school climate factors: school resources, decision-making, and instructional innovation. These findings provide empirical evidence for the perspectives of social cognitive theory and cultural and ecological psychology by highlighting the contextual sensitivity of growth mindset formation. These findings also have practical implications because they highlight the need to consider cultural and school climate factors in the promotion of teachers’ growth mindsets.

What Animals Can Do: Agency, Mutuality, and Adaptation

The endeavor to naturalize the philosophy of biology brings the problem of agency to the forefront, along with renewed attention to the organism and organicism. In this article, we argue for a mutualist approach to agency that starts to unravel layers of this complex issue by focusing on perception and action at the core of all biological agency. The mutuality of animals and their surroundings is seen as distinct from the typical concepts of organism, preexisting environment, and their interactions. Mutuality means a deep ontological and epistemological compatibility between the organism and its surround. We suggest that the concept of direct perception developed and empirically researched in the tradition of the ecological approach, launched by James J. Gibson, offers a promising path to approach agency within an ecological–mutuality framework. At the core of our definition of agency is the animal’s ability to self-initiate actions and activities. Animals are the source of their own actions and activities within the mutual, co-defining relation to their surround. The place of agency related to mutuality has not been elaborated sufficiently thus far, in either biology or ecological psychology. In this article, our goal is to argue for the necessity of placing agency into an ecological–mutuality framework and of further research in this direction in line with Marjorie Grene’s call to assimilate Gibson’s theory of knowledge into biology.

The Optimization Path of Research Support Services in University Libraries from the Perspective of Affordance Theory

University libraries, as an integral component of university research capabilities, are tasked with serving education by providing research support to faculty and students. This study adopts an affordance research perspective originating from ecological psychology to explore the optimization path of research support services in libraries in the new media era. Based on the characteristics of university library services, this research analyzes three aspects: production affordance, mobile affordance, and social affordance, and proposes practical recommendations to guide future research service practices of university libraries.

Productive pluralism: The coming of age of ecological psychology.

The ecological approach to psychology has been a main antecedent of embodied and situated approaches to cognition. The concept of affordances in particular has gained currency throughout psychological science. Yet, contemporary ecological psychology has seemed inaccessible to outsiders and protective of its legacy. Indeed, some prominent ecological psychologists have presented their approach as a "package deal"-a principled and unified perspective on perception and action. Looking at the history of the field, however, we argue that ecological psychology has developed in rich and pluriform ways. Aiming to open the field to critical engagement and productive exchange, we identify three major strands of thought within ecological psychology, each of which emerged in the 20 years after Gibson's death: physical, biological, and social ecological psychology. Each of these strands develop ecological ideas in quite different directions, making different use of some of its central concepts, adopting different explanatory principles, and embodying different philosophical worldviews. Proponents of the ecological approach have been arguing for pluralism within cognitive science to make room for ecological psychology. Given the diversity of the strands, we extend this plea to within ecological psychology itself; the field is better off aiming for a productive pluralism in which the different strands are in dialogue with each other. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Affordances, phenomenology, pragmatism and the myth of the given

AbstractThis paper addresses a potential contradiction between the two primary philosophical traditions that inform Gibsonian ecological psychology: the phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. These two traditions exhibit potentially contradictory intuitions about the epistemic role of direct perception. This epistemic role of direct perception was famously problematized by Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given (1956; 1997), and we draw on it here to serve as a test case for the Gibsonian synthesis of phenomenology and pragmatism. While ecological psychology’s emphasis on the firstperson perspective of organisms shares in the legacy of the phenomenological tradition, it also tends to assume direct experience as a given, something basic and foundational to knowledge. Pragmatism, on the other hand, is generally suspicious of experience as a foundational given. We argue that Gibson’s successful synthesis of these two traditions is also what makes his theory of affordances less susceptible to the myth of the given than some phenomenological approaches to perception. Namely, on the Gibsonian account of perception is always part of an action-perception cycle that takes place in and through embodied action and therefore no one act of perception functions as an epistemic given

Babies in the Corporeal Turn: The Cognitive Embodiment of Early Motor Development and Exploration in the Brazilian Context of Early Childhood Education.

The corporeal turn in developmental psychology has rekindled interest regarding how early motor development contributes to and enhances cognitive development across the first years of life. By highlighting embodied perceptual-motor engagement with the world, embodied cognitive learning emphasizes the importance of experience and perceptual-motor mechanisms in modulating the development of person-environment systems. The field currently calls for research that combines such conceptual frameworks with the complex everyday material and sociocultural landscapes that resource infants' developmental trajectories. We, therefore, aim to connect the conceptual refinement of bodily-anchored exploration to the contextual reality of everyday settings of early childhood education (ECE)-here situated in the Brazilian context-as relevant social and cultural suppliers and modulators of the developmental trajectories of babies. Secondarily, we ponder on the premises of national pedagogical curricula and their role in mediating the quality of experiences and systems of person-environment relations more closely. Cultural-historical psychology, in dialogue with the principles of Ecological Psychology, constitutes the theoretical framework that underpins the microgenetic analyses conducted. By analyzing episodes of exploratory actions of a focal baby situated in the ECE context, we seek to apprehend motor-perceptual indicators of embodied cognitive processing by considering the modes of appropriation entailed in episodes of embodied exploration. We reflect on pedagogical implications considering official national documents of early childhood education. This work contributes by providing complementary insights into the nature of infants' everyday sociocultural embodied experiences and their development in pedagogically oriented settings.

Zooming through History: Active Perceptual Experience Mediated by Technology

This article examines the evolution of zooming and its impact on human perception, blending historical analysis with concepts from enaction and ecological psychology. The paper traces the advancement of magnifying tools from ancient lenses to modern optical instruments, highlighting their transformative role in extending human capabilities to perceive beyond natural limits. Central to this exploration are Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), which exemplify the integration of perceptual theories into technological innovation. ZUIs are presented not just as tools but as interactive platforms that embody enactive and ecological principles, enabling users to engage dynamically with multi-scale digital environments. This approach challenges traditional views of perception, emphasizing an active, embodied experience that aligns with our cognitive abilities, opening up new perceptual agencies. The paper concludes by exploring future possibilities in virtual reality and multimodality, suggesting new directions for zoom technologies to enrich human perceptual experiences. This work offers a narrative that underscores the continuous human quest to enhance our understanding and interaction with the world, marking the expansion of human perception and interaction with our environment.

Frames of agency in a school with poor indoor-air quality: A longitudinal composite narrative study

Problems with schools' indoor-air quality are common, and they can cause health problems to adolescents. However, no previous research has examined how adolescents make sense of such contaminated socio-material environments or what kinds of agency those environments afford. Taking an ecological psychology perspective informed by frame analysis, we analysed longitudinal focus group interviews with adolescents in a Finnish school with longstanding indoor-air problems. We constructed three composite first-person narratives that reflected different experiential frames, with corresponding forms and changes of agency. We found that our adolescents made sense of the same socio-material environment and its affordances in very different ways, and this process afforded them to develop many kinds of agency that changed over time.

Trusted Urban Places

We draw on insights from ecological psychology, explorative architecture, and psychiatry to provide an analysis of basic trust in relation to urban places. We use the term basic trust to refer to the attitude of certainty we express when we act in skilled, often unreflective, habitual ways in the living environment. We will argue that the basic trust of people living in cities should be understood in relation to what we will call trusted urban places. Trusted urban places can be understood similarly as what Giovanna Colombetti and Joel Krueger have called “affective niches” that provide affordances for amplifying, dampening, and sustaining affective states. The basic trust of people living in cities, we will argue, depends upon people moving through and engaging with trusted urban places. In urbanism and architecture, it is barely recognized how the city affords places of affective significance that the person incorporates into their bodily way of existing. Persistent exposure to urban stressors can disturb basic trust in one’s living environment, resulting in a person no longer being at home in the world. We provide examples in which people, as a consequence of the repeated exposure to stressors, no longer move through and engage with trusted urban places, and the impact this has on their basic trust. Our aim is to understand how the urban environment can contribute to the path from stress to anxiety and mood disorders, and how a person can regain their openness to possibilities for regulating their emotions skilfully.

Custodians of an ecology of data: Foundational theory and practice for data analysis in a complex world

Currently, limited guidance is offered to qualitative researchers regarding ways to undertake data analysis that focus on the complex transactions of person and place. We propose that honouring mutuality of person and place requires analysis textured as ‘custodianship’ of the diverse expression of values in research data that constitutes an ‘ecology’. The process of analysis as custodians is the enacted responsibility to learn with data: digging deep within the ecology to reveal flows of diverse values motivating human behaviour. In this article, this inherently more relational approach to data analysis is theorised as an eco-behavioural stance, inspired by the social-ecological model and ecological psychology. Directing increasing sensitivity to the role of the qualitative researcher that considers the multiple emergent processes operating simultaneously across various levels of analysis, we contend, will bring a resultantly richer feast of findings.

Wellbeing and the importance of going “out of the realm of the classroom”: secondary school teachers’ perspectives

ABSTRACT Schools play a central role in supporting young people affected by mental health issues. This article reports a reflexive thematic analysis of focus group and interview data with English secondary teachers about their perspectives on mental health and well-being in schools. Data were collected during the pandemic year 2020–2021, with a research focus on evolving school practice for wellbeing. Our results show that although teachers recognised a shift towards school leadership and policymaking that acknowledged mental health, they also identified barriers that undermined attempts to embed wellbeing practices in their schools. Firstly, they expressed frustration with neoliberal education, and how it works against wellbeing, and specifically against relationality, which was seen to underpin good mental health. Secondly, teachers envisioned wellbeing education as breaking with the boundaries of the typical classroom space, structurally, physically and pedagogically. The boundaries described were shaped by an educational purpose logic of “doing well” in terms of performance measures, whereas teachers articulated solutions as stepping outside the traditional limits of the classroom and curriculum, a move corresponding to greater environmental and community awareness. In conclusion, we point to an expanded view of educational purpose and the application of a more ecological psychology to embolden wellbeing practice in schooling.

Collective emotions and the distributed emotion framework

AbstractThe main aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of the distributed emotion framework and to conceptualize collective emotions within that framework. According to the presented account, dynamics of mutual affecting and being affected might couple individuals such that macro-level self-organization of a distributed cognitive system emerges. The paper suggests calling a distributed self-organizing system consisting of several emoters a “collective.” The emergence of a collective with a distributed affective process enables the involved individuals to enact emotions together. Accordingly, the suggestion is to conceptualize collective emotions as mereologically complex affective processes consisting of contributions which are distributed among several individuals and integrated through ongoing macro-level self-organization. To spell-out this account, the paper combines key conceptual resources from dynamical systems theory, enactive cognitive science, ecological psychology, and phenomenology. A second aim of the paper is distinguishing collective emotions from group-based emotions and suggesting an understanding of shared emotions as a subtype of collective emotions within the distributed emotion framework.