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How does brain activity explain your perceptions and your actions? That's what neuroscientists ask. How does the interaction between brain, body, and environment explain your perceptions and actions? That's what ecological psychologists ask… sometimes leaving the brain out of the equation altogether. These different approaches to perception and action come with different terms, concepts, underlying assumptions, and targets of explanations.
So what happens when neuroscientists are inspired by ecological psychology but don't necessarily want take on, or are ignorant of, the fundamental principles underlying ecological psychology?
This happens all the time, like how AI was "inspired" by the most rudimentary understanding of how brains work, and took terms from neuroscience like neuron, neural network, and so on, as stand-ins for their models. This has in some sense re-defined what people mean by neuron, and neural network, and how they function and how we should think of them.
Modern neuroscience, with better data collecting tools, has taken a turn toward more naturalistic experimental paradigms to study how brains operate in more ecologically valid situations than what has mostly been used in the history of neuroscience - highly controlled tasks and experimental setups that arguably have very little to do with how organisms evolved to interact with the world to do cognitive things.
One problem with this turn is that we neuroscientists don't have ready-made theoretical tools to deal with the less constrained massive amounts of data the new approach affords. This has led some neuroscientists to seek those theoretical concepts elsewhere. One of those places that offers those theoretical tools is ecological psychology, developed by James and Eleanor Gibson in the mid-20th century, and continued since then by many adherents of the concepts introduced by ecological psychology. Those concepts are very specific with regard to how and what to explain regarding perception and action.
