Uniting Jimmy and Jackie: Foundation for a Research Program in Developmental Ecological Psychology

ABSTRACT The research program described here is based on an approach to doing developmental research that has at its foundation principles of Ecological Psychology set forth by James Gibson and which has its beginnings in the mentorship provided by Eleanor Gibson. The research summarized covers decades of laboratory studies with infants and young children with a focus on three topics: (a) perceiving and responding to an affordance of nontraversability, (b) perceiving affordances provided by covers used in object permanence research and perceiving hidden affordances, and (c) picking up metamodal information in speech-gesture synchrony for word learning in typically as well as atypically developing children. Findings from this research show the importance of attending to the information-specifying aspects of the environment as well as the nature of the action studied when designing developmental research. It is hoped that this research review will provide insights for Ecological Psychology that come from understanding the beginnings of organism-environment relationships and how these relationships vary and change for different individuals and across the life span.