Academic Stuff

Before retirement,  I edited the journal, Ecological Psychology, and directed the International Society for Ecological Psychology (ISEP). The 2016 paper below describes my 27 year history with the journal.

Papers — with occasional Commentary

Mace, W. M. (2020).  Getting into the Ambient Optic Array and What We Might Get
Out of It.   In Wagman, J. B. & Blau, J. J. C. (Eds.)  Perception as Information Detection: Reflections on Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Chapter 5. New York:Routledge.

Shaw, R. E., Kinsella-Shaw, J. M.  & Mace, W. M.  (2019).  Affordance Types and Affordance Tokens: Are Gibson’s Affordances Trustworthy?, Ecological Psychology, 31:1, 49-75, DOI:10.1080/10407413.2018.1508353

Mace, W. M. (2016).  Origins and development of Ecological Psychology, the Journal.  Ecological Psychology, 28 (2), 65-77.

Mace, W. M. (2015).  Introduction. Classic edition of James J. Gibson, The ecological approach to visual perception.  New York:  The Psychology Press. (original work published 1979).

Mace, W. M. (2015). E. B. Holt revival. Review of Eric P. Charles (Ed.), A New Look at New Realism: The Psychology and Philosophy of E. B. Holt.  Theory & Psychology, 25, 139-141.

Mace, W. M. (2010) Ecological psychology.
In I. Weiner, (Ed.),Corsini’s Handbook of Psychology, Fourth Edition. NY: Wiley.
Note: On p. 542, late in the first column, the end of a paragraph says, “But the way we sort out what is illusion and what is not is still perceptual. The status of the lines was determined through more than visual perception.” Someone at the publisher added the word “than” which reversed my meaning. The sentence, as originally written, was, “The status of the lines was determined through more perception.”

Mace, W. M. & Heft, H. (2009). Ecological Approach. In E. Bruce Goldstein (Ed.), Handbook of Perception. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Invited entry in a very large reference source. Related entries are by Geoff Bingham and Bill Warren.

Mace, W. M. (2005). James J. Gibson’s Ecological Approach: Perceiving What Exists.
Ethics & the Environment, 10, 195-216.

Shaw, R. E. & Mace, W. M. (2005). The value of oriented geometry for ecological psychology.
In J. D. Anderson and B. F. Anderson, Moving image theory. Ecological considerations. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Mace, W. M. (2002). The primacy of ecological realism.
Behavioral and brain sciences, 25, 111.
Commentary on target article by Joel Norman. The full exchange can be found HERE

Mace, W. M. (2001). Amodal specifying information: Where is occlusion? (commentary)
Behavioral and brain sciences, 24, 226 – 227.

Mace, W. M. (2000). Discussion: The roots of emerging ecological psychology.
Ecological psychology, 12, 345 – 352.

Mace, W. M. (1997). In memoriam: Edward S. Reed. 1954 – 1997.
Ecological Psychology, 9, 179 – 188

Shaw, R. E., Flascher, O. & Mace, W. M. Dimensions of event perception.
In W. Prinz & B. Bridgeman, Handbook of perception. Berlin: Springer-Verlag [German version out in 1994]

Mace, W. M. (1986). J. J. Gibson’s ecological theory of information pickup: Cognition from the ground up.
In T. Knapp and L. Robertson (Eds.), Approaches to Cognition: Concepts and Controversies. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mace, W. M. (1985). Johansson’s approach to visual perception–Gibson’s perspective.
In W. H. Warren and R. E. Shaw (Eds.), Persistence and Change. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Pittenger, J., Mace, W. Visual perception as a text. Nature 317, 22 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1038/317022a0

Mace, W. M. (1983). Proceedings of a meeting of the International Society for Ecological Psychology.
Journal of experimental psychology: Human perception and performance, 9, 151-157.

Shaw, R. E., Turvey, M. T. & Mace, W. M. (1981). Ecological psychology: The consequence of a commitment to realism.  In W. Weimer & D. Palermo (Eds.). Cognition and the symbolic processes Vol.  II. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Turvey, M. T., Shaw, R. E., Reed, E. S. & Mace, W. M. (1981). Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981). Cognition, 9, 237-304.

Mace, W. M. & Turvey, M. T. (1983). The implications of occlusion for perceiving persistence. The behavioral and brain sciences, 6, 29-31.

Mace, W. M. (1980). Perceptual activity and direct perception. Commentary on article by Shimon Ullman. The behavioral and brain sciences, 3, 392-393.

Turvey, M. T., Shaw, R. E. & Mace, W. M. (1978). Issues in the theory of action.
In J. Requin (Ed.), Attention and performance VII. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mace, W. M. (1977). James J. Gibson’s strategy for perceiving: Ask not what’s inside your head, but what your head’s inside of. In R. E. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing, 43-65. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Mace, W. M. & Pittenger, J. B. (1975). Directly perceiving Gibson: A further reply to Gyr.
Psychological bulletin, 82, 137-139.

Shaw, R. E., McIntyre, M. & Mace, W. M. (1974). The role of symmetry in event perception.
In R. B. MacLeod & H. Pick (Eds.), Studies in perception: Essays in honor of James Gibson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Mace, W. M. (1974) Ecologically stimulating cognitive psychology.
In W. Weimer & D. Palermo, (Eds.),Cognition and the symbolic processes Vol.I, 137 – 164. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mace, W. M., Shaw, R. E. (1974). Simple kinetic information for transparent depth.
Perception & Psychophysics, 15, 201 – 209.  Note –September, 2009 — This 1974 paper was based on my 1971 Ph.D. dissertation done under Bob Shaw at Minnesota.

Leventhal, H. & Mace, W. M. (1970). The effect of laughter on evaluation of a slapstick movie. Journal of Personaility,, 38, 16-30.   Note –September, 2009 — This 1970 paper, based on my undergraduate research, is still thought – provoking. Reporting that something is funny is related to laughter, but with variable coupling. Boys found it easy to laugh in the presence of the W. C. Fields movie clip and then report that it was not especially funny. Girls did not do that. Laughing and judging the movie to be funny were better correlated for girls. The trends showed up across several age groups. Howard Leventhal thought of this as a difference in how much people were paying attention to their bodily reactions while making a cognitive judgment — boys tended to ignore, girls did not. Later research done by other Leventhal collaborators showed that these biases could be manipulated. The coupling is more soft and malleable than hard and fast.
By 1970, I was immersed in issues in visual perception and the ecological approach — the major topic of all the other papers.