Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists

The most influential part of this book is the theory of affordances . We still argue a lot about what these are and how they work, because t...

After a book length set of preliminaries, we are finally getting to the meat of the positive case the ecological approach has to make. That ...

I just reviewed the affordance properties that produce the spatial structure in reach-to-grasp actions , and there's an unquestioned ass...

In the last post , I reviewed the basic form of the reach-to-grasp task and the basic spatial and temporal structure of the resulting reach-...

Movements are never the same twice, even when you are trying to do that same thing over and over. Variability is an inescapable fact of tryi...

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 meantim...

We're in the home stretch of working through how direct perception is, at least, an option, and how the ecological approach in particula...

The first post in this series laid out the rules for what makes a theory of perception direct or indirect . In order to avoid having to requ...

In the previous post , I laid out the basic distinction between direct and indirect theories of perception. The basic issue is how to get to...

This lecture is a brief history of the common assumptions made in theories of perception about how things 'over there' can cause us...

One of the more enduring arguments in ecological psychology is about the best way to formally describe affordances. The two basic approaches...

I study throwing for two basic reasons. One, it is intrinsically fascinating and I want to know how it works. Second, it's become a rich...

One common critique of the ecological approach is how can we use perception to explain behaviour that is organised with respect to things in...

Throwing a projectile in order to hit a target requires you to produce one lot of the set of release parameters that result in a hit; releas...

The size-weight illusion (SWI) occurs when people are asked to judge the weights of two different sized but identically weighted objects. Th...

Affordances are on my mind right now as I develop the throwing research programme, and a major commitment of that work is that affordances a...

I had a conversation with Eric Brymer  ( @Ericbrymer ) a few weeks ago. Eric is a Reader at Leeds Beckett and is an ecologically minded psy...

Turvey, Shaw, Reed and Mace (1981) laid out an ontology of affordances; a formal account of the kind of things they are. They described them...

I recently posted about relational accounts of affordances  and how one way to summarise my objections to them is that they cannot support m...

The fundamental question in psychology boils down to "why did that person do that thing they just did?". Welcome to my new favour...