This volume contains several excellent chapters, and is a fine reference joining the previous handbook. As a whole, the volume might have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand that helped us see what cognitive ecology is or should be. The book does not do this. But the editors found excellent stand-alone contributions that summarize important fields and theories.
Chapter 1 (Rosch) is the volume's most creative attempt to define ecological cognition. Behaviorism, with its crucial environmentΒ±organism interface, is her intriguing first example. The perspectives of direct perception, object-relations theory, and the social self are also usefully raised. The discussions of humans' consciousness fringe and their cognitive flexibility less clearly further an ecology of mind. The discussion of depressives' destructive ruminations may even speak against cognitive ecology, because these need scant environmental sustenance.
Chapter 2 (Valsiner) stresses culture's role in defining a cognitive ecology. It considers cultural perspectives on psychology from Wertsch, Markova, Rogoff, and Eckensberger. It contains useful methodological suggestions (e.g., focus on emergent processes, development, and on functioning structures). Be forewarned that this chapter is European in its determination to enrich the soup rather than clarify the broth. Possibly the sauce is a little heavy, for the constructs of culture and ecology are delicate meats to season. But this is a matter of taste.
Chapter 3 (Cupchik and Winston) gives a quality review of psychological aesthetics, with a nice spin on the relations between aesthetic cognition and everyday cognition. The section on aesthetic distance and detachment are distinctively informative. The section on unity amidst diversity is fine, though perhaps interesting subtypes of this theory are glossed over. The passage on prototypes in aesthetic theory is timely, and that on expertΒ±novice differences in aesthetics rare.
Chapter 4 (Kendall and Carterette) is a first-rate summary of music science, suitable for graduate students in a cognition proseminar. Unfortunately, summarizing and ecologizing music science are conflicting goals. The authors note that composerΒ±performerΒ±listener relationships are music's ecology. But there is little research to discuss here. The authors note that an ecological music psychology is a comparative music psychology. But research on highly trained listeners dominates the field. The authors faithfully carry the field's message that music's truest meanings are abstract and syntactic. But other musical meanings (emotional, imaginal, etc.) and the listeners (novices) who depend on these in the real ecology get short shrift.
Chapter 5 (Hochberg) on pictorial art embodies a fascinating graduate seminar (with a 12page bibliography). The chapter skillfully distinguishes direct and knowledge-based theories, and convincingly shows how artists deliberately cheapen affordances while enhancing depictions. This theme interweaves with the expected idea that depictions are constructed over successive glances. Possibly the chapter is too emphatic on these themes. They lead Hochberg to encourage aesthetics research on architectural spaces, and research on experimental aesthetics, because his themes fit here. They lead Hochberg to dismiss research on pictorial art's emotional and expressive qualities, because his themes fit less easily there. But Hochberg's theories might actually help illuminate these qualities, if he gave them more than one successive glance.
Buy popcorn before going to Chapter 6 on motion pictures (Hochberg and Brooks). The chapter's 30-page section on motion perception may be the strongest in the book. It has lovely examples of film stylistics, and it attends (better than Chapter 5) to bigger cognitive issues like narrative, affect, and momentum. Even so, the chapter runs long (almost 100 pages). The 43 difficult pages on pans, zooms, and cuts seem a lot for showing that optical kinesthesis and flow account poorly for humans' comprehension of moving pictures. Moreover, the chapter reverses perspectives by sometimes using perceptual theory to explain film practice, and other