The Ecological Approach - The Accidental Textbook

By Andrew D Wilson @PsychScientists
Over the years this blog has collected 232 posts on a wide range of topics and we have multiple papers out and forthcoming working on the ecological approach to psychology and the behavioural sciences more generally. On the plus side, I have material all over on a wide range of topics; on the down side, I have material all over on a wide range of topics and it's hard sometimes to hand someone a useful entry point. 

I always figured we would accidentally write a textbook on this blog and while we aren't there yet, we are working on a fairly comprehensive paper that tries to walk through the entire approach. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to post some excerpts from that work to a) have some focused information in the them and b) get some feedback about whether it makes sense.

At this point, I assume you are sufficiently intrigued by the ecological approach that you would like to know how it works. One motivation for getting to that point is the fact it allows mechanistic models of psychological phenomena; another may be a desire to be more embodied or enactive in your science. I'm not going to work on convincing you at the moment; I'm just going to try out the clearest explanations of all the key ideas I currently have in order to educate and get feedback. 

I will come back and update this post with links to all future posts on this topic, in order (you can also search with this tag). If by any chance you are finding this material useful, drop me a line and let me know. 

Textbook Posts

  1. The Nature of Ecological Perceptual Information