ABSTRACT
Learning is a concept that has received much attention from psychologists, but little from biologists, whereas the opposite can be said for the concept of environment. Psychologists deal with human and animal behavior, predominantly in that order, whereas biologists are concerned with a great many aspects of a large number of species among which Homo sapiens is only one. When psychologists and biologists engage in a discourse, any concept used extensively in one field is likely to have a different connotation for a scientist in the other field, and misunderstandings are possible. When a psychologist talks about the need to describe the environment, he may have Gibson's (1977) concept of affordance clearly in mind; the biologist may nod in full agreement but may be thinking of Hutchinson's (1957) n-dimensional niche, which is a very different concept. In order to avoid such confusions, one might suggest that the biologist read Gibson (and that the psychologist read Hutchinson), but this will provide only temporary relief, for it does not resolve the basic problem, which is to come up with a format for the description of the environment that is equally useful to the psychologist and to the biologist, that can be used in the context of both learned and unlearned behavior, and that is applicable both to humans and to other kinds of organisms.
