Behaviour settings, situated action and complexity theory.

In spite of the fact that Roger Barker's groundbreaking research was acclaimed sixty years ago by his contemporaries, it has all been but forgotten among recent generations of psychologists. However, in the wake of developments in dynamical systems and complexity theory, its value for understanding psychological processes in everyday life should be recognized anew. Barker's naturalistic studies of children's daily behaviours in their community revealed that their actions which initially seemed only marginally predictable at the level of individual interaction were, in fact, reliably context-dependent.

Assessing the Effect of a Visual Navigational System on Route-Learning From an Ecological Perspective.

Route-learning, considered from an ecological approach to perception, is posited to involve the detection of information over time that specifies a path from one location to another. The study examines whether the use of a visual navigational system (e.g.

Visual art history and the psychology of perception: Perspectivism and its 20th century abandonment in the visual arts and in Gibson's ecological psychology.

The development of linear perspective in the early 15th century and the discovery of the retinal image two centuries later became cornerstones of an approach to visual perception theory that eventually took shape primarily in the hands of British Empiricist philosophers. Even as this approach has dominated perceptual theory to the present day, the perspectivist influence on pictorial representation within the visual arts steadily diminished over time. Its decisive break with perspectivism came in the early 20th century with transformative 19th century changes in the sciences and technology.

Ecological Psychology and Enaction Theory: Divergent Groundings.

Both ecological psychology and enaction theory offer an alternative to long-standing theoretical approaches to perception that invoke post-perceptual supplemental processes or structures, e.g., mental representations, to account for perceptual phenomena.