ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents the relevant history that makes ecological psychology and neuroscience seem irreconcilable. In order to frame the issue, it is helpful to first present an overview of and motivations for doing “cognitive” psychology. The discussion begins with presenting the cognitive revolution as a revolt against behaviorism. The cognitivism springing from that period of time was heavily influenced by Shannon and Weaver information theory, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. The black box of the mind was purported to be opened and defined in information processing terms: computations operating on representations. Second, motivations for doing “ecological” psychology are presented, in particular, flaws in standard theories of visual perception. James Gibson developed a framework to overcome those flaws by shifting the focus of perceptual psychology to four core principles: perception is direct, perception and action are continuous, the theory of affordances, and the organism-environment system as the relevant spatiotemporal scale of investigation. It is then argued that ecological psychology overcomes critiques of cognitivism, specifically, those stemming from considerations of disembodiment, and sources of innateness, meaning, and intelligence.
