Is Autism a Deficit in Invariance Detection?

If ASD is a problem detecting invariants, the world would remain a 'blooming buzzing confusion' and lead to the behaviours we see in children with ASD, claims a new paper. 

A new paper in Frontiers in Psychology (Hellendoorn, Wijnroks & Leseman, 2015) has proposed that autistic spectrum disorders might be the developmental consequence of a low level, domain general perceptual deficit, specifically the detection of invariants. They explicitly ground this hypothesis in Gibson's ecological approach and theories of embodied cognition that emphasise the key role perception plays in behaviour. This seemed like something I should evaluate, so thanks to Jon Brock for sending this my way on Twitter.

While I am very sympathetic to the basic idea, this particular implementation is too flawed to get off the ground. The authors make a critical conceptual confusion. They mix up invariant features of the world with invariant features of perceptual arrays that might serve as information for the world, and this stops the paper in it's tracks. I think an interesting exercise might be to fix this problem and then simply repeat the paper with the more careful grounding to see where you end up. 

In this post I've briefly reviewed the claims in the order in which they came up in the paper. I've focused my attention on the central hypothesis about invariant detection because that underpins everything else. I've also briefly summarised some of the cited evidence and implications as laid out by the authors, and commented on any issues I saw. This bit is briefer, because my knowledge of the specifics of ASD are limited. I am also considering a comment to Frontiers on this paper, so feedback on this welcome. If you want in on a comment or reworking of the paper, let me know!

Embodying Culture: My ongoing conversation with Soliman & Glenberg

Would a formal reply make me this guy?

I've been exchanging views with Art Glenberg and his colleagues about a paper he published recently in Frontiers. I reviewed it, had reservations but eventually let it through, then published my concerns as a commentary on the original paper. Soliman and Glenberg (2014; S&G) then replied to my reply which I didn't know about until I noticed the commentary had a citation in my Google Scholar profile. 

I could simply publish a reply to their reply, but to be honest I'm not sure it's worth it; it feels a little too much like arguing on the internet. I'll link to this in the comments section of the Frontiers page, however, and if people think it's worth the DOI then I'll write this reply up as a formal submission. I'd be interested to hear from you all on this.

The short version of my reply is that in the process of dodging my criticism they concede it applies to them, and they swerve into a literature that doesn't help. I do think they've applied some serious and valuable consideration to the details of their proposal, though, so I think this has been a useful process.

Connecting the conceptual dots in embodied cognition

UPDATE 9 June 2015: We published this critique. 

Around about the time we published our embodied cognition paper, we also reviewed a paper for that research topic, which happened to be an example of the conceptualisation hypothesis  style of 'embodied' cognition we aren't all that impressed by.

We had serious reservations about the paper (detailed below) and did not think it should be published. After several rounds of trying and failing to get the authors to acknowledge the problem, we withdrew from the review and the editor, Dermot Lynott then decided to side with the other reviewers (who had identified the same problem we had but who didn't think it was a fatal flaw). The paper (Dijkstra, Eerland, Zijlmans & Post, 2012) was therefore published.

A while back I drafted a commentary laying out the problems with this paper; the full text is here. The motivation for a comment was the same as for the one I wrote for Soliman et al (2014); this style of embodiment does not tackle the hard questions about mechanism that are crucial for an embodied account and this is a big problem. I cannot decide if the commentary is worth publishing; this paper is not that important, although it is a good example of this major issue for 'grounded' embodied cognition. Any thoughts on this would be welcome.

Does action scaling predict 'the embodiment of culture'? (No.)

I recently reviewed a paper for Frontiers by Arthur Glenberg and colleagues called 'Sensory motor mechanisms unify psychology: the embodiment of culture' (Soliman, Gibson & Glenberg, 2014). This is part of an ongoing research topic on embodied cognition run by Guy Dove. Once the paper had been published, I took the opportunity to write up my main remaining problem with the paper as a commentary piece (Wilson, 2014) and I'd like to review that here (and also please see my comment at the end about my role here as reviewer). Go download the paper, though, I worked hard to produce a focused critique in the 1000 word limit and I think it went well.

Glenberg and colleagues are trying to develop a broad embodied framework that can encompass both traditional hunting grounds like perception and action but also 'higher order' cognition like social cognition and culture. I admire the effort but to my mind this is grounded cognition, not embodied and so this is not an approach I'd endorse. I like to review papers like this though because it's healthy to have an adversarial reviewer who tries not to be evil (I promise!), and because I also like to keep myself informed about the work I'm rejecting so that I don't start fighting straw men.

'Embodied Cognition Is Not What You Think It Is' - the paper!

Whoops, we did it again - a paper based on the blog! This time we are in press at Frontiers in Psychology, in a Research Topic on embodied cognition, with a paper we somehow got away with calling 'Embodied Cognition is Not What You Think It Is'. 

This paper draws from a lot of posts on the blog on embodied cognition, perception-action and language. We have used this opportunity to tackle some key issues head on, and we like this paper a lot :) We cover all the important issues and we set up what we think is the way forwards for embodied cognitive science. In addition, it sets up the ground work that we want to build on with our own Research Topic on Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. We've laid out what we think is the task facing the brain; this is what the brain is engaging with, and so this is what we think neuroscience needs to work with in order to understand what the brain is doing.

It's the kind of paper that will either land with a splash or vanish without trace. We want it to make some serious waves, and we're hoping that we can encourage people to publish free Commentaries on it at Frontiers, to challenge us or pick up our challenges, and, most fun for all, to come work with us to take all this forwards! We want this to be the basis of an empirical research programme and we want you all to work with us on it :) At the very least, feel free to pepper us with questions; this paper is the start of something for us, not the end and we're interested in the response to this paper to frame the next step.

Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience - A Frontiers Research Topic

UPDATE: This topic is now live! We welcome all and any submissions that fit the remit. Please email Andrew if you are interested and I will add you to the contributors list, or you can also simply contribute via the Frontiers page. 

A couple of years ago, Sabrina and I were chatting about the brain and running into the problem that we just don't know enough about how it works. We realised that what we needed to do was host a conference, invite some useful people, and pick their brains for a few days. 

We've had two goes at funding such a conference; we've had a lot of interest from the academics we've contacted but no luck convincing anyone to give us any money. Over the process, however, we got Tony Chemero (author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science) involved, and he recommended Louise Barrett to us (that's how we came across her excellent book). The four of us have been scheming for a while to try and make this a reality, and two things have developed.

First, we are going to host a workshop on Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience, hopefully at the Lorentz Centre in the Netherlands. Before that can really be worth doing, however, we've realised we need a little more momentum, so we've advanced our plans and are about to announce a Research Topic at Frontiers in Psychology. We'd like to invite all interested parties to play.

The goal is simple: we want this to be a virtual conference, in effect, where people pose problems and offer solutions to the problem of developing a radical (non-representational) embodied cognitive neuroscience. We want real collaborations to come out of this, so we want people coming looking for ways to help and be helped. And we want to create a resource that we can point to to shape discussions at future workshops. 

What we need from you
I've pasted the text of the call we will run below. If you are interested in submitting something to  this, send us your name, affiliation and email address (either in the comments below or email us, psychscientists@gmail.com). At this point, this commits you to nothing; we just need a decent length list of people to initially invite to submit, to indicate that there is going to be enough interest. If you change your mind later there's no problem.

Any thoughts on the call, let us know. We all like that this call is short, direct and to the point; too many of these research topic calls are inflated by too much detail. But if there's any flags, let us and know.

If you can help us by promoting  this post on social media, that would also be excellent. We are looking to cast a wide net.