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Current Perception Action Workshop (PAW) schedule

Archived Data

CESPA provides an organizational structure that allows unparalleled integration of research across specialties, with extensive collaboration among faculty and students. With 10 Faculty and many associated Fellows (including specialists in optics, acoustics, haptics, movement, physical therapy, nonlinear dynamics, development, social psychology, ethology, and language), the program provides a breadth of training in ecological psychology that is unmatched anywhere. Students in Ecological Psychology at the University of Connecticut will confront conceptual and methodological topics that are at the cutting edge of cognitive science in a program that has long led the way in the development of many of those same topics. Applicants who would like to tour the facilities and talk to students and faculty are encouraged to arrange a visit.

What is ecological psychology?

The ecological approach to perception and action, in the tradition of the late James J. Gibson, sees psychology as continuous with the natural sciences. Just as the behaviors of natural, nonliving systems at the very large and very small scales are approachable in terms of very general principles so, too, are the behaviors of living systems at the intermediate ecological scale, the scale at which animals and their environments are defined.

Where the more orthodox strategy in cognitive science is to appeal to special mental processes to impose order and regularity on perception and action, the ecological approach seeks to expose the laws that underlie these capabilities. Proponents do not aim to reduce the phenomena of perception and action to known physical phenomena but to share with the natural sciences the law-based strategy of explanation. The task of identifying general principles at the ecological scale poses new and exciting challenges to be met by the development of novel tactics within an inter-disciplinary framework. The program in Ecological Psychology at the University of Connecticut exploits such a framework.

For over 30 years, students of ecological psychology at the University of Connecticut have received training from leading proponents of the approach. These have included Claudia Carello, Carol Fowler, Claire Michaels, Robert Shaw, and Michael Turvey. All are now Emeritus in name but not in deed. Graduates of the program are now themselves at the vanguard of ecological science at major universities such as Arizona State, Brown, California-Riverside, Cincinnati, Clemson, Illinois State, Indiana, Ohio State, and Northeastern as well as at independent research facilities such as Haskins Laboratories, Hughes Research Laboratories, the National Defense Institute, and the Wyss Institute.

One third of the Consulting Editors for the journal Ecological Psychology are graduates of the program at the University of Connecticut as are a number of the Consulting Editors of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. The semiannual International Conference on Perception and Action started here in 1981 and has since been hosted at several other sites within the U.S. as well as in Sweden, Italy, Holland, France, Scotland, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil and Portugal.

Recent books by CESPA faculty

Two of our esteemed faculty members, Till Frank and Michael Turvey, have officially published their books. Click the links below to take a look:

      

Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective (2019) by Michael Turvey

Determinism and Self-Organization of Human Perception and Performance (2019) by Till Frank

New Research on Collective Behavior (2015) by Till Frank

 

Rod Swenson Graduate Fellowship Fund

For decades, research at the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) has focused on the foundational role of self-organization in living systems. Our work, and indeed that of the field generally, has been dramatically impacted by the contributions of CESPA Fellow Rod Swenson. Rod’s work on autocatakinetic systems and the law of maximum entropy production (the “Fourth Law of Thermodynamcs”) provides fundamental insight into the origins and nature of living systems and particularly their cognitive, or perception-action, capabilities. In honor of Rod’s contributions to the field, we are establishing the Rod Swenson Graduate Fellowship (“Fund”).

Gifts to the Rod Swenson Graduate Fellowship Fund will provide financial support for students affiliated with CESPA. These students will be graduate students enrolled in School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, pursuing basic experimental or theoretical research on the thermodynamically driven self-organization of living systems, and particularly their cognitive, or perception-action, capabilities, and demonstrate need and/or merit.

To donate, click here.

 

CESPA Alumni and Friends Fund

Support for the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception & Action -including but not limited to student support, conferences, visiting lecturers, travel, internal grant awards, receptions & activities that support social & intellectual environment.

CESPA members, alumni, and visitors have long encountered a rich social-intellectual environment of thematic workshops, frequent working dinners, and travel to special conferences. Faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars all contribute to an atmosphere in which pioneering work has thrived. The CESPA Alumni and Friends Fund was established in order to ensure continued support for critical activities that define "The CESPA way".

To donate, click here.

Contact Us

Phone: General Lab Phone: (860) 486 2212
james.dixon@uconn.edu
Address: CESPA
Department of Psychology
University of Connecticut
406 Babbidge Rd, U-1020
Storrs, CT
06269-1020