Browsing by Subject "Direct perception"

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    Ecological Psychology
    (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Raja Galián, Vicente; Filosofía
    Ecological psychology is one of the main alternative theories of perception and action available in the contemporary literature. This Element explores and analyzes its most relevant ideas, concepts, methods, and experimental results. It discusses the historical roots of the ecological approach. The Element then analyzes the works of the two main founders of ecological psychology: James and Eleanor Gibson. It also explores the development of ecological psychology since the 1980s until nowadays. Finally, the Element identifies and evaluates the future of the ecological approach to perception and action.
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    Neither mindful nor mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance
    (Springer, 2021-06-30) Segundo-Ortin, Miguel; Heras-Escribano, Manuel; Filosofía
    A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we ofer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specifc perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent’s conscious attention to the afordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for afordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (fexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them.