Egon Brunswik defined the term "ecological validity" in the 1940s to describe a cue's informativeness.
Brunswik's admonition regarding the representativeness of the formal aspects of the conditions of experiments also includes the (ecological) intercorrelation among the independent variables in the experiment, thus challenging the typical factorial design in which variables are set in orthogonal relation to one another."
To understand why the "ecological validity" of a cue will change if the design is not "representative", consider two admissions officers, at schools A and B.
But if the same person is put in a new situation with different ranges of the cues and different correlations among them, performance in predicting the criterion will suffer.
This is similar to saying that Admissions officer A might have a hard time using what she had learned from experience at her selective employer if now attempting to predict freshman GPAs of applicants at B's university.
Social scientists routinely refer to the "ecological validity" of an experiment as a rough synonym to Aronson and Carlsmith's (1968) concept of the "mundane realism" of the experimental procedures—Mundane realism refers to the extent to which the experimental situation is similar to situations people are likely to encounter outside of the laboratory.