What is ecological psychology?
Ecological psychology studies perceiving, acting, and cognizing as they actually happen — in living organisms acting and perceiving in a real environment. Where much of psychology treats the mind as a processor reconstructing the world from thin sensory data, the ecological approach begins elsewhere: the environment is already rich with information, and an active perceiver picks it up directly to guide what they do. The ecological approach was founded by James J. and Eleanor J. Gibson.
Organism and environment are one system
Behavior can’t be explained by the brain alone. Perceiving and acting are properties of the whole animal–environment relationship, unfolding across many timescales.
Perception is direct
We perceive surfaces, objects, and events themselves — not inner images or inferences about them. Meaning is found in the world, not constructed after the fact.
The world offers affordances
We see the environment in terms of what it offers for action: a surface affords walking, a handle affords grasping, a gap affords passing through.
Information is in the energy
Structured light, sound, pressure, and much more specify the world to a moving observer. Perceiving is the skilled detection of this information as it changes over time.
A science of behavior from an ecological point of view.
"We must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive."
— James J. Gibson
The International Society for Ecological Psychology, founded in 1981, has its roots in the ecological approach to psychology developed by James J. Gibson and Eleanor J. Gibson. Their approach evolved across James Gibson's three books — The Perception of the Visual World (1950), The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) — and Eleanor Gibson's Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (1969). From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Gibsons drew visiting students and colleagues to Cornell University. Since James Gibson's death in 1979, the ISEP has served as the organizing group connecting ecological psychologists around the world.
The shared commitment of ISEP members is to foster the development of psychology as a science of behavior from an ecological point of view. The focus is on principles that underlie the organization of organism–environment systems at multiple time scales — from phylogeny and ontogeny to learning and acting. From the outset, ISEP has broadened its scope to include perception, the control and coordination of action, cognition, dynamical systems, developmental systems, social systems, human-centered design, and the arts.
The Society organizes a biennial conference, the International Conference on Perception and Action (ICPA), and publishes a quarterly journal, Ecological Psychology. It welcomes all interested researchers and scholars, and promotes participation by people of all genders, races, religions, and nationalities in the study of ecological psychology.
From the community
ISEP President Bill Warren receives the Distinguished Research Achievement Award from Brown University.
Vice President Benoit Bardy is knighted in France — “Chevalier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques” — for contributions to Movement Science and the creation of EuroMov.
The ISEP President receives the 2023 Ken Nakayama Medal from the Vision Sciences Society.
Dagmar Sternad’s research is featured in The New York Times.
Julia Blau & Jeff Wagman are interviewed on Rob Gray’s Perception & Action podcast (#421) on their text Introduction to Ecological Psychology.
Jobs & Opportunities
Calls for papers, faculty positions, editorial openings, and fellowships from across the field. Have something to share with the community?