An Ecological Approach to Behavioral Development: Insights From Comparative Psychology

In this article, I review recent work from comparative psychology, highlighting several conceptual and methodological insights drawn from comparative research and exploring their value to an ecological approach to behavioral development. In particular, I consider examples of a major focus of comparative psychology, the search for developmental mechanisms and processes underlying the expression of species-typical behavior. This focus has provided several insights regarding behavioral development that have supported an ecological approach and provided a richness and depth of perspective on behavior complementary to that found in ecological psychology. Specifically, I review the related notions of probabilism, equifinality, nonlinearity, and distributed control and discuss their applicability to and support of ecological theory.