PSY 395-01 - Advanced Special Topic: Ecological Psychology

4 credits (Spring)

This course will present a survey of ecological psychology from its roots in such early, disparate psychological traditions as functionalism, behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology to its formulation by James and Eleanor Gibson, and it will review recent directions such as embodied cognition, dynamical systems theory, and probabilistic epigenesis. A key theme that will emerge across this work is the “perception-action cycle,” a conceptual suggestion of how perception might arise from the coordination of motor behavior with action-specific information called “affordances.”

Prerequisite: Two 200-level Psychology courses.
Instructor: D. Kelty-Stephn