This class is designed to introduce the basic ideas of ecological psychology. Ecological psychology (EP) is an important paradigm of psychology, as mentioned in the first chapter of many cognitive psychology textbooks. EP was originally proposed by James J. Gibson and the early theories were established and formalized in Gibson’s books (1966 & 1979). Over the past 40 years or so, Gibson’s theories received much refurbishment, extension and empirical support. His ideas have not only been applied to explaining perception/action (the original area of inquiry), memory, language, motor control, motor development and related psychological issues, but also to science and engineering fields like computer vision and autopiloting. These theories and applications will be discussed in this course (and only in this course, which is the sole EP course taught in Chinese universities).