We've finally reached Gibson! In Chapter 3, Heft explores some broad ideas about animal-environment relations that are shared between James, Holt, and Gibson. These include the mutuality between animal and environment, phenomenological experience, affordances, and self-perception. This post focuses on the first two ideas, while the latter two will be covered in a future post.
Animal-environment mutuality
Ecological psychology was formally introduced in James Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), where Gibson emphasised the importance of the mutual and reciprocal relationship between animal and environment. Rather than viewing the physical environment and within-organism psychological processes as separate (like in traditional Descartes-rooted psychology), Gibson argued that no animal could exist without a surrounding environment, while no environment could exist without an animal to surround. In other words, the animal and the environment make an inseparable and reciprocal pair, with each existing in relation to the other.