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The author offers a far-reaching and integrative chapter in his discussion of affordances. He notes that behavior is a central element of any ecologically-based view of psychology. He explores whether his ideas can be turned into a fresh look at a theory of situations. In such a theory, situations are a complimentary mirror image of a theory of personality, in the same sense that certain niches imply certain plants and animals, while certain plants and animals imply certain niches. Here are the powerful ideas of co-evolution and the self-organization of complex systems. Why are certain opportunities configured to support certain dispositions, and/or, types of people? The author suggests that the social analogue of co-evolution is the embedding of personality in the organizational dynamics of behavior to recruit people with the appropriate personality traits to carry out these roles successfully.

This chapter argues that ecological psychology exists as a unified but broad field of study. It is the study of how animals encounter their world, and while it has room within it to appreciate the special nature of human life, it does not separate our life from that of our fellow residents on earth. Ecological psychology offers a series of concepts that are truly psychological—and irreducibly so. The concepts of information, affordances, and encounters cannot be reduced to physiology or to biochemistry, nor can they be assimilated to symbolic or pragmatic interpretation. Animal life is based on encountering the world: animals thrive to the extent that they can get both meaning and value from their encounters with their surroundings. Psychology will thrive to the extent that it learns to study these meaningful and valuable encounters and ceases trying to explain them away.

The previous six chapters have offered a perspective on behavior that is both novel and challenging. Taken together, they constitute nothing less than a call for a new psychology—one that begins in a different way and that uses different concepts from all previous psychologies. This chapter takes stock. What are the main themes of this perhaps grandiose new psychology? Both those who have some sympathy with the above arguments and those who were not at all swayed by them have a right to see where this is all heading. What kind of psychology is this ecological approach going to give us? It is all very interesting to hear about habitats, affordances, and selective processes in the nervous system, but is there any psychology in all this? It is argued that the ecological psychology outlined here is full of implications for psychological theorizing. What is most radical of all in this ecological approach is its refusal to tear animals into physical mechanism and psychological states.

In this chapter, we examine marginal cases of systematicity in the behavior of minimally cognitive agents like plants and insects. Our intention is to provide in the context of such simple agents a basis for understanding systematicity in more sophisticated kinds of linguistically mediated cognition. To do so, we adopt a neo-Gibsonian perspective in order to show how systematicity may emerge, providing an explanation of the emergence of systematic intelligence per se rather than a defense of a particular cognitive architecture.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of various crises faced by the science of psychology since the 19th century. It then discusses “the psychological” as a domain. It sets out the four primary goals of the book: (i) to show that “the psychological” is part of nature and can therefore be studied ecologically; (ii) to show that both action and awareness can be studied scientifically; (iii) to show that “individual” and “social” psychology can be fit together if we recognize that many higher animals live in a populated environment and try to understand the implications of this for psychological evolution and development; and (iv) to begin to address some of the special features of human psychology—especially our evolution of language and other forms of “selected” information—and to show these as continuous with a more general psychology of the animate.

For most of the life of the motion picture, (a little over one hundred years), there has been a continuous effort on the part of a small number of dedicated filmmakers, film scholars, psychologists, philosophers, and journalists to account for its large impact on viewers, individually and collectively, especially with regard to the dramatic narrative “movie.” These musings have been called “film theory” in academic circles since the mid-twentieth century. This chapter offers a brief history of the course of film theory along with some of its philosophical underpinnings and implications for other arts. Special note is taken of the contributions from cognitive and ecological psychology.

Ecological psychology holds that behavior and awareness are an animal's ways of discovering and using key resources—the values and meanings—of the animal's surroundings. Human beings are no different from other animals in this regard, although we have evolved some novel cooperative methods for these processes of discovery and use. The key to understanding resource use, whether in evolution generally or more specifically in regard to psychological evolution, is to find the selective processes that constrain and change the varieties of resource use found in a population. This chapter argues that the source of the psychological components of natural selection are the affordances of the environment. These affordances select and shape animal behavior and awareness, not only on the time scale of natural selection but also within more narrow time scales, such as that of ontogeny, learning, and individual behavioral acts. The concept of affordances as the basis of animacy and sentience is ecological psychology's contribution to our general understanding of the evolution of animals within the environment.

This chapter considers a radical hypothesis in ecological psychology and that is that information exists within the environment, specifying the affordances of that environment for that observer. If such information exists and can be detected by animals, then the proximate mechanisms for the detection of information and regulation of behavior can be directly linked with ultimate evolutionary functions. It is also speculated that the pickup of information is tantamount to awareness of the environment, or at least of the environment insofar as it is specified by that information.

This chapter argues that the “divide and conquer” approach for understanding how the mind works (advocated by the traditional modular information-processing framework) has already provided about as much scientific advancement as it can. Further progress in the cognitive sciences is likely to require a more integrative dynamical and ecological approach to cognition that acknowledges not only the continuous and recurrent flow of information between different neural subsystems, but also the continuous and recurrent flow of information between the organism and the environment. Findings in change blindness, external memory use, and eye movements during imagery and memory are marshaled to support a visualization of mental content as something that spreads out beyond the body, sometimes overlapping with the mental content of other minds. The mind and its inextricable causes naturally extend to environmental forces (e.g., sensory, social, cultural, evolutionary) that operate at multiple interdependent time scales.

This introductory chapter starts by contrasting two approaches to the study of vision, the dominant ‘passive vision’ approach as exemplified particularly in the work of Marr, and the ‘active vision’ approach which is the focus of the book. The chapter then goes on to differentiate between active vision and the vision for action framework proposed by Milner and Goodale; and to outline the relationship between active vision and the ecological approach proposed by Gibson. Finally, the chapter outlines the kinds of research questions that emerge with a focus on active vision.

Darwin treated both behavior and awareness as integral parts of animal life and as subject to the same evolutionary pattern of variation and selection as all other aspects of the living world. He rejected his friend Huxley's theory of animals as automata, and he believed not only that animals had mental states but that these states could be known through a combination of observation, experiment, and ecological analysis. Darwin did not explicitly develop the core ideas of ecological psychology, the concepts of ecological resources for behavior and awareness, but he came surprisingly close to doing so. Many of the ideas discussed in this chapter are, at the very least, implicit throughout his work on behavior and evolution. Moreover, Darwin invented several basic experimental procedures for analyzing how animals regulate their encounters with their surroundings. It is this Darwin, the experimental behaviorist and evolutionist, who is surprisingly still unknown, more than a century after his death. This chapter reviews his studies on earthworm activities and awareness to gain an overview of his efforts at creating an experimental and evolutionary science of behavior.

This chapter presents a set of tentative suggestions toward a theory of cognition. From an ecological point of view, the study of cognition begins with an analysis of information and exploratory activity. The cognitive psychologists are right that cognition is not “just” a form of behavior: it is a special kind of activity and awareness, one dependent upon the pickup and use of information. But the behavorists are also right in claiming that cognition is not a purely mental affair, for it takes effort and activity to find and use information.

This chapter develops an ecological and social approach to testimony as an everyday memory practice. It first analyzes the nature of this practice through a history of psychological testimony for more than a century. In recent decades, two approaches to testimony have been dominant: the cognitive and the discursive one, each with its own problems. A hint at a new theory exists in Neisser’s classic study of “John Dean’s memory.” Neisser introduced the concept of “repisodic memory,” roughly defining this concept as representatives or common characteristics of a series of events, in contrast to “episodic memory,” which refers to the representation of a single event. The chapter examines the concept and integrates it with Gibson’s ecological perspective of perception and Bartlett’s schema theory in a synthesis that combines the two approaches. The validity of the new theory is demonstrated by referring to practical and experimental studies that have been performed.

This chapter aims to challenge the theoretical tenets of systematicity arguing that this feature is language dependent and not a general capacity of cognition. We support this statement by means of two ideas: First, systematicity is syntax bound. Second, the data from comparative and developmental psychology indicates that non-verbal cognitive creatures do not exhibit systematic processes. We demonstrate that examples given in perception, such as amodal completion, are context-dependent and non-systematic. According to this rationale, we maintain that ecological psychology is a better approach to explain regularities in behavior (with examples in spatial perception, sensory substitution and perceptual learning). As a corollary, alternatives to a classical view of cognition are deemed to be necessary.

Cognitive-evolutionary theories of religion have so far paid little attention to the value that religious practices add to life, focusing instead on the verbally expressed content of religious beliefs. Adopting the perspective of ecological psychology, this chapter presents a radically different approach. First, it argues that in the context of everyday life, participation in religious activities is more worthy of explanation, than statements of belief. Second, it proposes that the primary function of religious activity is the discovery and creation of value, and that a basic drive to maximize value has played a leading role in its evolution. It is argued here that the earliest forms of religion were indistinguishable from the earliest art and music: only gradually did religion emerge as a distinct sphere of experience. Finally, it is argued that once religious values have been given their due, we are better prepared to frame questions about cognitive content (e.g. supernatural beings).

Many commentators on Clark’s writings on predictive processing have wondered how well the predictive processing model actually fits with embodied and extended cognition. The former seems to imply that cognition is secluded from the environment, while the latter implies that cognition is in and of the environment. This chapter argues that a reconciliation with embodied and extended cognition is possible but requires that predictive processing proponents reject environmental seclusion. To do so means adopting ecological information in place of the Shannon information most typically invoked by proponents of predictive processing, and giving many of the other semantic-sounding terms they use (e.g., “prediction,” “model,” “representation”) deflationary understandings.

During the 1980's and 1990's Fodor, McLaughlin, and Pylyshyn claimed that thought is in various respects systematic. Further, they argued that so-called “Classical” syntactically and semantically combinatorial representations provide a better explanation of the systematicity of thought than do non-combinatorial representations or non-Classical combinatorial representations. During the 1990’s, part of what made the systematicity arguments problematic was the subtlety of the idea of providing a better explanation. In what sense is the Classical account better than its rivals? During what we might call the Post-Connectionist era of roughly the last ten years, however, theoretical shifts have made it even more difficult to bring considerations of the systematicity of thought to bear on the nature of cognition. Post-Connectionist cognitive science has come to focus less on cognition. This chapter reviews these changes in the cognitive science landscape regarding systematicity.

This chapter champions the notion of ‘strange’, paradoxical, level-crossing feedback loops as a means to address the shortcomings of information-processing approaches to cognition, especially as applied to musical improvisation. It highlights the inherent challenges of studying improvisation and consciousness, and suggests ways that embodied and enactive theories of cognition, and emerging ideas in predictive processing and social psychology, may offer productive ways to understand mind and consciousness, and the dynamics of collective musical improvisation. Improvising music together, the chapter argues, involves joint action, embodied coordination, collective attention, and shared intention in ways that challenge conventional understandings of cognition and consciousness.