Luis Favela is an Associate Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. He is part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part many things, and on this episode we discuss his new book, The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment.
Three ecological psychologists on the right and wrong ways to use ecological psychology principles in neuroscience.
Luis Favela, Vicente Raja, and Mattheu de Wit weigh in on the recent trend of neuroscientists importing concepts from ecological psychology, and how assumptions in neuroscience may gloss over critical principles underlying ecological psychology.
Raja discusses his philosophical and scientific work assessing how concepts from ecological psychology might elucidate the brain’s role in perception and action, within the context of our inextricable embodiment and interaction with the environment. They also discuss Raja’s term “motif” to describe how a single term can enable scientific progress even when researchers use different definitions for the same words, and the ongoing research studying the nature of plant behavior.
What do neuroscientists mean when they use the term representation? That’s part of what Luis Favela and Edouard Machery set out to answer a couple years ago by surveying lots of folks in the cognitive sciences, and they concluded that as a field the term is used in a confused and unclear way.
Damian Kelty-Stephen is an experimental psychologist at State University of New York at New Paltz. Last episode with Luis Favela, we discussed many of the ideas from ecological psychology, and how Louie is trying to reconcile those principles with those of neuroscience. In this episode, Damian and I in some ways continue that discussion, because Damian is also interested in unifying principles of ecological psychology and neuroscience.
