Some Thoughts on 'The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience' (SCENE)

Last year the Simons Foundation announced a massive multi-centre grant project called SCENE: The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience. At the time, those of us interested in ecological neuroscience were surprised that this existed, because none of us were involved. We noted that the core approach seemed off: "Inspired by ecological psychology, SCENE proposes that one of the brain’s core functions is to encode affordances..." isn't actually what an ecological neuroscience would ever be about. 

Just this week, the consortium published a piece in Neuron detailing the project and it's goals, and this just confirms their actually non-ecological take on an ecological neuroscience:

SCENE focuses on the task structures that animals evolved to solve rather than the detailed input statistics upon which they operate.

and

In SCENE, we consider a task to be ecological if it includes three elements: (1) a closed perception-action loop, (2) sequences of actions and a delayed reward structure that creates a credit-assignment problem in linking actions to outcomes, and (3) partial observability, requiring brain states that synthesize sensory inputs over time to infer hidden world variables and guide actions. This last element, partial observability, marks a key departure from traditional ecological psychology and its notion of direct perception. We do not espouse Gibson’s claim that all information needed for action is directly accessible in sensory inputs, nor do we share his aversion to the concept of a representation....our use of the term ‘‘ecological neuroscience’’ draws inspiration from ecological psychology, with its emphasis on perception-action loops and environmental affordances, but extends it toward mechanistic neurobiological and computational accounts that can span species and neural systems

In other words, they are applying a theory of indirect perception and will not be studying how the brain interacts with information. 

My question is this: why call this ecological neuroscience?

Asking this online elicited responses along the lines of 'well they can call it what they like'. If SCENE had simply used the word 'ecological' generically, I would have been okay with that. But they have explicitly connected their ecological approach to the one thing they want from Gibson (the notion of affordances) and they have rejected the rest, and this, I am not okay with. 

They want affordances to do work for them - to be the thing that brains encode because they are the thing the brain really needs to be encoding. But the work that affordances do in a theory comes from their being directly perceived:

The central question for the theory of affordances is not whether they exist and are real but whether information is available in ambient light for perceiving them.

Gibson, 1979

Affordances are out there, in that we can describe the environment in those terms. But they are only psychologically important if they can be perceived, and that means there must be information for them. So that actual central question for an ecological neuroscience is 'whether resonance to information about affordances is available' (Raja, 2018). SCENE is not doing ecological neuroscience. 

Look: I wish them luck in their projects, I really do. But it feels like we've been the victim of a heist. I'm unhappy that they have co-opted the term 'ecological neuroscience'; every grant from here on out where we try to do it properly is now going to have to explain why we need funding when there's a huge research group already, and why aren't you working with them (I have already run into this issue). I'm unhappy that they didn't even think to reach out to the people like Audrey van der Meer, Ruud van der Weel, Vicente Raja and others who have already invested considerable time and effort into this topic (hell, just noticing we had a special issue on this would have helped). And I'm unhappy that we're just sort of expected to suck this up. That just feels....rude.