Navigating the normativity of behaviour settings: an observational case study.

Traditionally, sensitivity to situational norms is understood as deriving from internal cognitive states that represent the rules for appropriate conduct. On an alternative view, norms are 'out there', in the practices and situations themselves, without being duplicated in the head. However, what does normativity look like when it is performed by people engaging with a concrete situation? A 'behaviour setting' offers a window onto these dynamics. This article presents an observational case study of normative coordination within a behaviour setting. Immersed in a scientific laboratory setting, the observations show how the normative demands of the overall behaviour setting can give shape to various places of action, or 'synomorphs', which invite the participants' activities. Responding to the different needs of each synomorph, in turn, maintains the behaviour setting. What connects these two reciprocal timescales of activity are the situationally sensitive activities of the participants. We end with several examples that bring such sensitivity to the interdependence of the norms of a behaviour setting to the fore. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things, and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'.

Productive pluralism: The coming of age of ecological psychology.

The ecological approach to psychology has been a main antecedent of embodied and situated approaches to cognition. The concept of affordances in particular has gained currency throughout psychological science. Yet, contemporary ecological psychology has seemed inaccessible to outsiders and protective of its legacy. Indeed, some prominent ecological psychologists have presented their approach as a "package deal"-a principled and unified perspective on perception and action. Looking at the history of the field, however, we argue that ecological psychology has developed in rich and pluriform ways. Aiming to open the field to critical engagement and productive exchange, we identify three major strands of thought within ecological psychology, each of which emerged in the 20 years after Gibson's death: physical, biological, and social ecological psychology. Each of these strands develop ecological ideas in quite different directions, making different use of some of its central concepts, adopting different explanatory principles, and embodying different philosophical worldviews. Proponents of the ecological approach have been arguing for pluralism within cognitive science to make room for ecological psychology. Given the diversity of the strands, we extend this plea to within ecological psychology itself; the field is better off aiming for a productive pluralism in which the different strands are in dialogue with each other. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Situated anticipation.

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of 'higher' cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to 'affordances,' i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as 'higher' cognition in terms of engaging with affordances.

Psychology in an Indeterminate World.

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal's activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of "affordances," the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.

Reductive and Emergent Views on Motor Learning in Rehabilitation Practice.

To allow different views on motor learning to inform rehabilitation research, the authors aimed to explicate a frequently missed yet fundamental difference in starting point of such views. By considering how rehabilitation in practice answers the question of what parts an activity consists of, reductive and emergent approaches to motor learning are identified and traced throughout rehabilitation practice. The authors show that when a task is cut up along reductive dimensions while also apparently relying on emergent components, this unequally favors the reductive approach and acts to limit the views on motor learning available. By showing the approaches in practice, the authors hope to inspire an awareness that brings both approaches the opportunity to independently inform research so that new theories and practices can proliferate.

The Anatomy of Action Systems: Task Differentiation When Learning an EMG Controlled Game.

This study aims to determine to what extent the task for an action system in its initial development relies on functional and anatomical components. Fifty-two able-bodied participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups or to a control group. As a pre- and post-test all groups performed a computer game with the same goal and using the same musculature. One experimental group also trained to perform this test, while the other two experimental groups learned to perform a game that differed either in its goal or in the musculature used. The observed change in accuracy indicated that retaining the goal of the task or the musculature used equally increased transfer performance relative to controls. Conversely, changing either the goal or the musculature equally decreased transfer relative to training the test. These results suggest that in the initial development of an action system, the task to which the system pertains is not specified solely by either the goal of the task or the anatomical structures involved. It is suggested that functional specificity and anatomical dependence might equally be outcomes of continuously differentiating activity.

Learning an EMG Controlled Game: Task-Specific Adaptations and Transfer.

Video games that aim to improve myoelectric control (myogames) are gaining popularity and are often part of the rehabilitation process following an upper limb amputation. However, direct evidence for their effect on prosthetic skill is limited. This study aimed to determine whether and how myogaming improves EMG control and whether performance improvements transfer to a prosthesis-simulator task. Able-bodied right-handed participants (N = 28) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups. The intervention group was trained to control a video game (Breakout-EMG) using the myosignals of wrist flexors and extensors. Controls played a regular Mario computer game. Both groups trained 20 minutes a day for 4 consecutive days. Before and after training, two tests were conducted: one level of the Breakout-EMG game, and grasping objects with a prosthesis-simulator. Results showed a larger increase of in-game accuracy for the Breakout-EMG group than for controls. The Breakout-EMG group moreover showed increased adaptation of the EMG signal to the game. No differences were found in using a prosthesis-simulator. This study demonstrated that myogames lead to task-specific myocontrol skills. Transfer to a prosthesis task is therefore far from easy. We discuss several implications for future myogame designs.

Task-Oriented Gaming for Transfer to Prosthesis Use.

The aim of this study is to establish the effect of task-oriented video gaming on using a myoelectric prosthesis in a basic activity of daily life (ADL). Forty-one able-bodied right-handed participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups. In three of these groups the participants trained to control a video game using the myosignals of the flexors and extensors of the wrist: in the Adaptive Catching group participants needed to catch falling objects by opening and closing a grabber and received ADL-relevant feedback during performance. The Free Catching group used the same game, but without augmented feedback. The Interceptive Catching group trained a game where the goal was to intercept a falling object by moving a grabber to the left and right. They received no additional feedback. The control group played a regular Mario computer game. All groups trained 20 minutes a day for four consecutive days. Two tests were conducted before and after training: one level of the training game was performed, and participants grasped objects with a prosthesis simulator. Results showed all groups improved their game performance over controls. In the prosthesis-simulator task, after training the Adaptive Catching group outperformed the other groups in their ability to adjust the hand aperture to the size of the objects and the degree of compression of compressible objects. This study is the first to demonstrate transfer effects from a serious game to a myoelectric prosthesis task. The specificity of the learning effects suggests that research into serious gaming will benefit from placing ADL-specific constraints on game development.

Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework.

Social coordination and affordance perception always take part in concrete situations in real life. Nonetheless, the different fields of ecological psychology studying these phenomena do not seem to make this situated nature an object of study. To integrate both fields and extend the reach of the ecological approach, we introduce the Skilled Intentionality Framework that situates both social coordination and affordance perception within the human form of life and its rich landscape of affordances. We argue that in the human form of life the social and the material are intertwined and best understood as sociomateriality. Taking the form of life as our starting point foregrounds sociomateriality in each perspective we take on engaging with affordances. Using ethnographical examples we show how sociomateriality shows up from three different perspectives we take on affordances in a real-life situation. One perspective shows us a landscape of affordances that the sociomaterial environment offers. Zooming in on this landscape to the perspective of a local observer, we can focus on an individual coordinating with affordances offered by things and other people situated in this landscape. Finally, viewed from within this unfolding activity, we arrive at the person's lived perspective: a field of relevant affordances solicits activity. The Skilled Intentionality Framework offers a way of integrating social coordination and affordance theory by drawing attention to these complementary perspectives. We end by showing a real-life example from the practice of architecture that suggests how this situated view that foregrounds sociomateriality can extend the scope of ecological psychology to forms of so-called "higher" cognition.

Information without content: a Gibsonian reply to enactivists' worries.

In this article, we aim to strengthen the emerging radical, non-representational, approaches to cognitive science by defusing the worries radical enactivists have with the use of information in the ecological approaches - namely the worry that information carries content. We show that Gibson's later use of the concept is meant to allow for a content-less notion of information, but that the language surrounding information in ecological psychology has subsequently slipped into a more cognitivistic vocabulary. We argue that by considering ecological information not to be information about, but information for affordances, the notion of information can be fruitfully applied without invoking notions of content. Gibson's later notion of information for perception, stresses the insight that in ecological theory there is no information in content, but only in use. It is suggested that radical cognition should embrace this notion of information without content, as doing so can help to situate the enactivist's "basic mind" into large and complex scales of coordination.