Ecological psychology, developed by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson, offers an alternative to cognitivism and behaviorism by emphasizing the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as the unit of analysis, and affordances as the objects of perception. The approach rejects the poverty of the stimulus and the passive perceiver, instead highlighting perceptual learning and development. This paper analyzes the philosophical and psychological influences—pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology—and summarizes the main concepts and their historical development. The authors conclude that ecological psychology remains highly innovative, influencing contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences through the concept of affordance.
Enactivism and ecological psychology share more common ground than is often recognized, as illustrated by the example of dynamic touch—a form of touch involving muscles and tendons that allows perception of hand-held objects wielded but not seen. Dynamic touch necessarily implies active exploration because perceivers perform wielding movements with effort. The example has been formalized at the level of laws governing the organism-environment system, providing empirically supported instantiations of sensorimotor contingencies (in enactivist terms) and intentional exploration and information detection (in ecological terms). It also exemplifies the enactivist concepts of bringing-forth the world and sense-making. The article also clarifies key ecological concepts of invariance and affordance, highlighting the crucial difference between perceiving and actualizing affordances for dialogue between the approaches.