Developmental Ecological Psychology: Changes in Organism-Environment Systems Over Time, Part II

ABSTRACT

As invited editors of this 2-part Special Issue, we ended the Introduction to Part I of this Special Issue (Read & Szokolszky, 2018) with a claim that the Ecological Psychology revolution would not be complete without Developmental Ecological Psychology. The inclusion of developmental work requires considering some basic questions regarding change in organism-environment systems over time and of how to describe and study such changes over stretches of time. J. J. Gibson (1966, p. 321) ended with a dedication to “all persons who want to look for themselves.” We dedicate this 2-part Special Issue to all persons who want to look for themselves over time.

In this second part of the Special Issue on Developmental Ecological Psychology the research reports expand the topics that have been approached using developmental questions and methods within Ecological Psychology to include infant and toddler perception of affordances and word-object relations as well as social and object interaction among children with autism and their parents. We conclude with an article that explores the consequences of taking the organism in its environment as the starting point for theory and research on perception. In this introduction we briefly describe these topics and focus on the following question: What lessons can Ecological Psychology¹ learn from developmental research that has grown out of ecological theory?

The first article, by Nancy Rader is entitled “Uniting Jimmy and Jackie: Foundation for a Research Program in Developmental Ecological Psychology.” In this article Dr. Rader describes a career's worth of research based on a foundation of James Gibson's ecological approach to perception under the mentorship of Eleanor Gibson. She covers three main topics: (a) perceiving and acting upon an affordance of nontraversability, (b) object-handling affordances in object permanence research and also in perceiving hidden affordances of objects, and (c) picking up metamodal information in speech-gesture synchrony for word reference by typically as well as atypically developing children. Findings from these studies show the importance of attending to the information specifying aspects of the environment when doing developmental research. The studies provide insights for Ecological Psychology that come from understanding the beginnings of the organism-environment relationships that exist for different individuals at different times within the life span.

An important conclusion based on this research is that affordances differ over time for organisms that are developing, not just because of changes in their possibilities for action but also because of their history of perceiving and acting, that is, their experience. And we can only know their history by studying the organism in specified and described environments over time. Emotional state and style of interaction are part of any ongoing perceptually guided activity and therefore influence experience. These results from ecologically oriented research reinforce the important point that age, per se, is not an independent variable (cf. Wohlwill, 1973). Age is, at best, a rough index of ability/experience and can be used only as a general grouping variable. Further, the idea that invariants specify higher order relations among visual, auditory, and gustatory experiences applies to the same situations in different ways at different points in development. Rader uses the term “metamodal” to refer to these higher order invariants that are constant across what are usually considered the sense modes (sight, hearing, taste) because the term captures that the specifying information is “above” or “carried across” the traditional modes. Others have come to related ideas (e.g., Stoffregen, Mantel, & Bardy, 2017) regarding problems with the idea of separate "modes” of perception. Rader goes on to provide specific accounts of this type of perception (in the synchrony of word and object and in the taste of a visible object) and, it is important to note, to show that the affordances that this information specifies are used differently by infants and toddlers at different points in their development. For example, word-gesture synchrony is attended to and affects infants (and older children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder) but not toddlers in her experimental setup. How the one perceptual system changes over time is yet to be mapped.

The second article, by Emma Williams, Alan Costall, and Vasu Reddy, entitled “Autism and Triadic Play: An Object Lesson in the Mutuality of the Social and Material,” challenges the traditional notion that interaction with objects is a separate process from interaction with people, in other words, the assumed social-material divide. People with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often seen as competent with objects but lacking in social ability. Drawing on evidence from ecological and sociocultural research highlighting the mutuality of our relations to people and things, it is argued that difficulty in relating to other people should itself lead to corresponding problems in object use. Findings are presented from an empirical study comparing the triadic (parent-object-infant) play of children with autism (ages 1–6) and their parents with that of developmentally matched typical and Down syndrome triads with regard to the children's response to parental invitations and the proportion of time each child spent engaged with objects and/or their parents. In contrast to the children in the comparison groups, those with autism were more likely to ignore parental invitations or be preoccupied with their own idiosyncratic use of an object. They also spent less time jointly engaged with their parent and an object and more time unengaged or focused exclusively on their own use of an object. Williams concludes that object use is always social and that children's actions with objects can guide how parents interact with them in an ongoing triadic relation of parent-child-object and that such mutualities are different depending on the child's abilities and states (comparing autism, Down syndrome, and typically developing children).

Thus, in human experience all material is social (in its history and/or in its presentation or co-action), but people vary in their engagement with the social-material due to their social ability and their developmental history. And developmental history depends on the individual's abilities, states, and interests. The mutuality of parent-child-object does lead to the question of the role of norms in action with/on objects. The key question here is, Are norms perceptible? What is the difference between affordances for humans (given human culture; cf. Loveland, 1991) and norms of human action and interaction? In a related vein, the inheritance of environments is another key developmental concept that Williams' research coincides with. Ethologically minded developmental comparative psychologists have detailed the process of parents providing “species typical” environments for their offspring, in other words, the inheritance of niches (e.g., Gros-Louis, West, & King, 2014; West, King, & Arberg, 1988; West, King, & White, 2003; see also Szokolzky & Read, 2018). Is the “species typical” environment different for someone on the Autism Spectrum than for someone developing “typically”?

In the third article, entitled “An Emerging Developmental Ecological Psychology: Future Directions and Potentials,” Catherine Read and Agnes Szokolszky reflect upon the persisting “problem” of development and explore the relation of ecological research on infancy to adult Ecological Psychology. As a starting point they relate the eight principles of perceptual and cognitive development, as laid out by Eleanor Gibson in 1997 (E. J. Gibson, 1997), to another list of principles underlying Ecological Psychology as presented recently by Michaels and Palatinus (2014). Their point is to elaborate principles of Ecological Psychology into developmental principles. They go on to discuss how the two originators of Ecological Psychology, James J. Gibson and Eleanor J. Gibson (E. J. Gibson, 1969; E. J. Gibson & Pick, 2000; J. J. Gibson, 1966, 1979/1986) provided contrasting accounts of what was to be perceived (invariants vs. distinctive features) and therefore how it was perceived, although the differences between them are subtle and are not often acknowledged. The authors emphasize that E. J. Gibson's long and rich career laid the groundwork for developmental research that is ecological. However, a fully developed Developmental Ecological Psychology must emerge at the level of the organism, consistently understood as the development of the organism-environment system. The authors go on to present Goethe's work in morphology and 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, they 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.

This article points out some of the consequences of a commitment to the organism as a situated perceiver in mutual relation to its surround or “niche” in all its social and material complexity. Living organisms at the animal level are active and purposive and at the human level are active and intentional (e.g., prospective). One of the consequences of the focus on organisms is that the question of the genesis of form in the organism, actually in the organism-environment system, comes into focus. Descriptive formalisms from physics are not sufficient to account for living purposive systems (cf. Grene, 1974), so we turn to formal and experimental work in morphogenesis in biology for inspiration and tools. Perhaps some of these ideas hold potential for future work and understanding of how the organism-environment system transforms over time in such a way that the past, the present, and moving toward an (intended) future are integrated in theory and in experiments.

Finally we conclude, taking into account the articles in Part I and Part II of this Special Issue, that transformation is a key concept in Developmental Ecological Psychology. We hope that differentiated and considered thinking in philosophy, biology, and Ecological Psychology can come together to bring progress to our understanding of what it means for an organism-environment system not just to change but also actually to develop.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Editor of Ecological Psychology, Richard Schmidt, and the Editorial Board for support in this endeavor and the reviewers who provided insightful and useful comments on the manuscripts. We also thank Nancy Rader for fruitful discussions on the research reported herein and on the history of Ecological Psychology.

Notes

¹ We use Ecological Psychology, with capitalized initials, to refer to the school of thought and research that has grown out of James J. Gibson's work. This does not mean, however, that lessons and contributions are not relevant for other kinds of ecological approaches.