Ecological Cognition: A new dynamic for human-computer interaction

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a field of computer science that can benefit from psychological understandings of human behaviour. During the 20th century HCI was dogged by behaviourist and cognitivist understandings of such behaviour, which led to systems that assumed that the so-called responses of actors could be reinforced through rewards, or that they responded based on schemata they had developed.

A new method is needed to explain how actors are influenced by their environment and how their actions are not always consistent from one situation to the next. This approach, named ecological cognition is a new dynamic for HCI and provides a framework for understanding and influencing the behaviour of actors and for developing autonomous agents that think the way humans do.