It is hard to find good introductory readings in ecological psychology, and an unfortunate amount of discussion within ecological circles can look like self-contained naval-gazing at times. We shall try to get a sense for the radical shift in perspective that accompanies ecological thinking, without worrying too much about purity of doctrine.
Because we are lucky this year to have Tony Chemero visit us, I am proposing Chapters 6 & 7 of his book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science as an entry point here:
* Chapters 7 & 8 of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science
Read that at least, and if you have the energy, read also this article which attempts to describe the history and philosophy of ecological psychology. The remaining articles are there for dipping into at your leisure.
*Lobo, L., Heras-Escribano, M., & Travieso, D. (2018). The history and philosophy of ecological psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2228.
Additional readings and resources
This first article is outside the ecological canon, but the relatively simple point it raises is a great starting point for adopting an ecological form of questioning about the nature of perception and the embedding of an organism in its environment:
Runeson, Sverker (1977) On the possibility of “smart” perceptual mechanisms. Scand J. Psychol. 1977;18(3):172-9.
Harry Heft has done an admirable job of demystifying Gibsonian approaches.
Heft, Harry (1989), Affordances and the body: An intentional analysis of Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception, J. Theor. Soc. Behavior, 19(1), 1-30
Louise Barrett’s chapter on The Ecology of Psychology is a painless way to approach some central concepts.
I suggest having a look at this article, but not necessarily in depth. It the reconsideration of what vision is about, and how it is to be understood that is crucial. If you normally think of “images” when you think of vision, then you need to read this a bit more carefully.
Lee, David (1980), The Optic Flow Field: The Foundation of Vision, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, vol. 290, no. 1038, pp. 169-179, July 1980.
While far more work has been done in visual perception than any other modality, the fundamental principles of ecological psychology are modality independent. Here are some papers in ecological audition:
- W. H. Warren and R. R. Verbrugge (1984) “Auditory perception of breaking and bouncing events: A case study in ecological acoustics“, J. Exp. Psych. 10(5), 704-712
- W. W. Gaver (1993) “How do we hear in the world? Explorations in ecological acoustics.” Ecological Psychology 5(4), 285-313.
- W. W. Gaver (1993) “What in the world do we hear? An ecological approach to auditory event perception“, Ecological Psychology 5(1), 1-29.
- Cummins, F. (2008) “Auditory event structure and speech.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Speech Prosody, pages 631-634., Campinas, Brazil.
For those wanting to go further, a more complete account of (one view of) perception as understood within the Ecological tradition is available in this book: Michaels, C.F., & Carello, C. (1981). Direct perception. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
If predictive models are your bag, then this contribution by Strepp and Turvey might be of interest: Stepp, N., & Turvey, M. T. (2010). On strong anticipation. Cognitive Systems Research, 11(2), 148-164.
Beyond Solipsism 