Intellectual Journeys in Ecological Psychology

Intellectual Journeys in Ecological Psychology
Author: Agnes Szokolszky
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2022-12-27
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000825612

Intellectual Journeys in Ecological Psychology: Interviews and Reflections from Pioneers in the Field presents 12 in-depth interviews with prominent scientists associated with Ecological Psychology, rooted in James Gibson’s radical approach to perception. Featuring a mix of interviews conducted around the turn of the millennium with leading figures of Ecological Psychology, the book reveals discussions not previously found in publications and authentic personal perspectives about the early days of Ecological Psychology, a significant paradigm of post-cognitivist psychology. The interviews are supplemented by current reflections that bridge the past to the present. Each interview chapter also contains a brief biography of the interviewee and a list of their top ten most significant publications. An introductory chapter by Harry Heft provides an overview of Gibson’s theory and the post-Gibsonian theoretical landscape. A further chapter by the editors highlights lineages and patterns in the scientific careers and work of the interviewees. An epilogue by William Warren concludes the volume, addressing the current state and directions of Ecological Psychology. In the Appendix photographs taken by Sverker Runeson in the 1960s and 1970s show scenes and actors from scientific event in Ecological Psychology. This book will be beneficial to all researchers and students in the international community of Ecological Psychology. It will also serve as a starting point for those who wish to learn more about the movement and origins of Ecological Psychology.

Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy

Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy
Author: Karyn L. Lai
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030793494

This volume offers arguments from eastern and western philosophical traditions to enrich and diversify our present conceptions of knowledge. The contributors extend contemporary Western epistemology in novel directions, through investigating and questioning entrenched conceptions of knowledge. The cross-tradition engagement with the neurosciences, psychology, and anthropological studies is an important feature of the volume’s methodological approach that helps broaden our epistemological horizons. It presents a collection of perspectives on epistemic agency by engaging philosophical traditions east and west, including Japanese, Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and Anglo-analytic.

The Body, Embodiment, and Education

The Body, Embodiment, and Education
Author: Steven A. Stolz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000449785

Notions of the body and embodiment have become prominent across a number of established discipline areas, like philosophy, sociology, and psychology. While there has been a paradigmatic shift towards this topic, there is a notable gap in the literature as it relates to education and educational research. The Body, Embodiment and Education addresses the gap between embodiment and education by exploring conceptualisations of the body and embodiment from interdisciplinary perspectives. With contributions from international experts in philosophy, sociology, and psychology, as well as emerging areas in related fields, such as embodied cognition, neuroscience, cognitive science, this book sets a new research agenda in education and educational research. Each chapter makes a case for expanding the field and adds to the call for further exploration. The Body, Embodiment and Education will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students who are interested in the body and embodiment and/or its relationship with education or educational research.

Learning as Interactivity, Movement, Growth and Becoming, Volume 1

Learning as Interactivity, Movement, Growth and Becoming, Volume 1
Author: Mark E. King
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-07-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 100088550X

The two inter-linked volumes in this series are dedicated to the development of analysis and theorisation of learning and teaching in higher education. The two volumes focus on the multi-scalar ecological inter-connectedness of learners with teachers, with artefacts, with cultural patterns and resources, with places, with social activities and practices, with social institutions, with time and temporality, and with technologies. Learning reflects inter-individual dynamics that are shaped by biology and culture. Against prevailing orthodoxies that view learning in higher education in terms of "information transmission" and "content delivery," the contributors articulate leading developments in distributed cognition, distributed language, ecological psychology, enactivist and embodied-embedded cognitive science, interactivity, and multimodal event analysis. They also extend several earlier traditions such as American pragmatism, embodied curriculum theory, and Vygotsky's latter day anti-dualist Spinozan turn. Through detailed empirical analysis of in vivo episodes of learning using multimodal event analysis, cognitive event analysis, and cutting-edge theory, the authors show how and why learning is not adequately explainable as internal mental processes per se. Instead, sophisticated empirical analysis and innovative theory are put to work to reveal the emergence of learning in the interactivity of learners and teachers with the affordances of a distributed brain-body-environment learning system. Volume 1 is an edited collection of seven chapters written by internationally renowned researchers together with an Introduction and an Afterword written by King and Thibault. Volume 1 (and its successor Volume 2) will serve as valuable reading for educationalists and researchers in the cognitive, communication, learning, and language sciences who are looking for new multidimensional tools for thinking about, and new empirical tools for analysing, learning, and teaching as multi-scalar interactive processes in radical embodied ecologies of learning and teaching.

Situated Cognition Research

Situated Cognition Research
Author: Mark-Oliver Casper
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2023-10-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3031397444

This volume assembles supporters and critics of situated cognition research to evaluate the intricacies, prerequisites, possibilities, and scope of a 4E methodology. The contributions are divided into three categories. The first category entails papers dealing with a 4E methodology from the perspective of epistemology and philosophy of science. It discusses whether to support explanatory pluralism or explanatory unification and focuses on possible compromises between ecological psychology and enactivism. The second category addresses ontological questions regarding the synchronic and diachronic constitution of cognitive phenomena, the localization of cognitive processes, and the theoretical issue of mutual manipulability. The third category analyzes how the theoretical and practical commitments of 4E approaches lead to empirically supported investigations of different phenomena, such as research on affordances and (chronic) pain. The book renews attention to the possible adverse consequences coming along with methodical fragmentation, as found among 4E positions. It provides an overdue first step towards a systematic and positive answer to methodological concerns in situated cognition research. Without this and further steps in the future, the growth of 4E ́s significance for the scientific study of the mind might stall or even decrease. With such steps, situated cognition research could realize its frequently highlighted but so far not comprehensively accessed potential to change radically the modalities of how cognitive phenomena are studied. This volume is of interest to scholars of the philosophy of mind.

The Ecological Brain

The Ecological Brain
Author: Luis H. H. Favela
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1003830404

The Ecological Brain is the first book of its kind, using complexity science to integrate the seemingly disparate fields of ecological psychology and neuroscience. The book develops a unique framework for unifying investigations and explanations of mind that span brain, body, and environment: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). Beginning with an introduction to the history of the fields, the author provides an assessment of why ecological psychology and neuroscience are commonly viewed as irreconcilable methods for investigating and explaining cognition, intelligent behavior, and the systems that realize them. The book then progresses to its central aim: presenting a unified investigative and explanatory framework offering concepts, methods, and theories applicable across neural and ecological scales of investigation. By combining the core principles of ecological psychology, neural population dynamics, and synergetics under a unified complexity science approach, NExT offers a compressive investigative framework to explain and understand neural, bodily, and environmental contributions to perception-action and other forms of intelligent behavior and thought. The book progresses the conversation around the role of brains in ecological psychology, as well as bodies and environments in neuroscience. It is essential reading for all students of ecological psychology, perception, cognitive sciences, and neuroscience, as well as anyone interested in the history and philosophy of the brain/mind sciences and their state-of-the-art methods and theories.

The Multimodal Learning Analytics Handbook

The Multimodal Learning Analytics Handbook
Author: Michail Giannakos
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2022-10-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031080769

This handbook is the first book ever covering the area of Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA). The field of MMLA is an emerging domain of Learning Analytics and plays an important role in expanding the Learning Analytics goal of understanding and improving learning in all the different environments where it occurs. The challenge for research and practice in this field is how to develop theories about the analysis of human behaviors during diverse learning processes and to create useful tools that could augment the capabilities of learners and instructors in a way that is ethical and sustainable. Behind this area, the CrossMMLA research community exchanges ideas on how we can analyze evidence from multimodal and multisystem data and how we can extract meaning from this increasingly fluid and complex data coming from different kinds of transformative learning situations and how to best feed back the results of these analyses to achieve positive transformative actions on those learning processes. This handbook also describes how MMLA uses the advances in machine learning and affordable sensor technologies to act as a virtual observer/analyst of learning activities. The book describes how this “virtual nature” allows MMLA to provide new insights into learning processes that happen across multiple contexts between stakeholders, devices and resources. Using such technologies in combination with machine learning, Learning Analytics researchers can now perform text, speech, handwriting, sketches, gesture, affective, or eye-gaze analysis, improve the accuracy of their predictions and learned models and provide automated feedback to enable learner self-reflection. However, with this increased complexity in data, new challenges also arise. Conducting the data gathering, pre-processing, analysis, annotation and sense-making, in a way that is meaningful for learning scientists and other stakeholders (e.g., students or teachers), still pose challenges in this emergent field. This handbook aims to serve as a unique resource for state of the art methods and processes. Chapter 11 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology
Author: Stephan Käufer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-05-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1509540679

A classic in its field, this comprehensive book introduces the core history of phenomenology and assesses its relevance to contemporary psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. It provides a jargon-free explanation of central themes in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. From artificial intelligence to embodiment and enactivism, Käufer and Chemero go on to trace how phenomenology has produced a valuable framework for analyzing cognition and perception, whose impact on contemporary psychological and scientific research, and philosophical debates, continues to grow. New to this second edition are a treatment of nineteenth-century precursors of experimental psychology; a detailed exploration of Husserl's analysis of the body; and a discussion of the work of Aron Gurwitsch and other philosophers and psychologists who explored the intersection of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. The new material also includes an expanded consideration of enactivism, and an up-to-date examination of current work in phenomenologically informed cognitive science. This is an ideal introduction to phenomenology and cognitive science for the uninitiated, and will shed new light on the topic for experienced readers, showing clearly the contemporary relevance and influence of phenomenological ideas.

Sensorimotor Life

Sensorimotor Life
Author: Ezequiel Di Paolo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-06-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0191090468

How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer. Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human mind, while developing an alternative picture closer to people's daily experiences. Enactive ideas are applied and extended, providing a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of meaning and agency. The book includes a dynamical systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies; a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery; and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, as well as its implicatons for embodied subjectivity. Written for students and researchers of cognitive science, the authors offer a fuller view of the mind, a view better attuned to the experiences of people who live, work, love, struggle, and age, thrown into a world of meaningful relations they help create. Additionally, the book is of interest to neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and philosophers of science.