DigitalUM :: Browsing by Subject "Ecological psychology"

Browsing by Subject "Ecological psychology"

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Open Access
A theory of resonance: towards an ecological cognitive architecture
(Springer, 2018-03) Raja Galián, Vicente; Filosofía
This paper presents a blueprint for an ecological cognitive architecture. Ecological psychology, I contend, must be complemented with a story about the role of the CNS in perception, action, and cognition. To arrive at such a story while staying true to the tenets of ecological psychology, it will be necessary to flesh out the central metaphor according to which the animal perceives its environment by ‘resonating’ to information in energy patterns: what is needed is a theory of resonance. I offer here the two main elements of such a theory: a framework (Anderson’s neural reuse) and a methodology (multi-scale fractal DST).
Open Access
Agency from a radical embodied standpoint: an ecologial-enactive proposal
(Frontiers Media, 2020-06-26) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Filosofía
Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.
Open Access
Augmented reality: an ecoloigcal blend
(Elsevier, 2017-05) Raja Galián, Vicente; Calvo, Paco; Filosofía
In this article we present Ecological Augmented Reality (E-AR), an approach that questions the theoretical assumptions of main-stream Augmented Reality (AR). The development of AR systems to date presupposes an information-processing theory of perceptionthat hinders the potential of the field.Generally, in AR devices, virtual symbolic information is superimposed upon the environment in such a way that the real and thevirtual may be processed, informationally speaking, in tandem. Thus, we find information in reality itself, as well as virtual symbolicinformation. But by increasing the burden of symbolic crunching, AR devices run the risk of saturating the user of the technology. AR systems developed under the principles of an ecological psychology may contribute to new and better levels of performance andadaptation to the user’s perceptual abilities. Our proposal is to develop AR devices such that reality itself is augmentednon-symbolically by blending real and virtual layers/information. Although there are seldom AR devices in the market that are designedecologically, two fields of research may well bring inspiration to AR developers. These are the design and manipulation of real objects,and ecological research in the field of sensory substitution. We consider them both in turn with an eye to putting forward a frameworkthat eschews any type of information-processing regarding the nature of our psychological processes. Ultimately, our aim is to providesome guidelines for the exploration.
Open Access
Extended skill learning
(Frontiers Media, 2020-08-14) Baggs, Edward; Raja Galián, Vicente; Anderson, Michael L.; Filosofía
Within the ecological and enactive approaches in cognitive science, a tension exists in how the process of skill learning is understood. Skill learning can be understood in a narrow sense, as a process of bodily change over time, or in an extended sense, as a change in the structure of the animal–environment system. We propose to resolve this tension by rejecting the first understanding in favor of the second. We thus defend an extended approach to skill learning. An extended understanding of skill learning views bodily changes as being embedded in a larger process of interaction between the organism and specific structures in the environment. Such an extended approach is committed to the claims that (1) the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding skill learning is not the body but the activity and (2) learning consists in the establishment and adaptive organization of enabling constraints on that activity. We focus on two example cases: maintaining upright posture and walking. In both cases, environmental structures play a constitutive role in the activity throughout learning, but the specific environmental structures that are involved in the activity change over time. At an early stage, the child makes use of an environmental “support”—for example, holding onto furniture to maintain upright posture. Later, once further constraints have been established, the child is able to let go of the furniture and remain upright. We argue that adopting an extended understanding of skill learning offers a promising strategy for unifying ecological and enactive approaches and can also potentially ground a radically embodied approach to higher cognition.
Open Access
Gibson’s reasons for realism and gibsonian reasons for anti-realism: an ecological approach to model-based reasoning in science
(Cognitive Science Society, 2016) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía; Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J.C.
Representational views of the mind traditionally face a skeptical challenge on perceptual knowledge: if our experience of the world is mediated by representations built upon perceptual inputs, how can we be certain that our representations are accurate and our perceptual apparatus reliable? J. J. Gibson’s ecological approach provides an alternative framework, according to which direct perception of affordances does away with the need to posit internal mental representations as intermediary steps between perceptual input and behavioral output. Gibson accordingly spoke of his framework as providing “reasons for realism.” In this paper I suggest that, granting Gibson his reasons for perceptual realism, the Gibsonian framework motivates antirealism when it comes to scientific theorizing and modeling. If scientists are Gibsonian perceivers, then it makes sense to take their use of models in indirect investigations of real-world phenomena not as representations of the phenomena, but rather as autonomous tools with their own affordances.
Open Access
Neither mindful nor mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance
(Springer, 2021-06-30) Segundo-Ortin, Miguel; Heras-Escribano, Manuel; Filosofía
A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we ofer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specifc perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent’s conscious attention to the afordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for afordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (fexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them.
Open Access
Radical embodied cognitive science and “Real Cognition”
(Springer, 2019-11-21) Raja Galián, Vicente; Chemero, Anthony; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
A persistent criticism of radical embodied cognitive science is that it will be impossible to explain “real cognition” without invoking mental representations. This paper provides an account of explicit, real-time thinking of the kind we engage in when we imagine counter-factual situations, remember the past, and plan for the future. We first present a very general non-representational account of explicit thinking, based on pragmatist philosophy of science. We then present a more detailed instantiation of this general account drawing on nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology.
Open Access
Reading comprehension as embodied action: exploratory findings on nonlinear eye movement dynamics and comprehension of scientific texts
(Cognitive Science Society, 2023) Bammel, Moritz; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
Reading comprehension is often conceptualized in terms of the internal processing of linguistic information and construction of accurate mental representations. In contrast, an ecological-enactive approach rejects this internalist focus and instead emphasizes the dynamic process of reader-text coupling in which eye movements play a constitutive role. In this study, we employed recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and eye movement dynamics, based on eye-tracking data from the Potsdam Textbook Corpus recorded from beginners and experts reading scientific texts, followed by comprehension questionnaires. Moreover, we compared the findings from RQA to classical eye movement measures (number of fixations, mean fixation duration, regression fixation proportion). The results indicated that classical eye movement measures did not predict reading comprehension reliably, whereas recurrences in gaze steps were reliably associated with reading comprehension proficiency. Contrary to our original hypothesis, experts showed more irregular, rather than more regular, eye movement dynamics, and these were linked to more proficient reading comprehension. In line with previous research on naturalistic reading using nonlinear methods, the present findings suggest that reading comprehension is best understood as emerging from interaction-dominant coordination processes.
Open Access
Scaling-up behavior settings: an ecological approach to cognitive institutions
(Springer, 2025-08-07) Bammel, Moritz; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
Barker’s notion of behavior settings has been fruitfully used in ecological psychology to highlight the importance of place and to account for how perception-action of affordances is socio-culturally co-constituted. In parallel, the notion of cognitive institutions has been introduced in the context of the extended cognition debate to analyze how certain cognitive practices are enabled and shaped by institutional structures that have emerged from previous collective cognitive and social activities. In this paper, we argue that behavior settings and cognitive institutions are complementary notions and we propose a synthesis under the umbrella of ecological psychology. Relative to behavior settings, cognitive institutions can be conceived as yet higher higher-order ecological structures that emerge from and are sustained by active participation in spatio-temporally more widely distributed joint actions and collective cognitive practices. At the same time, cognitive institutions function as more global enabling constraints, relative to behavior settings, over individuals’ perception-action of affordances and families of behavior settings. Incorporating the notion of cognitive institutions into ecological psychology thus enables a more comprehensive analysis of how cognitive practices are socio-culturally co-constituted at various spatio-temporal scales. We conclude that this synthesis opens up opportunities for a critical turn in ecological psychology, supporting the analysis of how cognitive practices are socio-culturally co-constituted on an institutional level for better or worse.
Open Access
Scientific practice as ecological-enactive co-construction
(Springer, 2023-06-22) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; van Es, Thomas; Hipolito, Ines; Filosofía
Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive views in embodied cognitive science, on the other. But these insights have so far been explored in separation from each other, without clear indication of whether they can work together. Moreover, the focus on particular practices, however insightful, has tended to lack consideration of potential further implications for a naturalized understanding of science as a whole (i.e., above and beyond those particular practices). Motivated by these developments, here we sketch a broad-ranging view of science, scientific practice and scientific knowledge in terms of ecological-enactive co-construction. The view we propose situates science in the biological, evolutionary context of human embodied cognitive activity aimed at addressing the demands of life. This motivates reframing theory as practice, and reconceptualizing scientific knowledge in ecological terms, as relational and world-involving. Our view also brings to the forefront of attention the fundamental link between ideas about the nature of mind, of science and of nature itself, which we explore by outlining how our proposal differs from more conservative, and narrower, conceptions of “cognitive niche construction.”
Open Access
The Cognition-Perception Distinction Across Paradigms: An Ecological View
(Cognitive Science Society, 2018) Raja Galián, Vicente; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
Folk psychology takes perception and cognition to be two distinct processes. It seems that when we perceive the world we are engaged in one kind of activity and when we think about it we are engaged in a different one. This conception underlies various discussions within the cognitive sciences, such as on the architecture and modularity of the mind, and the cognitive penetrability of perception. But is the distinction justified? This paper looks for an answer in two opposing paradigms in the sciences of the mind: traditional cognitivism and ecological psychology. Even though cognitivism is the dominant paradigm, we argue that it has thus far failed to give a definite account of the relation between perception and cognition, and to support or to deny their separation. Ecological psychology, on the other hand, rejects the distinction and integrates cognition with perception. We discuss previous work within the ecological view and sketch directions for future research.
Open Access
The embodiment of architectural experience: a methodological perspective on neuro-architecture
(Frontiers Media, 2022-05-09) Wang, Sheng; Djebbara, Zakaria; Gramann, Klaus; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
People spend a large portion of their time inside built environments. Research in neuro-architecture—the neural basis of human perception of and interaction with the surrounding architecture—promises to advance our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying this common human experience and also to inspire evidence-based architectural design principles. This paper examines the current state of the field and offers a path for moving closer to fulfilling this promise. The paper is structured in three sections, beginning with an introduction to neuro-architecture, outlining its main objectives and giving an overview of experimental research in the field. Afterward, two methodological limitations attending current brain-imaging architectural research are discussed: the first concerns the limited focus of the research, which is often restricted to the aesthetic dimension of architectural experience; the second concerns practical limitations imposed by the typical experimental tools and methods, which often require participants to remain stationary and prevent naturalistic interaction with architectural surroundings. Next, we propose that the theoretical basis of ecological psychology provides a framework for addressing these limitations and motivates emphasizing the role of embodied exploration in architectural experience, which encompasses but is not limited to aesthetic contemplation. In this section, some basic concepts within ecological psychology and their convergences with architecture are described. Lastly, we introduce Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) as one emerging brain imaging approach with the potential to improve the ecological validity of neuro-architecture research. Accordingly, we suggest that combining theoretical and conceptual resources from ecological psychology with state-of-the-art neuroscience methods (Mobile Brain/Body Imaging) is a promising way to bring neuro-architecture closer to accomplishing its scientific and practical goals.
Open Access
The risk of trivializing affordances: mental and cognitive affordances examined
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-06-25) Segundo Ortín, Miguel; Heras Escribano, Manuel; Filosofía
In the last years, we have attended to different attempts to extend the notion of affordance to include mental or cognitive actions. In short, the idea is that our capacity to perform some cognitive functions such as counting, imagining, mathematical reasoning, and so on, is preceded by our awareness of cognitive or mental affordances. In this paper, we analyze two of these attempts, Mental Affordance Hypothesis, and cognitive horizons, and conclude that they fail to deliver their promise. Our argument is two-fold. First, we show that both proposals lack an explanation for how these affordances can be perceived or experienced by the individuals. Second, we argue, focusing on the examples provided by the authors, that the introduction of cognitive affordances is not justified on explanatory grounds. In other words, neither of these proposals offers a compelling justification for thinking that performing said “mental acts” requires the perception of mental or cognitive affordances. Hence, the existence of mental or cognitive affordances remains both scientifically mysterious and explanatorily unjustified.

Browsing by Subject "Ecological psychology"

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