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This chapter presents a discussion of the principal characteristics of an ecological approach to perception. Adopting many of the principles set out in the ecological work of James Gibson, it discusses the fundamental relationship between perceivers and their environments, and the integrated and complementary relationship between perception and action. When perceivers pick up information about the world, they do so as a result of their actions, and what they discover in turn leads to new actions. This constant process results in adaptations to the environment over the timescale of the perceiver's lifespan — in turn building upon the organism's adaptations that have taken place at an evolutionary timescale. Countering the possible objection that the adaptation of an organism to its environment seems too “convenient”, the chapter shows how work in the connectionist modelling of human musical capacities can be seen as an analogy for the way in which people adapt to their musical environments. The chapter discusses the relationship between nature and culture, and perception and cognition, and introduces a key term in ecological theory: affordance. The chapter concludes with a short discussion of the application of these ideas to three brief sound examples.

The motor theory of biological motion perception hypothesizes that motor commands (or records thereof) are used to recognize human event recognition, motor theory, biological motion perception movements when they are visually perceived. However, current theories of human action render this motor theory redundant. This chapter argues that motor commands are not responsible for the specific forms of different kinds of movements such as running or walking. Rather, passive dynamical organizations are used to generate forms of movement that are then controlled by parametrically adjusting the dynamics. However, it is the dynamically generated movement forms that can provide the information that allows biological motions to be perceived and recognized for what they are. This possibility has been systematically investigated in a number of studies inspired by an ecological approach to visual event perception. The approach hypothesizes that lawfully generated information must be available to allow perception and support recognition. Trajectory forms generated by event dynamics would provide such information. The studies have shown that trajectory forms can be used by human observers to recognize events.

This chapter argues for an Ecological approach to community psychology. The guiding force of the Ecological approach is in its commitment to Contextualism. Contextualism is the epistemological theory that knowledge is relative to a given empirical and theoretical frame of reference and that one is implicitly embedded in the world he or she observes. Contextualism acknowledges the responsibility of the observer in choosing a given frame of reference and in justifying the chosen frame of reference. Contextualism requires that one be deliberately aware of the multifaceted nature of the conditions and motivations for the expression of behavior across environmental conditions. Contextualism also requires that observers be flexible in their selection of alternative or complementary methodologies when conducting research across different environmental conditions. The Ecological approach advocates the use of alternative or complementary frameworks and methodologies when conducting community research.

This chapter describes a rational-ecological approach to derive the processes underlying the balance between exploration and exploitation of actions as an organism adapts to a new environment. The approach uses a two-step procedure: the general environment is first analyzed to identify its invariant properties; then a set of adaptive mechanisms are proposed that exploit these invariant properties. The underlying assumption of the approach is that cognitive algorithms are adapted to the invariant properties of the general environment. The current proposal is that suboptimal performance can be often explained by the interaction of the cognitive algorithms, information samples, and the specific properties of the new environment so that the obtained samples of the environment may provide a biased representational input to the cognitive algorithms. The current approach is applied to analyze behavior in two information-seeking tasks. It is shown that suboptimal performance is often an emergent property of the dynamic interactions between cognition, information samples, and the characteristics of the environment.

This chapter summarizes what is known about ecological speciation, focusing on findings with strong support. It outlines the key missing components in the understanding of ecological speciation, thereby outlining clear avenues for further research. It examines aspects of ecological speciation that were not thoroughly treated in this book. It states that the study of ecological speciation is yet to enter a truly experimental phase, where manipulations are commonly employed to isolate causal associations between the factors driving and constraining speciation. The future holds promise, particularly as rapidly developing genomic methodologies continue to be further integrated with classical ecological approaches.

As a multidisciplinary field, human information interaction (HII) includes basic concepts with a variety of definitions and interpretations. Researchers give these concepts the meanings common in their discipline, but researchers in the same discipline may come up with differing interpretations. This chapter provides an overview of some basic concepts about HII and their definitions, first by elucidating the terms human, information, and ecological approach. It then explains what a community of actors is, along with system, the functional elements of a system, a system’s environment and constraints, context-specific and general-context information systems, and the systems approach used to account for the multidisciplinary nature of HII.

Cognitive work analysis (CWA) can play an important role in realizing convergence between research in human information interaction (HII) and information systems design. CWA has the potential to establish relations between various elements that have been fragmented in human information behavior research and in other HII areas. It can also connect theory with practice, various areas of research expertise, seemingly diverse areas of research, and various theoretical traditions and conceptual constructs. Moreover, CWA can help researchers decide about which variables to study. As an ecological approach, CWA can also be useful to the design of context-specific systems through its focus on environmental constraints.

This chapter examines the wider public health debates that are gathering pace in many countries that have concluded that merely funding health systems as presently configured is unsustainable. It explains that that most of the gains in population health have less to do with health care services and more to do with factors and policies outside health care. It suggests that health services alone are insufficient on their own and in the absence of an ecological approach to health that recognises the importance of structural determinants on health.

This chapter examines trends in early childhood development (ECD) programmes in Latin America and their relevance to the achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the region. It begins with a theoretical background on ECD policies, including child protection policies, the ‘ecological’ approach to ECD programmes, how such programmes seek to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, and their emphasis on the ‘vital cycle’ approach. It then considers some conditioning factors for child development before turning to the monitoring and tracking system of Chile Crece Contigo (ChCC), an early childhood development programme in Chile. It also discusses parenting stimulation as a component of ECD programmes in Jamaica.

This chapter considers the key stages in a child's stay in residential care: assessment, care planning, and programming. The Children who wait report identified a situation whereby children stayed in residential-care settings with little sense of purpose to the placement, other than that of providing everyday care. This report posed fundamental questions as to the suitability of residential child care to provide long-term care for children; this, axiomatically, being assumed to be located in natural or increasingly in substitute-family settings. The publication of Children who wait coincided with the professionalisation of social work in the early 1970s. The chapter also discusses an ecological approach to assessment, problems with assessment frameworks, assessment in the lifespace, risk assessment, and activities in care homes.

This chapter explores the consequences of war on the development and mental health of adolescents. The discussion begins by framing prevention and intervention programs within the context of human security. The example of war-affected youth in Sierra Leone is used to illustrate the interrelatedness of the core security needs and rights of adolescents, using the SAFE model (safety/freedom from harm; access to basic physiological needs and health care; family and connection to others; and education/economic security) of child protection as a lens for analysis. The chapter proposes ideas for how to promote youth development and well-being in the context of violence and other forms of adversity.