In his 1997 book, King announced “A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem”. This review discusses King’s method, and tests it on data where truth is known. In the test data, his method produces results that are far from truth, and diagnostics are unreliable. Ecological regression makes estimates that are similar to King’s, while the neighborhood model is more accurate. His announcement i...

The abstraction hierarchy analysis tool developed by Vicente and Rasmussen (1992) for Ecological Interface Design (EID) provides an in depth understanding of work domain constraints and information requirements. EID and work domain analysis (WDA) have been successfully applied in several fields. However, application in the medical domain has proven to be much more difficult. This study examines...

Species interactions are a key component of ecosystems but we generally have an incomplete picture of who-eats-who in a given community. Different techniques have been devised to predict species interactions using theoretical models or abundances. Here, we explore the K nearest neighbour approach, with a special emphasis on recommendation, along with a supervised machine learning technique. Rec...

We have proposed an extension of Ecological Interface Design (EID) to encompass the design of auditory displays. Our analysis shows that EID can succeed in this task if all stages of Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) are employed and if an extra “attentional mapping” stage is added, which maps the attentional need of the human operators. A review of auditory perception and attention suggests that t...

AIMS Mixed models are used increasingly for analysis of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data. The variance parameters of the random effects, which indicate the degree of heterogeneity in the population of subjects, are considered usually to be homogeneous across subjects. Modeling these variances can shed light on interesting hypotheses in substance abuse research. DESIGN We describe ho...

A representational approach to ecological psychology is presented. This paper identifies a computational-level commonality in ecological psychology research related to passability of apertures. It is argued that a cognitive mechanism capable of comparing the geometric properties of an environment and the geometric properties of the agent can be used to support judgments for action in space.

An alternative view of presence is introduced based on existential philosophy and ecological psychology. This view favors a Heideggerian/Gibsonian metaphysic over the more conventional rationalistic orientation. In this alternative view, notions of subjective presence and objective presence no longer exist. Presence is instead tied to one’s successfully supported action in the environment, this...

– We report an analytic and numerical study of a phase transition in a P problem (the assignment problem) that separates two phases whose representatives are the simple matching problem (an easy P problem) and the traveling salesman problem (a NP-complete problem). Like other phase transitions found in combinatoric problems (K-satisfiability, number partitioning) this can help to understand the...