61 posts · 34,753 views
I am a perception/action researcher at the University of Leeds, interested in learning, perceptual control of action, ecological psychology and dynamical systems.
Cognition Without Borders
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- June 7, 2012
- 05:13 AM
- 400 views
Specification: What It Is, and Why We Need It (Specification I)
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
The first thing I need to do in a discussion of specification is explain what it is and why it's important to ecological psychology. I've tried to maintain a clear logical progression in this post, building towards the need for specification. In my next post, I'll take a first swing at explaining what specification gives us, namely a reason why information means one thing and not another. The issue of specification comes from Gibson's (1966, 1979) analysis of visual perception, so that's where I........ Read more »
Bingham, G. (1993) Optical flow from eye movement with head immobilized: “Ocular occlusion” beyond the nose. Vision Research, 33(5-6), 777-789. DOI: 10.1016/0042-6989(93)90197-5
Fodor, J., . (1981) How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson's “ecological approach”. Cognition, 9(2), 139-196. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(81)90009-3
Gray, R., & Regan, D. (1999) Do monocular time-to-collision estimates necessarily involve perceived distance?. Perception, 28(10), 1257-1264. DOI: 10.1068/p2895
RUNESON, S. (1977) On the possibility of "smart" perceptual mechanisms. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 18(1), 172-179. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1977.tb00274.x
Turvey, M. T., Shaw, R. E., Reed, E. S., . (1981) Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981). Cognition, 9(3), 237-304. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(81)90002-0
- June 6, 2012
- 08:16 AM
- 411 views
Specification & Its Discontents
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
A topic that has been flying under the radar a little in Sabrina's language posts is the issue of specification. Sabrina's ecological analysis of language discusses information and what it means, but is not committed to the kind of law based account that is typically invoked in the perception-action literature. It can't - language can be used to talk about things in their absence, and it's not clear what kind of ecological laws might govern the connection between the speech event and it's meanin........ Read more »
Turvey, M. T., Shaw, R. E., Reed, E. S., . (1981) Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981). Cognition, 9(3), 237-304. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(81)90002-0
Withagen, R., & Chemero, A. (2009) Naturalizing Perception: Developing the Gibsonian Approach to Perception along Evolutionary Lines. Theory , 19(3), 363-389. DOI: 10.1177/0959354309104159
Withagen, R., & van der Kamp, J. (2010) Towards a new ecological conception of perceptual information: Lessons from a developmental systems perspective. Human Movement Science, 29(1), 149-163. DOI: 10.1016/j.humov.2009.09.003
Jacobs, D., Michaels, C., & Runeson, S. (2000) Learning to perceive the relative mass of colliding balls: The effects of ratio scaling and feedback. Perception , 62(7), 1332-1340. DOI: 10.3758/BF03212135
Jacobs, D., Runeson, S., & Michaels, C. (2001) Learning to visually perceive the relative mass of colliding balls in globally and locally constrained task ecologies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(5), 1019-1038. DOI: 10.1037//0096-1523.27.5.1019
Withagen, R., & van Wermeskerken, M. (2009) Individual differences in learning to perceive length by dynamic touch: Evidence for variation in perceptual learning capacities. Perception , 71(1), 64-75. DOI: 10.3758/APP.71.1.64
- May 18, 2012
- 07:56 AM
- 389 views
An Ecological Approach to Language
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
Language is often held up as an example against the possibility of the radical (non-representational) psychology we advocate for. You might be able to explain perception-action without representations, people say, but we can't see how you'll ever be able to explain 'real cognition, like language' without them. It's finally time for us to begin chipping away at this criticism. In the next few posts I'll lay out a first draft of an embodied, ecological analysis of language use.Psychologists u........ Read more »
Bingham, G. (1988) Task-specific devices and the perceptual bottleneck☆. Human Movement Science, 7(2-4), 225-264. DOI: 10.1016/0167-9457(88)90013-9
- April 13, 2012
- 04:59 AM
- 453 views
Patient DF uses haptics, not intact visual perception-for-action to reach for objects
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
Before functional neuroimaging techniques like PET and fMRI became common, what we knew about which parts of the brain did what came from neuropsychology. This is the study of patients with specific injuries to the brain, and the basic logic of the field is that if you have a patient with a lesion in area A who can't do task 1, then area A is involved in performing task 1. It gets a little more complicated than this, as you search for double dissociations, etc, but this is essentially it.A surpr........ Read more »
Milner, A., Ganel, T., & Goodale, M. (2012) Does grasping in patient D.F. depend on vision?. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.004
Schenk, T. (2012) No Dissociation between Perception and Action in Patient DF When Haptic Feedback is Withdrawn. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(6), 2013-2017. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3413-11.2012
Schenk, T. (2012) Response to Milner et al.: Grasping uses vision and haptic feedback. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.006
- April 1, 2012
- 03:30 AM
- 506 views
Did language emerge from the neural systems supporting aimed throwing?
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
Aimed throwing is surprisingly uncommon in the animal kingdom. Humans do it par excellence, and otherwise it only shows up occasionally, even in our closest relatives. Chimpanzees will throw things (often faeces) but unlike humans don't throw things when hunting or trying to get food; when non-human animals throw things, it's usually part of a social encounter.Throwing is a fascinating task for many reasons; I hope to blog some about the perception-action aspects of this task in the future as I ........ Read more »
HAMILTON, W., BUSKIRK, R., & BUSKIRK, W. (1975) Defensive stoning by baboons. Nature, 256(5517), 488-489. DOI: 10.1038/256488a0
Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernandez-Lloreda, M., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2007) Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. Science, 317(5843), 1360-1366. DOI: 10.1126/science.1146282
Hopkins, W., Russell, J., & Schaeffer, J. (2011) The neural and cognitive correlates of aimed throwing in chimpanzees: a magnetic resonance image and behavioural study on a unique form of social tool use. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1585), 37-47. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0195
Zhu, Q., & Bingham, G. (2011) Human readiness to throw: the size–weight illusion is not an illusion when picking the best objects to throw. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(4), 288-293. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.11.005
- March 18, 2012
- 09:53 AM
- 415 views
A field spotter's guide to embodied cognition
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
I've spent quite a bit of time lately on the blog and Twitter talking about what embodied cognition is not. For example, it's not about moving through time (Miles et al, 2010), and it's not about leaning to the left (Eerland, Guadalupe & Zwaan (2011). It's about finding new solutions to old problems by expanding the resources available to a perceiving-acting organism; for instance, allowing it to move so as to produce useful information, as in the outfielder problem (e.g. McBeath et al, 1995........ Read more »
McBeath MK, Shaffer DM, & Kaiser MK. (1995) How baseball outfielders determine where to run to catch fly balls. Science (New York, N.Y.), 268(5210), 569-73. PMID: 7725104
Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. (2012) Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.008
Bingham, G. P. (1988) Task-specific devices and the perceptual bottleneck. Human Movement Science, 7(2-4), 225-264. DOI: 10.1016/0167-9457(88)90013-9
Eerland, A., Guadalupe, T., & Zwaan, R. (2011) Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation. Psychological Science, 22(12), 1511-1514. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611420731
Miles, L., Nind, L., & Macrae, C. (2010) Moving Through Time. Psychological Science, 21(2), 222-223. DOI: 10.1177/0956797609359333
Runeson, S. (1977) On the possibility of "smart" perceptual mechanisms. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 18(1), 172-179. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1977.tb00274.x
WILSON, A., & BINGHAM, G. (2008) Identifying the information for the visual perception of relative phase. Perception , 70(3), 465-476. DOI: 10.3758/PP.70.3.465
- March 8, 2012
- 05:07 AM
- 230 views
There's More to Us Than Our Brains - So What Does The Brain Do?
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
I'm not that interested in the brain. It's hard to be this way in modern psychology. Cognitive neuroscience is where it's at, and I think I come off as a bit of a Luddite when I try to convince people fMRI is a bit of a waste of time. Not caring much about the brain is certainly a sociological reason why ecological psychology doesn't get taken very seriously; we're just the crazy people who don't think there are mental representations, based on some work from the 50s-70s. Surely modern ima........ Read more »
Bingham, G. (1988) Task-specific devices and the perceptual bottleneck☆. Human Movement Science, 7(2-4), 225-264. DOI: 10.1016/0167-9457(88)90013-9
- February 25, 2012
- 06:52 AM
- 606 views
Are babies super? Performance, competence and infant habituation
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
Are babies really more competent than we give them credit? (No.)Developmental psychology is filled with studies that claim to show the hidden abilities of babies. The claim is that babies come pre-packaged with all kinds of knowledge and skills that provides them with the foot in the door they need to learn about the world. Babies are limited in their ability to demonstrate this knowledge, however, because of their immature bodies and inability to control these well. In the language of the field........ Read more »
Schöner, G., & Thelen, E. (2006) Using dynamic field theory to rethink infant habituation. Psychological Review, 113(2), 273-299. DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.113.2.273
Wickelgren, E., & Bingham, G. (2001) Infant sensitivity to trajectory forms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 942-952. DOI: 10.1037//0096-1523.27.4.942
- December 14, 2011
- 06:33 AM
- 2,452 views
Leaning to the left makes you believe odd things about embodied cognition
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
Embodied cognition is not what you think it is. But I do understand why people think differently; it's because of the depressingly endless stream of papers published in Psychological Science that claim to have found that body posture somehow influences the contents of some cognition about the world. The latest "exciting" new finding claims that estimates of magnitude (size, amount, etc) are affected by your posture. The paper is well summarised at the Guardian for those without access to the pap........ Read more »
Eerland, A., Guadalupe, T., & Zwaan, R. (2011) Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation. Psychological Science, 22(12), 1511-1514. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611420731
Miles, L., Nind, L., Macrae, C. (2010) Moving Through Time. Psychological Science, 21(2), 222-223. DOI: 10.1177/0956797609359333
Restle, F. (1970) Speed of adding and comparing numbers. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 83(2, Pt.1), 274-278. DOI: 10.1037/h0028573
- December 9, 2011
- 09:35 AM
- 532 views
Some Ground Rules for a Theory of Psychology
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
Add psychology to the listA fairly common response to our theory post was 'here's my theory, which is designed to replace and fix all the others'. However, it's more a symptom of the problem I was discussing than a solution for everyone to have their own entirely separate theory which doesn't talk to any other work in the field (see above). One of my personal goals in science is to not be that guy. I want to see cognitive science become more integrated, not more fragmented. We have also been ask........ Read more »
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998) The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7-19. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8284.00096
Runeson, S. (1977) On the possibility of "smart" perceptual mechanisms. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 18(1), 172-179. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1977.tb00274.x
Turvey, M. (1992) Affordances and Prospective Control: An Outline of the Ontology. Ecological Psychology, 4(3), 173-187. DOI: 10.1207/s15326969eco0403_3
Turvey, M., Shaw, R., Reed, E., & Mace, W. (1981) Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981). Cognition, 9(3), 237-304. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(81)90002-0
van Gelder, T. (1995) What might cognition be, if not computation?. The Journal of Philosophy, 92(7), 345-381. info:/
Warren, W. (1984) Perceiving affordances: Visual guidance of stair climbing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10(5), 683-703. DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.10.5.683
- November 6, 2011
- 07:06 AM
- 352 views
Embodied cognition is not what you think it is
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
The most exciting thing in cognitive science right now is the theory that cognition is embodied. It is, in fact one of the things interested lay people know about cognitive science, thanks in part to a lot of high profile experiments that claim to show how cognition can be influenced and biased by states of the body, or that cognitive states can affect states of the body in ways that suggest abstract metaphors and concepts are grounded in the behaviour of the body. A recent blog post at Scientif........ Read more »
Jostmann, N., Lakens, D., & Schubert, T. (2009) Weight as an Embodiment of Importance. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1169-1174. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02426.x
Miles, L., Nind, L., Macrae, C. (2010) Moving Through Time. Psychological Science, 21(2), 222-223. DOI: 10.1177/0956797609359333
- October 9, 2011
- 09:25 AM
- 581 views
Prospective Control I: The Outfielder Problem
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
A couple of posts ago I raised the distinction between prediction and prospective control. I was trying to make the point that, if you are coupled to the right information, you don't need to be mentally simulating what's happening so you can run this simulation ahead and predict what's coming up. Prediction of this sort is invoked by representational cognitive scientists to cope with things like delays in the nervous system (e.g. Changizi's 'perceiving-the-present' framework). It's a risky busin........ Read more »
McBeath MK, Shaffer DM, & Kaiser MK. (1995) How baseball outfielders determine where to run to catch fly balls. Science (New York, N.Y.), 268(5210), 569-73. PMID: 7725104
Fink, P., Foo, P., & Warren, W. (2009) Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem. Journal of Vision, 9(13), 14-14. DOI: 10.1167/9.13.14
- September 23, 2011
- 10:54 AM
- 548 views
Embodied solutions to neural delays: Information and Network Motifs
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
One of the bugbears of direct perception is the fact of neural delays. The transmission of signals through the nervous system takes time, and this means that there is a lag between something happening (at, say, the retina) and that event having consequences in cortex, let alone behaviour. In control theory terms, delays in a system can lead to instability in that system's behaviour as you are forced to make corrections that are then incorrect and must themselves be corrected. It's typically sugg........ Read more »
Montagne, G., Durey, A., Bootsma, R., & Laurent, M. (1999) Movement reversals in ball catching. Experimental Brain Research, 129(1), 87-92. DOI: 10.1007/s002210050939
Vicente, R., Gollo, L., Mirasso, C., Fischer, I., & Pipa, G. (2008) Dynamical relaying can yield zero time lag neuronal synchrony despite long conduction delays. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(44), 17157-17162. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809353105
- September 13, 2011
- 07:39 AM
- 988 views
Coordination dynamics and relative speed
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
The Bingham model of coordinated rhythmic movement makes three predictions. First, it predicts that movement stability is a function of perceptual ability, and we confirmed this in two ways (by showing how people can move stably at non-0° with transformed visual feedback (Wilson et al, 2005) and by showing that perceptual learning of 90° led to improved movement stability without practice at the movement task; Wilson et al, 2010). This prediction is also supported by recent work by Kovac........ Read more »
de Rugy, A., Oullier, O., & Temprado, J. (2007) Stability of rhythmic visuo-motor tracking does not depend on relative velocity. Experimental Brain Research, 184(2), 269-273. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-007-1180-0
Snapp-Childs, W., Wilson, A. D., & Bingham, G. P. (2011) The stability of rhythmic movement coordination depends on relative speed: the Bingham model supported. Experimental Brain Research. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-011-2874-x
- August 23, 2011
- 05:54 AM
- 984 views
There's More Than One Way to Rhythmically Move a Lobster
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
I'm slowly working my way through Olaf Sporn's excellent book, Networks of the Mind. The purpose of this book is to introduce neuroscientists to network theory, and vice versa; I'm eavesdropping and tooling up on both. It's slow going only because it's pretty much all new territory to me, but I'm seeing a lot of potential in the overall approach to the brain, and this just confirms for me that Sporns understands what he does pretty deeply.
Anyway, a while back, Bruce Hood tweeted the........ Read more »
Gonzalez Castro LN, Monsen CB, & Smith MA. (2011) The binding of learning to action in motor adaptation. PLoS computational biology, 7(6). PMID: 21731476
Prinz, A., Bucher, D., & Marder, E. (2004) Similar network activity from disparate circuit parameters. Nature Neuroscience, 7(12), 1345-1352. DOI: 10.1038/nn1352
Wolpert, D., Miall, R., & Kawato, M. (1998) Internal models in the cerebellum. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(9), 338-347. DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613(98)01221-2
- August 21, 2011
- 02:57 PM
- 847 views
Mirrors are Literally Windows to Another World
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
The other day, psychologist Tom Hartley tweeted "Your reflection is always half the size of the real thing - no matter how far from mirror. Hard to believe but true." and linked to this post in which someone demonstrates this effect. I had never quite thought about it, but realised it was of course always true: the mirror is at half the distance specified in the reflection. Then I read this post linked from the original, which reviewed an article by Lawson et al (2007) describing how people mis........ Read more »
Gibson, J. (1950) The Perception of Visual Surfaces. The American Journal of Psychology, 63(3), 367. DOI: 10.2307/1418003
Lawson, R., Bertamini, M., & Liu, D. (2007) Overestimation of the projected size of objects on the surface of mirrors and windows. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33(5), 1027-1044. DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.33.5.1027
- July 19, 2011
- 06:47 AM
- 864 views
Lissajous feedback and coordination stability
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
Understanding the perceptual information you provide people in a task is a critical element of the perception-action analysis. Last time I talked about the new form of coordination feedback I developed to allow us to train coordinated rhythmic movements without perturbing the task dynamic. Prior to this, the most common form of augmented feedback was the Lissajous plot - these are the result of plotting the displacements of two harmonic oscillators against one another, and the unique shape ........ Read more »
Kovacs, A., Buchanan, J., & Shea, C. (2009) Bimanual 1:1 with 90° continuous relative phase: difficult or easy!. Experimental Brain Research, 193(1), 129-136. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-008-1676-2
Kovacs, A., Buchanan, J., & Shea, C. (2009) Using scanning trials to assess intrinsic coordination dynamics. Neuroscience Letters, 455(3), 162-167. DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2009.02.046
Kovacs, A., & Shea, C. (2010) Amplitude differences, spatial assimilation, and integrated feedback in bimanual coordination. Experimental Brain Research, 202(2), 519-525. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-009-2154-1
- July 12, 2011
- 06:40 AM
- 1,014 views
Visual feedback for training novel coordinations
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
The key feature of coordinated rhythmic movements is that not all coordinations are stable. Most other rhythms can be learned, however, which is why we can have jazz drumming. People have been training participants to perform novel coordinations (especially 90°, the least stable rhythm without training) for years now, and have been asking all the standard learning questions - how long does learning take? Does it transfer to other coordinations? The first real studies on learning were by Ke........ Read more »
Wilson, A., Snapp-Childs, W., Coats, R., & Bingham, G. (2010) Learning a coordinated rhythmic movement with task-appropriate coordination feedback. Experimental Brain Research, 205(4), 513-520. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-010-2388-y
- July 6, 2011
- 09:14 AM
- 567 views
Rates of learning and the dynamic pattern approach
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
One of the interesting features of coordinated rhythmic movement is that people start out with a particular pattern to their performance - there is pre-existing structure to our attempts to coordinate these movements. This structure affects our ability to learn new coordinations, and the pattern of the effects reveals a lot about the cause of this pre-existing structure. However, the literature is split into two incompatible accounts of learning, and trying to fix this is part of my ongoing........ Read more »
Fontaine, R., Lee, T., & Swinnen, S. (1997) Learning a new bimanual coordination pattern: Reciprocal influences of intrinsic and to-be-learned patterns. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 51(1), 1-9. DOI: 10.1037/1196-1961.51.1.1
Kostrubiec, V., & Zanone, P. (2002) Memory dynamics: distance between the new task and existing behavioural patterns affects learning and interference in bimanual coordination in humans. Neuroscience Letters, 331(3), 193-197. DOI: 10.1016/S0304-3940(02)00878-9
Wenderoth N, Bock O, & Krohn R. (2002) Learning a new bimanual coordination pattern is influenced by existing attractors. Motor control, 6(2), 166-82. PMID: 12122225
- June 28, 2011
- 11:39 AM
- 796 views
Task Specific Devices and the Perceptual Bottleneck
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
I've been wanting to blog this paper, Bingham (1988; download link), for some time, and I've had the excuse to be reading it this week as I develop a grant. There's a lot here, and many of these brief points are worth posts in and of themselves. My goal here was to create a walk through of the paper, and I hope to dive into some of these issues in more detail.This paper comes from Geoff Bingham, my PhD advisor at IU. And, like most of the good things Geoff has taught me over the years, this pape........ Read more »
Bingham, G. (1988) Task-specific devices and the perceptual bottleneck☆. Human Movement Science, 7(2-4), 225-264. DOI: 10.1016/0167-9457(88)90013-9
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