I've spent the past few months getting a new paper to the 'complete first draft' stage (you can find a copy here in the meantime; it's still got some work to do though). It's about affordances, using targeted long-distance throwing as the task, and it's my first dip into the world of the uncontrolled manifold. I collected this data over five years ago, and it's been deeply satisfying to actually use it after all this time.
Part of what's taken so long is that I've had to learn the details of the uncontrolled manifold analysis. I blogged some about it here and here but this was the year I finally had the time and data to actually get into the maths. I still really like it as an approach to analysing human movement, but learning the details and trying to figure out how to get affordances into it has raised a lot of interesting questions about how it gets used right now and what this all implies for how we think movement is controlled. I'm raising a bunch of these issues in the paper but I wanted to sketch some out here for comment.
Broadly (and this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone really) I've realised that UCM is only a method, not a theory, and it's therefore not able to serve as a 'guide to discovery' about movement control. However, it's being used as if it can, and to be honest I was quite shocked at how carelessly it's being used in the literature.
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