An Emerging Developmental Ecological Psychology: Future Directions and Potentials

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relation of ecological perceptual research on infancy to adult Ecological Psychology, including contrasts between the ideas of invariants for perception and distinctive features that are the basis of perceptual learning. We concentrate on relations between development and learning and go on to elaborate principles of Ecological Psychology (as presented in Michaels & Palatinus, 2014) into developmental principles. As a result of this analysis, we stress that researchers must at least indicate how results relate to the organism-environment system at the level of the organism. We go on to present Goethe's work in morphology that stresses transformation as the key to development as a resource for theorizing and researching organismic development. This approach goes beyond “snapshots” at any one point in time and beyond any simple linear or additive model of change over the life span. We then draw on recent developments in organicism in biology (cf. Gilbert & Sarkar, 2000) to distinguish levels of functioning in living organisms, again with an eye to organismic functioning. Finally, we propose that these various branches of biology are potential resources for a psychology committed to ecology, that is, organism-environment mutuality existing over time and in all settings.

Acknowledgments

We thank Alan Costall, Claire Michaels, and Jeffrey Wagman for their cogent and helpful comments on portions of this text and Nancy Rader for fruitful discussions.

Notes

¹ Publications by Dent, C. H.; Dent-Read, C.; and Read, C. are by the same author.

² Thomas Reid, an 18th-century Scots philosopher who countered Locke and Hume in their theory of ideas (i.e., knowledge as images of things in the mind) asked, “What evidence have I, for this doctrine, that all the objects of my knowledge are ideas in my own mind?” (Reid, 1863, p. 283). He concluded that he could find no solid evidence for the theory of ideas and that they are “a mere fiction and hypothesis, contrived to solve the phenomena of the human understanding … they do not answer this end” (p. 106). If Reid was correct and there is no evidence for mental representations of the world as knowing, then one consequence is that there is no “critical test” experiment that will differentiate theories of mediated and nonmediated knowing as there is no coherent basis to the idea of mediated knowing.

³ “Psychology is about behavior. … I believe that psychology should and can be a science, a branch of biology that includes all animals and can be studied from a Darwinian approach as well as an objective experimental one. There must be observables that can be counted, if it is to be a science ( and there are). There must be living functions that can be served, if it is to be a branch of biology (and there are). There must be a relationship between those functions and the environment that is inhabited, if we ground it in Darwinian approach (and there is). Behavior takes place in the world, changes the world, and makes it possible for an organism to use what the world affords” (E. J. Gibson, 2003b, p. 289).

⁴ Contents in parentheses added by the present authors.