At the moment, it's unclear how much of the book draws explicit links to ecological psychology (there are only 2 mentions of ecological psychology in the book, at least from a preliminary search). However, this shouldn't be an issue. As mentioned, the main aim of this study is to get familiar (and hopefully, comfortable) with the language of dynamics, so that I may be better positioned to critically engage with the plethora of (ecological) literature that is complemented with dynamical approaches. Besides, Frank is an associate professor at the famed CESPA programme at UConn (that Turvey helped create), so I'm sure the ideas introduced will meld well more generally with ecological psychology.
A lawful approach to behaviour
Frank starts us off with 2 questions: "What am I?" and "Why do humans behave, think, feel, and perceive as they do?" These questions are broadly the target of studies in psychology and Frank. (2019) represents yet another approach to do so. Frank focuses on 3 aspects that define his approach, namely the Skinner perspective, the physics approach and physics-based determinism, and synergetics. The Skinner perspective refers to the famous behaviourist B.F. Skinner's view that human (and animal) behaviour can be mechanistically described using law-bound cause-and-effect relationships. This is related to the physics perspective that assumes that all natural phenomena, whether in animate or inanimate entities, are determined by universal laws of physics. Applied to humans, we then get physics-based determinism, which posits that human experiences and behaviours can be sufficiently described by deterministic (i.e., the same input always gives you the same output) laws. Together, these first two aspects align the natural and social sciences. If both can be studied using the same approach of finding universal (though to varying scopes) laws that govern behaviour/phenomena, there will be no need to assume any mystical, unobservable, potentially-made-up entities like representations and homunculi.
On top of this law-based foundation stands the third aspect of Frank's approach, that is, synergetics. In broad strokes, synergetics combines the theory of self-organisation and the theory of pattern formation. While pattern formation aims to explain 1) how patterns form, 2) which patterns form, and 3) how systems transition from one pattern to the next, self-organisation is seen as the mechanism by which pattern formation processes occur. This is the core bit of the book that I'm excited about, and is why I picked it up in the first place!
The human pattern formation reaction model
The human pattern formation reaction model (see Fig. 1) represents the primary model that Frank uses for the rest of the book. Firstly, focusing on its components (see Fig. 1c), the model describes human systems with respect to forces, brain states, and (internal) structure. Forces include external and produced forces (see Fig. 1a & 1c), where external forces (from the environment) can lead to changes in brain state (i.e., brain activity), which go on to cause forces to be produced (i.e., action and behaviour). While brain states and forces are sensitive to changes on faster time-scales, changes to structure (including brain and body structure) might be seen as constant or quasi-constant, evolving on much slower timescales. Certain clues peppered throughout this chapter suggest that learning is a matter of restructuring, which makes total sense. If you think about it, perception and action processes are often transient, emerging and disappearing on faster time scales, whereas learning (i.e., skill acquisition) frequently occurs over a longer, slower time frame.
Fig. 1 Component descriptions (a, b, c) and system dynamics description (d) of the HPFR model (Frank, 2019)
Crucially, the component model is replete with different causal linkages and circular causality. This is represented by a more general model (see Fig. 1D) of system dynamics (i.e., how the system changes with time), where an initial state, through pattern formation and self-organisation processes, leads to the emergence of brain and body activity patterns. These patterns then go on to take the role of the initial state, and the process repeats itself.
Forces
Given the physics perspective undertaken, as well as the references to external and produced forces in the human pattern formation reaction model, there is a need to describe what kind of forces there are and what roles they might play in understanding human behaviour. Frank outlines 4 fundamental forces. On the one hand, gravitational forces (acting on systems with mass) are important for postural and locomotor processes, while electromagnetic forces (between charged particles) prima facie play a role in visual perception and internal processes (think light waves and electrical signals in the brain). On the other hand, we have strong forces (that overcome electromagnetic forces to hold the nucleus of atoms together) and weak forces (with a role in atomic decay), which are not relevant to human behavioural processes.
Alongside the fundamental forces, we have 2 auxiliary forces. Mechanical (exerted by one object and acting on another) and chemical driving (in chemical reactions) forces are really alternative ways to describe electromagnetic forces. For practical reasons, it is more convenient to describe classical mechanics and chemical reactions with their respective auxiliary forces than to use their fundamental precursor. Fig. 2 shows the forces involved in several human behaviour functions.
Fig. 2 Applications of forces (Frank, 2019)
Why synergetics?
While Frank's approach is based on Skinner's perspective, Skinner's focus on behavioural input and output limited the explanatory power of his framework. By including synergetics as a core part of the approach to human behaviour, Frank argues that we now have a way to lawfully and mechanistically explain the cause-and-effect relationships posited by Skinner. Furthermore, the focus on pattern formation and self-organisation within synergetics can be applied to many levels of explanation (e.g., cellular, neuronal, bodily, behavioural, and social levels). More specifically, synergetics can be used to account for behavioural findings from psychophysics, as well as neuronal results from neuroscience. This ability to generate laws on different scales of analysis grants Frank's approach some form of generality and unity, which is widely seen as a persistent aim of the sciences.
Concluding thoughts
One thing I'm careful of is the appeal to a physical, mechanical, cause-and-effect story in Frank's approach. This caution is a result of my general reading from the ecological literature that broadly situates ecological psychology as an approach that opposes the application of Newtonian mechanics to psychology (in favour of a more biological, evolutionary approach, see Heft) and the appeal to efficient antecedent-consequent causality (in favour of a view that sees causality as being represented by the legs of a table). Meanwhile, the mechanistic view promoted by Frank is opposed by those who believe that a dynamical description is the best one can achieve in terms of explaining behaviour. This last point, of course, is still an open question, especially with some scholars arguing from a neomechanistic approach that mechanistic explanations can have a place in ecological psychology as long as we're careful about how we carve up the perception-action system (Wilson, 2022).
For now, I opt to withhold any strong judgment on Frank's approach. What I will say, though, is that I don't think Frank is necessarily promoting a regression back to Newtonian mechanics. There are a few instances in the chapter where he argues that, just as the natural sciences have physical laws governing their phenomena, so too psychology should have its phenomena explained using a physics perspective. This can be read as a clear signal that while human behaviour should be studied from a physics perspective, the kind of physics used (say, from classical Newtonian mechanics) must be appropriately different. This has many parallels with the call (Turvey & Shaw, 1995) for a new ecological physics (and physical psychology) that can appropriately generate ecological laws that explain human behaviour.
References
Frank, T. (2019). Determinism and Self-Organization of human perception and performance. In Springer series in synergetics. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28821-1
Turvey, M. T., & Shaw, R. E. (1995). Toward an ecological physics and a physical psychology. In ˜The œscience of the mind (pp. 144–169). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195080643.003.0011
Wilson, A. D. (2022). Ecological Mechanistic research and modelling. Ecological Psychology, 34(1–2), 48–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2022.2050912
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