1. Taking an Ecological Approach to Research & Practice
@PsychScientists
Taking an Ecological Approach to Research & Practice
Andrew D Wilson

2. “It’s time to move on from detailing the fact that children with DCD have worse motor performance, and even move on past examining how the children differ, and onto why they differ. This means tackling mechanism, which requires a theoretical understanding of the system we are studying.”
Wilson, A. D. (2012) The state-of-the-art is healthy; time to take the next step (Invited Comment on ‘Developmental delay of finger torque control in children with DCD’). Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 54(10),

3. Cognitive Explanations
Cognitive Functional Models
Cognitive Explanations

4. Dynamical Mechanistic Explanation
A mechanism is a structure performing a function in virtue of its component parts, component operations and their organisation. The orchestrated functioning of the mechanism, manifested in patterns of change over time in properties of its parts and operations, is responsible for one or more phenomena Modelling Strategy: Formally describe mechanism made of parts independently established to be in that mechanism; use to probe the phenomenon of interest
Mechanism is a word that’s cropped up quite a bit at this conference; I’m going to commit myself to a specific account because, right now, it sounds just right based on the science I’ll talk about
Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2010

5. Attractors
Self organisation
Embodiment
Non-linear
Complex System

6. “More problematically, sometimes [gaps in explanations] are masked by filler terms. Terms such as “activate,” “inhibit,” “encode,” “cause,” “produce,” “process,” and “represent” are often used to indicate a kind of activity in a mechanism without providing any detail about exactly what activity fills that role….
“…filler terms are barriers to progress when they veil failures of understanding. If the term “encode” is used to stand for “some-process-we-know-not- what,” and if the provisional status of that term is forgotten, then one has only an illusion of understanding. For this reason, neuroscientists often denigrate the authors of such black-box models as “diagram makers” or “boxologists.””
Craver, C. F. (2006). When mechanistic models explain. Synthese, 153(3),

7. Dynamical Systems is Awesome
The world is a dynamical place
Need to describe both how things change over time and the forces that changed them
Behavioural tasks are defined dynamically
Two events in the world that are described with the same equations are the same task
Two events in the world that are described with different equations are different tasks

8. Dynamical Systems is Not Enough
Which parts of the dynamical world are behaviourally relevant?
Lots of different ways to carve up the world
Dynamical is not the same as mechanistic
Lots of dynamical models, many just data fitting exercises
Attractors, repellors, etc aren’t real things – they are descriptions of system behaviour

9. Hello, I’m from ecological psychology and I’m here to help!
We need a behavioural level theory to guide how we use dynamical systems to build mechanistic models

10. Real Ecological Parts and Processes
Properties of the world are best described dynamically
The ecological world is made of behaviourally relevant dynamical properties – affordances, events
These task dynamical properties create information
Different behavioural tasks have different dynamical properties
Different task dynamics create different information
Different information leads to different behaviour
Behaviour is task specific; our explanations should be too

11. A Quick Example Of All This In Action
Coordinated Rhythmic Movement

12.  V = -a cosφ –b cos 2φ
0° & 180° the only stable states 0° more stable than 180° Other coordinations (e.g. 90°) can but must be learned

13. Haken-Kelso-Bunz Model (HKB)
 V = -a cosφ – b cos 2φ
No reference to real parts
Purely descriptive
Can be made to fit the data
Unable to make predictions beyond what it is tweaked to fit

14. The perception components
The action components
The perception components
Relative direction of motion
Relative speed
Bingham, 2001, 2004a, b; Snapp-Childs, Wilson & Bingham, 2011

15. “Why is it the case that explanations of experiments at the neural level are dependent on higher-level vocabulary and concepts?”
“…the components of a mechanism do different things than the mechanism organized as a whole (i.e., emergence) (Bechtel, 2008). A reductionist treatment of the components must be combined with investigation of how the total mechanism is organized and how it behaves when embedded in an environment; an approach that unavoidably spans two levels”
But What About Brains??

16. Behaviour First, Brains Later
The stories we tell about what brains are doing depends entirely on the stories we tell about what those brains are interacting with So let’s tell stories about the real components going into the brain!

17. So what use is any of that?

18. The Mechanistic Mindset
Everything you do is about identifying the real parts and processes involved in a behavior
You cannot start with a capacity and expect to get to real components
Start with tasks
Identifying the actual players in the mechanism places strong constraints on how-actually the behavior emerges
Currently only ecological psychology talks about any real parts and processes
Science: design experiments designed to systematically figure out the real parts and processes in the mechanism, THEN model those real parts
Data fitting is what happens when you get the mechanism right; it’s not the goal
Practice: be the place where the scientific rubber meets the road

19. Resources

20. Thanks! Andrew D. Wilson School of Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Cognition In Action (CIA) Lab
Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists