Laws for Ecological Psychology and stepping in rivers

📝 Weekly paper summary

A Ten Commandments for Ecological Psychology (Michaels and Palatinus, 2014)

Context

The underpinning of the Ecological Dynamics framework is an amalgamation of Ecological Psychology and Dynamical Systems Theory. Therefore, a guiding set of rules for Ecological Psychology can help researchers design studies and practitioners implement this framework in practice. Michaels and Palatinus provide us with the "10 Commandments" of Ecological Psychology to summarize most of the implications of the theory.

Contributions

I've summarized the ten commandments below, and this author's quote summarizes the main overarching ideas of Ecological Psychology (pg. 26):

"respect the integrity of the system under investigation; it cannot be indiscriminately decomposed into parts... While it may make sense to take a clock apart, describe the parts, and assess their functions and interrelations, the same cannot be said of living and knowing systems"

Thou shalt not separate organism and environment (these are intimately coupled)
Thou shall not take the name information in vain (information specifies a state of affairs between the organism-environment system; this is different from most information theory definitions)
Thou shalt regard perception as the detection of information (direct perception; perception is specific to information, and thus perception is specific to the environmental state of affairs)
Thou shalt not compute (living systems are arrangements of tissues to register information, not detect low-level stimuli to compute other properties or embellish them with additional information from memory; i.e., your brain, and thus the rest of your body, is not a classical computer)
Thou shalt not separate perception and action (organisms perceive actions that they can enter into with respect to other organisms, objects, events, places, etc. [i.e., affordances], but our perceptions are simultaneously dictated based on our actions)
Thou shalt have only one science before thee (we shouldn't have a "separate science" to explain multiple levels of inquiry in human behaviour; self-organization can describe emergent patterns at multiple levels with the same set of natural laws)
Thou shalt not steal intelligence (must be able to explain how a pre-existing pattern arises, which things such as symbolic memory representations, motor programs, and priors in Bayesian learning cannot do).
Thou shalt honour, exploit, and enlarge physical law (Similar to other physical constraints, intentional and information dynamics constrain [act as boundary conditions on] human behaviours to detect information appropriate to guide the deployment of metabolic resources; attractor dynamics should be enlarged to understand cognitive and behavioural phenomena on multiple levels)
Thou shalt not make unto thee any mental image or likeness of anything (perception is direct, and learning does not involve storage [don't let colloquial language dictate theoretical entities!]; learning is more analogous to evolution whereby experience leads to a new biological machine more "fit" to the current environment; you are not the same animal with new knowledge, but a new animal that now "knows better")
Thou shalt change with experience (direct learning suggests that learning is a movement through information spaces whereby learning to move is guided by less relevant information-for-learning in the short term and more relevant information-for-learning in the long term; information alters and improves the fit of situations and actions at many timescales; we learn by exploring to detect optimal information for the task)

It's certainly an "extreme" theory in many ways, but it's essential to understand it completely when applying it in practice.

🧠 Fun fact of the week

I've been super into Wordle (like many people) recently, so this week's fun fact is word-related. Did you know that "Strengths" is the longest word with only one vowel in the dictionary? Perhaps kind of a lame fun fact this week, but I'm into it right now 😜.

🎙 Podcast recommendation

This podcast is somewhat old now, but for those unfamiliar, Dan Carlin has probably one of, if not the, best history podcasts in the world. He releases episodes sporadically, but they're super long and detailed like this when he does.

🗣 quote of the week

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

- Heraclitus

I thought this was an appropriate quote for this week emphasizing some of the ideas relevant to Ecological Psychology :)