Organism-environment System Research Articles

On finding one’s way: a comment on Bock et al. (2024)

In a recent issue of Psychological Research, Bock, O., Huang, J-Y., Onur, O. A., & Memmert, D. (2024). The structure of cognitive strategies for wayfinding decisions. Psychological Research Psychologische Forschung, 88, 476–486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01863-3.) investigated cognitive strategies purported to guide wayfinding decisions at intersections. Following experimentation in a virtualised maze, it was concluded that intersectional wayfinding decisions were based on a ‘generalized cognitive process’, in addition to ‘strategy-specific’ processes. The aim of our comment is not to challenge these findings or their methodological rigour. Rather, we note how the study of human wayfinding has been undertaken from entirely different metatheoretical perspectives in psychological science. Leaning on the seminal work of James Gibson and Harry Heft, we consider wayfinding as a continuous, integrated perception-action process, distributed across the entire organism-environment system. Such a systems-oriented, ecological approach to wayfinding remediates the organismic asymmetry pervasive to extant theories of human behaviours, foregrounding the possibility for empirical investigation that takes seriously the socio-cultural contexts in which inhabitants dwell.

Grasping the Situation: analyzing how situational dynamics shape agency.

Despite the intimacy between the situation and our agency, "situation" remains an ambiguous concept in theory. Even within the context of situated theories of cognition and agency that take the organism-environment system as central in their investigations, the notion of "situation" has been undertheorized. Yet, whether affordances are relevant depends on the situation. Therefore, Van Dijk and Rietveld argue that we must understand the practical situation in which behavior occurs in order to know how we respond to the affordances that the materials and other people offer. Taking John Dewey's notion of "situation" as the basis for investigation, I follow Shaun Gallagher's analysis of how we are not just part of a situation, but we understand what an action is only in relation to a situation. Situations act like large-scale affordances, but this does not mean that affordances are inviting or soliciting as such. Because of the situational transactions with the environment that an agent has, the environment pushes and pulls the agent from and toward certain actions. This means that environments have expressive qualitative features that are non-subjective emotional qualities and social gestalt. I propose four overlapping but distinct features or axes of analysis of situations that can be identified and analyzed in terms of how they shape our agency: complexity, determinedness, the establishment of expectations, and restrictiveness. Situations can be more or less complex in a spatial, temporal, or layered way. They can also be more or less determined, meaning that the agent's actions are more or less obvious. Third, they can be characterized as socially established, meaning that certain behavior is expected. Finally, situations are more or less restricted, denoting the number of activities available to an agent.

Sex-biased phenotypic plasticity affects sexual dimorphism patterns under changing environmental conditions

Sexual dimorphism is almost ubiquitous in animals. A common pattern observed across multiple taxa involves differences in development time (sexual bimaturism) and body size (sexual size dimorphism) between conspecific males and females. Furthermore, a strict association of dimorphism at these traits has been documented in several taxa, where the sex showing shorter development time also has a smaller body size than the other sex. Growth and development are strongly dependent on environmental conditions during individual life-cycle in ectotherms, inducing considerable phenotypic plasticity. However, how phenotypic plasticity affects the association between sexual dimorphism in development time and body size remains unclear. Here, we tracked development time, body size, and body mass throughout the ontogeny of the mosquito Aedes mariae. The larval development of this species is strictly linked to Mediterranean Sea rock-pools, whose highly variable environmental conditions over minimal time frames make this organism-environment system ideal for exploring plasticity-led eco-evolutionary processes. We found differential plasticity between males and females, dissolving the link between dimorphism in development time and body size under increasing temperature and decreasing salinity conditions. These findings contrast with the current hypotheses proposed to explain the origin of the association between sexual bimaturism and sexual size dimorphism, highlighting the condition dependence of sexual dimorphism patterns and the need to consider phenotypic plasticity in future studies on their evolution.

Towards talent inclusion: The ecological ground of performance and potentiality – comment on McAuley et al.

From a scientific perspective, talent inclusion for the purposes of development is the most promising path for the use of genetic testing, requiring an enhanced scientific literacy of sports organisation decision-makers, making them less vulnerable to the FOMO effect. The mainstream inflated importance of genetic testing exemplifies an organismic asymmetry. Instead, performance and potentiality should be understood at the ecological level, the organism-environment system level of analysis. Commitment to understanding human behaviour at this ecological scale signifies that performance and potential are not properties located within the athlete (e.g., genes, mental representations), nor within the environment. Rather, it implies the coupling of the performers’ unique characteristics throughout development with affordances offered by a performance context.

A data-driven framework to model the organism-environment system.

Organisms modify their development and function in response to the environment. At the same time, the environment is modified by the activities of the organism. Despite the ubiquity of such dynamical interactions in nature, it remains challenging to develop models that accurately represent them, and that can be fitted using data. These features are desirable when modeling phenomena such as phenotypic plasticity, to generate quantitative predictions of how the system will respond to environmental signals of different magnitude or at different times, for example, during ontogeny. Here, we explain a modeling framework that represents the organism and environment as a single coupled dynamical system in terms of inputs and outputs. Inputs are external signals, and outputs are measurements of the system in time. The framework uses time-series data of inputs and outputs to fit a nonlinear black-box model that allows to predict how the system will respond to novel input signals. The framework has three key properties: it captures the dynamical nature of the organism-environment system, it can be fitted with data, and it can be applied without detailed knowledge of the system. We study phenotypic plasticity using in silico experiments and demonstrate that the framework predicts the response to novel environmental signals. The framework allows us to model plasticity as a dynamical property that changes in time during ontogeny, reflecting the well-known fact that organisms are more or less plastic at different developmental stages.

Perceiving "Complex Autonomous Systems" in Symmetry Dynamics: Elementary Coordination Embedding in Circadian Cycles.

This study explored the biological autonomy and control of function in circumstances that assessed the presumed relationship of an organism with an environmental cycle. An understanding of this behavior appeals to the organism-environment system rather than just the organism. Therefore, we sought to uncover the laws underlying end-directed capabilities by measuring biological characteristics (motor synchrony) in an environmental cycle (circadian temperature). We found that the typical elementary coordination (bimanual) stability measure varied significantly as a function of the day-night temperature cycle. While circadian effects under artificially manipulated temperatures were not straightforward during the day-night temperature cycle, the circadian effect divided by the ordinary circadian rhythm remained constant during the day-night cycle. Our observation of this direct, robust relationship between the biological characteristics (body temperature and motor synchrony) and environmental processes (circadian temperature cycle) could mirror the adaptation of our biological system to the environment.

Ecological perceptual holism – unity of the individual and the environment in perception

In the second half of the 20th century, ecological theory of perception presented a new concept of perception according to which it is not a one-sided process within the perceiver, in the form of representation and interpretation of sensory data obtained from the environment, but a process within direct and continuous interaction between the percipient and the environment. Opposing the almost intuitive acceptance of numerous dualities based on the traditionally accepted separation of subject and object, ecological theory introduces an innovative concept of affordance. At about the same time, the initial ideas of an equally innovative theory of the organism-environment system arise, and in this paper they are connected in the context of the interpretation of perception. The goal of the paper is to present the concept of affordance and point out its affinity with the theory of the unity of organism and environment, as well as the need for further introduction of similar theoretical concepts, and with this intention, the concept of ecological perceptual holism is proposed.

Язык и природа человечности (приглашение к дискуссии)

The article invites the reader to contemplate what impedes further development of lan­guage science which is currently in a state of stagnation. This crisis is caused by the inade­quate meth­odology used in linguistic research. It defines the paradigm of so-called ‘normal’ science, which suppresses innovation. The dualistic philosophy of external realism continues to be the epistemo­logical foundation of ‘normal’ linguistics, and neither mainstream cognitive science nor cogni­tive linguistics has been able to break away from it. The author argues that a new, constructivist epistemology is capable of overcoming the crisis and could give a new impetus to further devel­opment of language science. This calls for abandoning the traditional view of language as a tool used for the expression and transfer of thoughts. Instead, research­ers should use a systems ap­proach to linguistic semiosis as a biological adaptation, which is the organizational basis of hu­mans as living systems at both individual and social levels. Lin­guistic semiosis is an evolution­ary stage in the development of Homo sapiens. Establishing the functional role of linguistic semiosis in systemic cognition as a socially organized living system whose unity is ensured and sustained by its circular (self-referential) organization in the relational domain of language, calls for a radical revision of the extant views on the rela­tionship between language and mind, lan­guage and cognition, and language and conscious­ness. An ecological approach to language as­sumes that the cognitive dynamics of humans as living systems consists in the adaptive interac­tional behaviour in the relational domain of linguistic interactions. This domain constitutes the ecological niche of humans as organism-environment systems. It is in this continuously self-constructed human niche that the uniquely human power to reasoning (intelligence) emerges and develops. Humanness rests in language as the creative beginning of the world in which we exist as organisms capable of speech.

Sources of predictive information in dynamical neural networks

Behavior involves the ongoing interaction between an organism and its environment. One of the prevailing theories of adaptive behavior is that organisms are constantly making predictions about their future environmental stimuli. However, how they acquire that predictive information is still poorly understood. Two complementary mechanisms have been proposed: predictions are generated from an agent’s internal model of the world or predictions are extracted directly from the environmental stimulus. In this work, we demonstrate that predictive information, measured using bivariate mutual information, cannot distinguish between these two kinds of systems. Furthermore, we show that predictive information cannot distinguish between organisms that are adapted to their environments and random dynamical systems exposed to the same environment. To understand the role of predictive information in adaptive behavior, we need to be able to identify where it is generated. To do this, we decompose information transfer across the different components of the organism-environment system and track the flow of information in the system over time. To validate the proposed framework, we examined it on a set of computational models of idealized agent-environment systems. Analysis of the systems revealed three key insights. First, predictive information, when sourced from the environment, can be reflected in any agent irrespective of its ability to perform a task. Second, predictive information, when sourced from the nervous system, requires special dynamics acquired during the process of adapting to the environment. Third, the magnitude of predictive information in a system can be different for the same task if the environmental structure changes.

The Circularity of the Embodied Mind

From an embodied and enactive point of view, the mind–body problem has been reformulated as the relation between the lived or subject body on the one hand and the physiological or object body on the other (“body–body problem”). The aim of the paper is to explore the concept of circularity as a means of explaining the relation between the phenomenology of lived experience and the dynamics of organism–environment interactions. This concept of circularity also seems suitable for connecting enactive accounts with ecological psychology. It will be developed in a threefold way:(1) As the circular structure of embodiment, which manifests itself (a) in the homeostatic cycles between the brain and body and (b) in the sensorimotor cycles between the brain, body, and environment. This includes the interdependence of an organism’s dispositions of sense-making and the affordances of the environment.(2) As the circular causality, which characterizes the relation between parts and whole within the living organism as well as within the organism–environment system.(3) As the circularity of process and structure in development and learning. Here, it will be argued that subjective experience constitutes a process of sense-making that implies (neuro-)physiological processes so as to form modified neuronal structures, which in turn enable altered future interactions.On this basis, embodied experience may ultimately be conceived as the integration of brain–body and body–environment interactions, which has a top-down, formative, or ordering effect on physiological processes. This will serve as an approach to a solution of the body–body problem.

Ecological∼Enactivism Through the Lens of Japanese Philosophy.

The enactive and ecological approaches to embodied cognitive science are on a collision course. While both draw inspiration from similar views in psychology and phenomenology, the two approaches initially held seemingly contradictory views and points of focus. Early enactivists saw value in the ecological approach but insisted that the two schools remain distinct. While ecological psychology challenged the common foes of mental representation and mind-body dualism, it seemingly did so at the cost of the autonomy of the agent. This is evidence that the early enactive and ecological approaches told different stories about how agents and environments interact. Whereas the enactive approach broadly focuses on agency and the organism’s resilience to environmental perturbations, the ecological approach insists that organisms are best understood in terms of the organism–environment system and at the ecological scale. Historically, this tension created space for harsh criticisms from both sides and for some ecological psychologists to dismiss enactivism altogether. Despite their differences, both approaches use dynamic systems theory to explain the interactions between embodied agents and the environment or contextual milieu in which they are embedded. This has led some scholars to focus on the complementary elements of each approach and argue that the two schools are allies, thus rejecting the historical disagreements between the two approaches and calling for an ecological–enactive synthesis. The attempts to synthesize the approaches are noteworthy and should be considered steps in the right direction but are potentially problematic. If the two schools are merely synthesized to some form of ecological–enactivism, then something of value from both approaches could be lost. This is analogous to the hasty comparison between two seemingly similar schools of thought found in early attempts at East-West comparative philosophy. I argue that the relationship between the enactive and ecological approaches is both complementary and contrary and is thus best understood in terms of complementarity. Given the complexity of complementarity I will unpack the notion in steps. I will begin with the exploration of analogous concepts in Japanese Philosophy and gradually build a lens through which both agent environment and ecological enactive complementarities can be understood.

Defining the Environment in Organism-Environment Systems.

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, is unspecified beyond that of contingent relations with the species-typical sensorimotor capacities of perceiving organisms. This lack of specification creates a considerable gap in theory regarding the organization of organisms as coupled with their environments. I argue that this gap can be filled by drawing from resources in developmental systems theory, namely, specifying the environmental state-space as a developmental niche that shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and, on a population scale, evolutionary time. Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments.

Dynamic Touch as Common Ground for Enactivism and Ecological Psychology.

The main purpose of this article is to show that enactivism and ecological psychology share more aspects than is often recognized. Rather than debating about differences, commonalities between the approaches are illustrated with the example of dynamic touch. Dynamic touch is a form of touch that implies muscles and tendons and that allows the perception of hand-held objects that are wielded but not seen. Given that perceivers perform the wielding movements with effort, dynamic touch necessarily implies active exploration. The strength of dynamic touch as an example lies in the fact that it has been formalized and analyzed in detail at the level of the laws that govern the organism-environment system. The example provides empirically supported instantiations of sensorimotor contingencies, in enactivist terms, and of intentional exploration and information detection, in ecological terms. Moreover, dynamic touch is a practical example of the enactivist concepts of bringing-forth the world and sense-making. As a second purpose, we use the example of dynamic touch to clarify key concepts of the ecological approach. Specifically, we analyze the concepts of invariance and affordance, indicating the crucial difference between perceiving and actualizing affordances, and highlighting the importance of these concepts for the dialogue between enactivism and ecological psychology.

ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ ФІЗИЧНОГО СТАНУ СТУДЕНТІВ З КРАЇН БЛИЗЬКОГО СХОДУ

The article analyzes the problem of the modern ideas about the physiological mechanisms, which support the health of foreign students in the organism-environment system in the conditions of study in institutions of higher education of Ukraine. The aim is to give a comparative characteristics of student's physical state from Middle East countries. The male fourth-year students from Egypt and Israel have participated in the study. The authors carried out the analysis of special scientific and methodical literature, parameters of physical development and indicators of cardiovascular and autonomic nervous systems, physical work capacity of the foreign students. The study has showed the predominance of morphofunctional indicators of Israelis in comparison with students from Egypt in indicators of life index, strength index of wrist and posture dynamometry, chest excursion. It is probable that most of students from Egypt (36,4%) had overweight than students from Israel (8,3%). According to the Kerdoe’s Vegetative Index, ortho- and clinostatic tests, which characterize the influence of sympathetic or parasympathetic divisions of autonomic regulation, the probable (p ≤ 0,05) differences between the groups of subjects have been obtained, that allows to state that foreign students have the imbalance in the autonomic regulation of body, so, to some extent, students in Israel have a tendency towards predominance of parasympathicotonic influences, while students from Egypt have a tendency towards predominance of sympathicotonic effects. The study of cardiovascular system types of physical activity and physical work capacity shows that most of the foreign students had a normotensive type of reaction to physical exertion, high and above average level of physical work capacity. According to the conducted study, a negative impact of the environment on the mechanisms of autonomic support of the cardiovascular system was revealed, that requires some attention and timely adequate correction in order to prevent disorders of the nervous activity and the adaptive capacities of the students’ body in the analyzed groups.

Ecological Neuroscience: From Reduction to Proliferation of Our Resources

In one common view, human activity is explained by neural processes, because these implement psychological functions that underlie overt behavior. In the ecological approach, such accounts are taken to be nonexplanatory, because they reify the phenomena they wish to explain. We argue that ecological psychology offers an antidote to such reification with concepts such as resonance, attunement, and anticipation, if they are considered as relational, world-involving activities. Our main claim is that we can understand our scientific explanations of neural phenomena as itself an attunement to sociomaterial practices. This allows us to understand neuroscientific processes as conditions that enable a resonating organism-environment system. In this view, neuroscientific and psychological phenomena are usually found in widely different sociomaterial practices. But we can occasionally achieve coordination between those practices. Establishing that a dependence of a psychological phenomenon on neural events holds is an achievement of a novel practice that we developed and to which we resonate. Thus the more we want to understand what happens inside the nervous system, the more we also need to scrutinize the sociomaterial environment in which we do so.

The Metaphor of Dissociation: Teleological, Phenomenological, Structural, Dynamical

Dissociation as used in psychology and psychiatry is a troubled conceptual metaphor. The main problems include conflicting definitions and a lack of internal consistency of some of these formulations. Trying to mend the situation, Van der Hart, Nijenhuis and Steele (2006) revisited Janet's original definition of dissociation, and referred to it as "structural dissociation of the personality". This term is not meant to suggest that "structural dissociation" involves a particular kind of dissociation as is sometimes thought. To prevent or repair further misunderstanding, in the present article I highlight four inherent features of dissociation of the personality: teleological, phenomenological, structural, and dynamical. The article alsoaims to bridge some metaphors that are commonly described and understood as dichotomies, implying dualisms that plague philosophy, science, and clinical practice. For example, personality is understood as an organism-environment system, involving subjects and "objects" (that may be other subjects) as co-dependent and co-constitutive partners. Regarding matter (brain/body) and mind as attributes of one substance reflects an attempt to avoid the problems of philosophical (substance) dualism, as well as the one-sidedness of philosophical materialism and idealism. The generation, maintenance, and elaboration ofdissociation is analyzed in terms of causing, that is, the mutual manifestation of a network of reciprocal powers. The joint analyses involve an enactive approach to life, and intend to achieve further conceptual clarity and consistency of the metaphor of dissociation.

The History and Philosophy of Ecological Psychology.

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.

Biological autonomy and control of function in circadian cycle

Purpose The present study explored biological autonomy and control of function in circumstances that assessed a presumed relationship to an environmental cycle. An understanding of this behavior appeals to the organism-environment system rather than simply the organism—we seek to expose the laws that underlie end-directed capabilities by measuring biological characteristics (motor synchrony) in an environmental cycle (circadian temperature). Methods Participants (n = 24) at the University of Connecticut (Storrs, USA) and the Seoul National University (Seoul, Korea) served in the study. The production of in-phase bi-manual coordination was examined at different circadian points (allowing comparison of day-night temperature effects) in two experimental designs; (1) normal temperature embedded in a 24 hour cycle (5:00, 12:00, 17:00, and 24:00), and (2) normal versus abnormal temperature [artificially decreasing or increasing] while embedded at two points (5:00 am, 5:00 pm) during the circadian process. A typical bi-manual stability measure varied significantly as a function of the day-night temperature cycle. Results While (i) circadian effects under the artificially perturbed temperature manipulation were not straightforward along the day-night temperature cycle, (ii) the circadian effect divided by the ordinary circadian seems to be constant along the day-night temperature cycle. Conclusions The discovery of direct and robust relation between biological aspects (body temperature and motor synchrony) an environmental process (circadian temperature cycle) may echo adaptation of our biological system to the environment. This relation supports the claim that the organism and the environment should be considered as integrated system in which biological (or physical) dynamics takes place as a mutual factor.

Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity

Abstract Human language is extraordinarily meaningful. Well-spoken or well-written passages can evoke our deepest emotions and elicit all manner of conscious and subconscious reactions. This is usually taken to be an insurmountable explanatory challenge for ecological approaches to cognitive science, the primary tools of which concern coordination dynamics in organism-environment systems. Recent work (Pattee, H. H. & J. Rączaszek-Leonardi 2012. Laws, Language, and Life. Dordrecht: Springer) has made headway in describing the meaningfulness of linguistic units — the kind of meaning that we perceive as mediated by specific symbols — within an ecological framework, by building an account based on Howard Pattee’s conceptualization of symbols as physical, replicable, historically-selected constraints on the dynamics of self-organizing systems (Pattee, H. H. 1969. How does a molecule become a message?. Developmental Biology 3(supplemental). 1016; Pattee, H. H. 1972. Laws and constraints, symbols and languages. In C. H. Waddington (ed.), Towards a Theoretical Biology, 248–258. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). In order to propose an “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning, this paper takes the following steps: first, it rejects the view of linguistic meaning as fully independent from organism-environment interactions, as exemplified by formal approaches in philosophical semantics. Second, it presents a cutting-edge example of an ecological approach to symbols, namely Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2009. Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. Pragmatics and Cognition 17(3). 653–676. DOI:10.1075/pandc.17.3.09ras; Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2016. How does a word become a message? An illustration on a developmental time-scale. New Ideas in Psychology 42, Supplement C: 46–55. DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.001) version of Pattee’s symbols-as-constraints model. Third, it reviews and critiques a recent attempt (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., I. Nomikou, K. J. Rohlfing & T. W. Deacon. 2018. Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology 30(1). 39–73) to integrate the symbols-as-constraints model with Terrence Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: W. W. Norton and Company; Deacon, T. W. 2011. The symbol concept. In M. Tallerman & K. R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 393–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press) semiotic view of symbols, arguing that the properties ascribed to linguistic symbols, both by Deacon and very widely throughout the cognitive sciences, are not properties of individual instances of linguistic action. Rather, they belong to a particular mode of description that draws generalizations across the phenomenological experience of many language users. Finally, it lays out the core components of a novel “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning. On this view, human beings engage in constant, hyper-flexible entrainment and enskillment that produces tremendous perceptual sensitivity to vocal and acoustic patterns. This sensitivity enables us to coordinate our in-the-moment behavior with large-scale behavioral patterns within a larger population, and to compare our own actions to those large-scale patterns. Thus, the most important contribution made by an interactivity-based approach is that it accounts adequately for the role played by population-level behavioral patterns in the control of short-timescale, here-and-now linguistic actions. In so doing, it offers the grounds for an ecological account of rich linguistic meaning.

Developmental Ecological Psychology: Changes in Organism-Environment Systems Over Time, Part II

ABSTRACTAs invited editors of this 2-part Special Issue, we ended the Introduction to Part I of this Special Issue (Read & Szokolszky, 2018) with a claim that the Ecological Psychology revolution would not be complete without Developmental Ecological Psychology. The inclusion of developmental work requires considering some basic questions regarding change in organism-environment systems over time and of how to describe and study such changes over stretches of time. J. J. Gibson (1966, p. 321) ended with a dedication to “all persons who want to look for themselves.” We dedicate this 2-part Special Issue to all persons who want to look for themselves over time.