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• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the traditional view and its alternative, a summary
• Is there a problem?
• Interactionism without interactions
• The dichotomies remain
• Resistance to change
• The traditional view of psychological development
• The ecological, dynamic systems view
• Organization of the book
• Discussion points
• 2 Darwinian dichotomies and their dissolution
• Natural selection
• Learning
• The dichotomies
• The nature/nurture dichotomy
• The organism/environment dichotomy
• The ontogenetic/phylogenetic dichotomy
• The biological/learning or social or cultural dichotomy
• The mind/body dichotomy
• Other means of change
• Whose side are you on?
• An interactionist alternative?
• Beginning the dissolution
• Preformationist forms of explanation
• The pernicious function of preformation
• ‘Genes’ or ‘environments’ as separate and sufficient causes?
• Regularity does not imply a regulator
• Phylogenetic or ontogenetic factors as separate and sufficient causes?
• Dissolving the organism/environment dichotomy
• Systems and relations
• Stable but changeable genes, stable but changeable environments
• The generation of generic forms: not a job for genetics
• Species-typical?
• Discussion points
• 3 Towards the alternative: ecological, dynamic systems
• Internal and external structure: equal partners
• Types of interaction and the integration of nature and nurture revisited
• Selection of cognition and action ignores the origin or location of factors
• What is selected in natural selection?
• Mixed paradigms: case studies in confusion
• One: orientation to faces
• Two: disembedded mind or embedded robot
• Discussion points
• 4 Dynamic systems theories
• Main properties of dynamic systems
• A different view of causality
• Focusing on human development
• Self-organization
• Collective variables (order parameters)
• Control parameters
• Control parameters and the production of levels of knowledge
• Types of attractors
• Changes at
• How is skilled action possible?
• Dynamic systems and development
• So what does ‘biological’ mean?
• Discussion points
• 5 The ecological perspective: Gibson’s legacy
• Gibson’s critique of traditional thinking
• Dynamic invariance
• Why invariance is critical
• The effective environment
• Concepts are criteria: an infinite regress
• Empirical evidence against the ‘cognitive’position
• The concept of affordance
• The continuity between perception, cognition and action
• Interactions between systems of different extensions of invariance
• How more generic systems interact with less
• Uniqueness in the face of invariance
• Different levels of complexity in invariances
• Information is not invariance
• Defining information
• Discussion points
• 6 The creation of knowledge
• Introduction
• Prenatal experience
• Response to stimulation
• Spontaneous activity
• Newborn ‘reflexes’?
• Summary of relevance of prenatal experience
• The powerful properties of ‘primal’ interactions
• Providing the conditions for learning
• Reducing the problem by reducing the solution space
• Coupling task demands to abilities: keeping problems simple
• Providing sensitivity to context
• Summary of hypotheses
• A note on direct perception
• Discussion points
• 7 A sample of the evidence: wise owls, accurate ants
• A glance at the animal world
• Bam owl prey location
• Navigation by dead reckoning and learning
• Invariances involved in migration
• Responses to looming
• How bats learn to avoid obstacles
• Pigeons, people and humming birds
• Vervet monkey communication
• Changing form of locomotion after metamorphosis
• Weaning in rats
• The role of experience in ‘primal’ interactions
• Duckling calls
• Seeing and hearing mother bird: the need for intermodal experience
• Coupled primal and plastic interactions in humans
• Reaching
• Looming
• Intermodality
• Neonatal imitation
• Imitation of sounds
• How imitation occurs
• Knowledge of other minds?
• Intermodality and self-recognition
• Smiling
• Turn-taking through burst-pause sucking
• Using line of gaze as information for joint attention to objects
• ‘Motherese’
• ‘Motherese’ in sign language
• Differential effects of different prosodic invariances
• How language emerges
• Adults as sensitively contingent
• Infant episodes
• Differentiated scaffolding
• Infant play
• Only humans can utilize the interactive affordances on offer
• The development of true language
• Primal perception of speech contrasts
• From sounds to words: relations between what can be directly perceived and what cannot
• Discussion points
• 8 The origins of knowledge
• The origins of knowledge: percepts or concepts?
• The primacy of concepts
• The dynamic systems response: stability versus sensitivity
• Varying assumptions
• An example from locomotion
• Forgetting context
• What is common and what is different in the views
• Uncoupling of representations and action: thinking as mental play
• Knowledge of the physical and social worlds: same or different?
• Two forms of invariance
• Scaffolding as social
• Looking back
• Discussion points
• General questions
• Glossary
• References
• Index