What are the units that perception measures the world in? Firestone vs Proffitt

Perception is an act of measurement, and, like all acts of measurement, it needs a scale in order to be useful. Think about placing something on your kitchen scales; all that actually happens is that the object presses on the scale and the scale registers that something has changed by some amount in response (the location of a tray, for example). In order to know what that change means, the change is presented to us on a calibrated scale (by moving a needle around to point at some number, for example). The needle always moves the same amount for a given weight but the resulting number can vary (you might have an imperial rather than metric kitchen scale, for example). Without the scale, you can say that one thing is heavier than another by noting that it moves the scale more (this is an ordinal evaluation) but you need the scale in order to say what the weight difference is (the metric evaluation).

Visual perception measures the world in terms of angles; objects subtend a certain number of visual angles that depends on their size, distance, etc. Your thumbnail held at arm's length is about 1° of visual angle. You can get ordinal information directly from angles (the fact that one thing is closer/bigger/etc) but you need a scale to get the metric information required to use vision to control action. For example, you need to perceive how big something actually is in useful units in order to scale your hand size appropriately when grasping it; relative size doesn't help. One of the fundamental questions in (visual) perception research is, therefore, what are the metric units that the perceptual systems use to scale their measurements?

Dennis Proffitt has been studying this question for a long time and is in favour of task-specific, body-scaled units. His evidence comes from studies in which people perceive their environments differently as a function of their ability to act on that environment. Probably the most well-known example is the study that showed people judge hills to be steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). The idea is that the backpack will make traversing that hill more difficult, and when the visual system measures the slope, it scales its measurement in line with this perceived effort. The hypothesis is that this is functional; it's a feature of the visual system that helps us plan appropriate actions. 

Perspectives on Psychological Science recently hosted a point-counterpoint debate on this topic. Firestone (2013) reviewed the literature on this type of action-scaling in perception and concluded that not only do the data not really support Proffitt's account, but that this account couldn't work even in principle. Proffitt (2013) rebutted Firestone's arguments and defended his view. I'm interested in this because Proffitt is at least a little ecological, and the basic idea he defends is one I would defend as well (although not in the form that he proposes). So who won?

There's More to Us Than Our Brains - So What Does The Brain Do?

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 imaging has shown us the activity of mental representations? Clearly, the brain is the source of all behavior! Popular science writing on psychology is all cognitive and representational; most of the psychology blogging I come across is neuroscientific. What else could it be?

I've certainly spent a lot of time waving the flag against the infiltration of neuro-talk into places it doesn't yet belong; but to be honest, as I get older, I've begun to worry that I'm trying to be 'fair and balanced' in the sense Fox News is fair and balanced: relentlessly playing up one side to offset a perceived imbalance elsewhere. What I actually want to do is be actually fair and balanced: I want my own discussions about these issues to be internally balanced and coherent, giving credit where credit is actually due. I want to start teasing apart a few issues I've conflated over the years, so that my strong concerns about the relevance of fMRI  and cognitive neuroscience work stop getting swallowed up in a general dismissal of the brain's role in our lives. The brain is clearly interesting, but it's not representing, and if not that, what is it doing?

This post is therefore a first swing at integrating a lot of the things I've been blogging about for a while and doing so in a way that leaves a sensible role for the brain. I'm going to need some neuroscientists to talk to, though; I'd appreciate it if people could spread the word on this a little, because there are just some things I want to go a few rounds on with people who know what they're talking about. 

Task Specific Devices and the Perceptual Bottleneck

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 paper is a gift that keeps giving as I come to grips with what's in it. What it does is lay out a methodological problem (the massive redundancy and complexity of the human action system), proposes a solution (studying task-specific devices) and firmly embeds the idea that these devices are intrinsically perception-action devices (by discussing the so-called perceptual bottleneck). In effect, it lays out a way to be a productive scientist studying a hugely complex system without shying away from the complexity. This paper blew my fragile little mind when I first read it, and I'm still pulling good ideas from it today.

This paper is what I think the science of perception-action should look like. It's the piece I think Chemero (2009) is missing for his radical embodied cognitive science, and it contains (oddly without a lot of specific references) all the key ideas that have come up on this blog in a single coherent frame work (e.g. Gibson & specification; Turvey et al on the symmetry principle). Frankly, if you want to study perception-action systems from a dynamical systems perspective, this is what you have to acknowledge is the lay of the land and these are the beginnings of the tool kit you'll need.

Perceiving long distances in action scaled units

I have so many things I need to write up just now, but it's been a struggle finding the time. I hope to post on Chemero's last chapter, task-specific devices, calibration and some new coordination data soon. In the meantime, I thought I'd take advantage of the fact that I'm reading some new articles on an interesting topic, and I wanted to organise some thoughts and see if anyone had any comments!

Perception is action-scaled

Traditional theories of perception claim that we perceive the world in generic terms, and must transform that perception into a task relevant variable after picking the information up. The ecological suggestion is that the act of perception itself is directly scaled in action-relevant units, and that this perception will therefore be task-specific. In order to directly perceive action relevant properties (i.e. affordances) perception must be smart (think of the analogy of the polar planimeter).

We are capable of perceiving the distance of things in the world; but we don't perceive them as being '6m away'. Instead, the system is interested in how to reach for an object, so you need to calibrate your perception of distance in terms of, say, arm length units. Calibration is the process of placing a measurement on a scale, and the ecological approach has been interested in action relevant scales such as arm lengths (for reaching; Mon-Williams & Bingham, 2007) and leg lengths (for stair climbing; e.g. Warren, 1984). One of Chemero's points is relevant here; body scale is probably only a proxy measure for ability to perform the action and the real action scale the system is using (the effectivity) will be more complicated. But body scale is mostly where the field is at right now.