Ecological Validity (perception)
The ecological validity of a sensory cue in perception is the correlation between the cue (something an organism might be able to measure from the proximal stimulus) and a property of the world (some aspect of the distal stimulus). For example, the color of a banana is a cue that indicates whether the banana is ripe. This particular cue has an ecological validity close to 1, because a banana's ripeness is highly correlated with its color. By contrast, the presence of a sticker on the banana is a cue with an ecological validity close to 0, if (as seems likely) ripe and unripe bananas (in a fruit bowl, say) are equally likely to have stickers on them.
The concept of ecological validity is closely related to likelihood in Bayesian statistical inference and to cue validity in statistics.
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Famous quotes containing the words ecological and/or validity:
“It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.”
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“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
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