I can speak to the differences between Ecological psychology and behaviorism. While they both have a methodological and theoretical commitment to the study of the environment and behavior with little to no attention given to the central nervous system, their assumptions are drastically different.

Skinner's Behaviorism assumes that stimuli and responses are undifferentiated sensory stimulation patterns and body movements, respectively, until associated by hedonistic feedback. Ecological psychology is more explicit about the nature of perceptual information and actions. Environmental information is picked up by active perceptual systems. Actions are conceived as coordinated structures that are dynamically constrained by perceptual information and natural law (the physical constraints on the effector system).

Behaviorism assumes that complex actions are comprised of stimulus-response chains that are built up additively from individual stimulus-response pairs. Ecological psychology assumes that perception and action are cyclical. We perceive to act and act to perceive. This cycle dynamically unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, such that complex actions might emerge spontaneously.

Behaviorism assumes that stimuli and responses are mechanistically associated. Ecological psychology assumes that the animal and environment are mutually constraining, so they evolve synergistically. Gibson's term affordance suggests that we perceive the world in terms of action capabilities. For instance we perceive a doorway in units of pass-through-ability rather than an animal-neutral property like width.

They also both have different reasons for de-emphasizing the central nervous system. For behaviorists, the CNS is not considered because either (a) it is methodologically impossible to study or (b) it is not theoretically relevant since the only role of the brain is to passively link (and perhaps store) stimuli and responses. But the causal burden still rests on stimulus-response associations. Note that some behaviorists have been and are really interested in b! The ecological psychologist de-emphasizes the brain because perception is assumed to be direct. That is, perceptual information is purported to relate to states of affairs in the environment in a 1:1 fashion. There is therefore no need to use memory-based representations to reconstruct the stimulus. The information in the world specifies the stimulus.

I have attached some references that speak more to these matters and others.

Best wishes!

Brandon

Article The Dynamics of Perception and Action

Article Direct Perception

Article Can Psychology Be a Science of Mind?

In addition to the previous answer from the colleague (Brandon), Maturana & Varela are radical constructivists wich (on the limits) marks a fondamental opposite on the epistemological basis of the sientific knowledge basis. A good paper ont he topic. https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/complicity/article/viewFile/8778/7098

http://www.google.ca/url sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=7&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CFsQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.dxarts.washington.edu%2Fgroups%2Fgeneral%2Fwiki%2Fbe128%2Fattachments%2F21094%2FMaturana%2520Varela%2520Tree%2520of%2520Knowledge.pdf&ei=qDQGVcnZN9KHsQSi5YKwAQ&usg=AFQjCNG8rFMDpAt_GlMrHfUZvJJevZIiJg

Have a nice reading. François L.

Hi,

Brandon's description of behaviourism in terms of stimulus-response chains and strict mechanism is somewhat outdated and based on early and overly simplistic behavioural psychology so as a behaviour analyst I will try to update. Skinner (1938) emphasised the function of behaviour within an environment (seeking functional (causal) relationships; behaviour- environment relations), and the importance of consequences in behaviour development (i.e., behaviour followed by a positive or reinforcing consequence increases, while behaviour followed by a punishing consequence decreases). All behaviourists view behaviour per se as worthy  of investigation, not just as symptomatic, caused by hypothesised inner brain structures or cognitive models; the approach of targeting behaviour-environment relations has facilitated important progress in the applied field and behavioural treatments to reduce challenging behaviour and expand adaptive behaviour/ language repertoires et cetera for children with autism (see Larssen, 2012, for a review of Early Intensive Behaviour Intervention; EIBI). Over recent decades, the advance of derived relational responding has become the focus of modern behavioural researchers (see Relational Frame Theory (RFT); Hayes, Barnes-Holmes & Roche, 2001). This theory can plausibly encounter the more complex features of human behaviour, such as language generativity, metaphor, analogy, cognitive  flexibility, whereas earlier behavioural theory (including  Skinner's theory of language) was criticised as inadequate in comprehending these areas. Derived relational responding (DRR) has thus far produced a significant body of basic research and inspired new behavioural applications for complex behaviours.

I hope this information helps :)

Best, Carol.

Thanks for this updating, Carol.

I might toss a few grenades into the discussion just for fun, though:

1) Behavioral therapy doesn't have to get all relational-frame-y to remain relevant as it currently has the best shot (better than drugs!) at treating what were once, under DSM-IV, the anxiety disorders. Furthermore, RFT is fascinating, but it'll have to answer one day for it's assumption of types of relations. Any type-based theory is duty-bound to answer for where those types come from. I'm a bit worried by what I find on RFT as to whether how much it is a clinical treatment and how theoretical an account it is of learning with specific hypotheses that don't overlap with other theoretical perspectives--and I do intend those to be fairly exclusive options: clincial viewpoints and theoretical accounts rise and fall on different merits altogether, and we have also the pesky evidence that clincians are more effective as they learn to blend multiple theoretical positions rather than adhere to any single theoretical account.

2) More importantly, all of 1) is really irrelevant because the original question (Hi, Alessandro!) was not about where behaviorism is now but actually referred to "Skinner's behaviorism." Brandon's response might be outdated, but he was answering the question.

3) Worst of all, my readings of Gibson have pretty much all bucked biological considerations. I understand the tendency to lump Gibson and Maturana & Varela together entirely. What blows my mind is how ecological psychologists are often very happy to ignore anatomy/physiology all together. The classic ecological schematic of an organism as a circle with eyes and a leg embodies this bias nicely. If you check the early pages of Gibson (1979, somewhere in the Roman-numeraled pages), then you'll see he's pretty well fed up with biology, among other disciplines. Ecological psychologists who adhere to closely to Gibson risk being quite happy to ignore biology (except when it's rhetorically helpful) and, to my mind, often pull the problem it was looking to solve inside-out--and not solve it.

I think what I might agree with Carol on is that all these folks are history, and they were good at pushing forward incomplete models to address what later generations would have to articulate (well...Skinner hated model building, actually, claiming that theories were for "fun" and propping up a status quo in the clubbish scientific culture).

Best wishes,

Damian

Brandon Thomas's description of Skinner's behaviorism is a caricature.  Skinner is notable for being the one to get away from S-R connectionism and mechanical explanations.  His approach was distinctively functional.  He invented new concepts, such as stimulus control, to explain the relations between behavior and environment, and he adopted response rate, a non-momentary variable, as his measure.  The thrust of his innovations was toward viewing environment and behavior as temporally extended.  Although he never gave up his limited and limiting idea of reinforcement based on contiguity, others coming after like myself, Howard Rachlin, and Philip Hineline have developed a much more plausible behaviorism.  See my book, Understanding Behaviorism, for a more up-to-date presentation.

Hi, okay Damien,  i didn't actually mean to step on Brandon's academic toes, as it were, but it seemed to me that perceptions of behaviourism are commonly outdated, which is why it can irritating, i guess. I will say also that Professor Baum's book is indeed an excellent account that would possibly interest those outside the field because it is accessible and because it addresses broad concepts such as freedom, determinism, responsibility et cetera.

To return to Allessandro's  original query, I guess commonalities between Skinner & JJ Gibson's approach would be that both proposed that the organism be viewed in relation to its environment; both were against the unparsimonious cognitive models of mental processes  as "mediating" behaviour/environment relations. Both said the brain is not a static entity and responding cannot be examined in isolation or separate from the environment in which it evolved. Regarding theories, yes as Damian remarked Skinner took a largely a-theoretical approach, in an attempt to avoid pitfalls related to a priori assumptions; conversely, Gibson's work was all about providing a theoretical framework from which to investigate. Skinner was big into experimental data, Gibson not so much -- his description of "invariants" i don't think have much empirical support, for example. Also his "affordances" (e.g., a stimulus such as a chair "affords" the concept of sitting to a human) were somewhat weak and would IMHO (which is possibly not all that humble, i admit) be better explained in behavioural terms, such that the chair functions for sitting for a human, the concept of chair likely comes about because of the function rather than the reverse.

As to RFT and behaviour therapy, I'm not all that big into ACT -- it's got useful wisdom for people with mild/moderate depression and suchlike but would have limited use for extreme or severe psychological disorder....psychologists i think want to believe in the effectiveness of drug-free treatment to the extent they tend to overlook the fact that their own professional field's (APA) meta-analyses show better outcomes for combination treatments (i.e., meds and therapy). But i find the RFT/derived relational responding research and exponential learning via transfer/transformation of function is really exciting!! and there's a significant body of research literature emerging in that area -- Dymond & Roche (2013??) have recently reviewed progress to date if you're interested :)

I understand your sensitivity to a misrepresentation of an approach you support. I have a lot of respect for the experimental analysis of behavior. It has and continues to make long-lasting contributions within and outside of the field of experimental psychology.

I believe that ecological psychology has also been, and continues to be, a fruitful scientific enterprise. It is misleading to suggest that Gibson was not so much into experimental data. The ecological approach was intended to guide experimental research in psychology, and it has done so since its inception. His framework was the product of a number of experimental endeavors, in which he was engaged in testing and continued to test after making his theoretical contributions.

There is empirical support abound for the existence of invariants and their use in perceiving the environment, of which I will only mention some of the more seminal. There is an extensive literature on dynamic touch—a type of haptic perception. The perception of the properties of wielded, unseen objects are constrained by the physical invariant of rotational inertia (Carello & Turvey, 2000). Eyeheight is an invariant that has been shown to constrain the perception of affordances (Mark, 1987; Ramenzoni et al., 2008; Warren & Whang, 1984) and the perception of distance (Gibson, 1979). There is also a large literature on the existence and use of dynamic (Lee, 1980; Savelsbergh, 1991) and kinematic (Runeson & Vedelar, 1993) invariants for perceiving the environment.

The perception of affordances also has a large body of empirical evidence. Everything from the perception of aperture pass-through-ability (Warren & Whang, 1984; Fajen & Matthis, 2011), sit-on- and step-on-ability (Mark, 1987), and gap cross-ability (Burton, 1992) to the perception of affordances for the self and another (Stoffregen et al., 1999; Ramenzoni et al., 2008) and affordances for joint action tasks (Davis et al., 2010; Richardson et al., 2007) have been demonstrated. For a good review see Barsingerhorn et al. (2012).

I certainly do not wish to hijack Allesandro’s post and/or distract from his original question. I just wanted to address the empirical basis of the ecological approach to psychology in lieu of Carol’s comments.

Article Rotational Invariants and Dynamic Touch

Article Eyeheight-Scaled Information About Affordances: A Study of S...

Article Visual Guidance of Walking Through Apertures: Body-Scaled In...

Article An information-bsaed approach to action understanding

Book The Cological Approach to Visual Perception

Article Visuomotor coordination in space-time

Article Grasping Tau

Article The indispensability of precollision kinematics in the visua...

Article Direct Perception of Action-Scaled Affordances: The Shrinkin...

Article Nonvisual Judgment of the Crossability of Path Gaps

William may be interested in the Bernstein fellow mentioned in some of this ecological literature who was another "one" keen on functional descriptions of R-S contingencies--yes, R-S and not S-R. What I think both of them wanted was still a serial model. They were both vague on how to get function into the motor system, though. The fact that current behaviorists and current ecological psychologists are making caricatures of each other's founding father might have ruffled feathers on both sides, but it's nothing more but failure to keep up with literature on either proposed side.

The challenge with Skinner is that his atheoretical position left him to leap off into bit of vagueness and creativity of explanation without much constraint. Not committing to a theoretical position might be freeing (and indeed, demonstrably more effective for clinical treatment), but it left him quite open to Chomsky's attacks and all manner of caricatures subsequently. What Skinner's elaborations did were get progressively more waffly and more open to the very cognitive interpretations. Now, the cognitive interpretations are exactly what make principles of behaviorism such a mobile, effective clinical approach. That said, as I said before, clinical viewpoints and theoretical accounts are crucially not the same thing.

What Gibson had on Skinner, and one crucial difference between the two for what has followed is that Gibson emphasized nesting. He didn't know what to do with it, and I'm one of the first to dismiss him out of hand for missing his own point in various places. At his best (see attached), Gibson knew well enough to understand that, as a field, psychology had failed to come up with a specific definition/formalism for stimulus. When Skinner's more politically tinged rhetoric verged from science to moralizing, he gave himself away for imagining that the organism, functional though it might be was very malleable to stimulation schedules. Nesting has made ecological psychology a little more interesting and compelling a theoretical account (see attached fresh off the presses by Daniela Vaz). More compelling a theoretical account, yes. An effective clinical approach to treatment? Not yet. Behaviorism is winning the clinical competition, but again, I think that's precisely because of Skinner's (and the like's) creatively atheoretical approach. If I were a clinical psychologist, I would likely be a behaviorist. Since I'm not a clinical psychologist, since I have more fun with theoretical rigor than with making individual lives better right now, and since I expect that theoretical rigor will help us help other people in the long run, I am an ecological psychologist--not because I'm a Gibson-thumping zealot, just because I think Skinner was wrong to scoff at theory.

What Damian says agrees pretty well with my own view of Skinner.  He made some brilliant innovations that made a science of behavior possible, but his failure to embrace theory, even theory that grew out of data, was one of his weaknesses.  The field of behavior analysis moved ahead anyway, becoming both clinically versatile and capable and at the same time more organized around theoretical formulations, many of which grew out of research on choice.

I was happy to see the reference to nesting, because that has become prominent in my own thinking.  Behavior consists of activities at many different timescales, and any activity is composed of parts that are themselves activities at a shorter timescale.

If you are curious, here are a couple of publications.

Article Rethinking Reinforcement: Allocation, Induction, and Contingency

Article What Counts as Behavior? The Molar Multiscale View