Task Dynamics And The Information They Create

Over the next weeks I want to turn my attention to a detailed account of the process by which you go about studying affordances (formalised as task dynamics) and the perception of affordances (via the kinematic consequences of those task dynamics) using throwing for maximum distances and for accuracy as the task. This post will introduce the basic research programme. Future posts will work through papers from my colleagues Qin Zhu & Geoff Bingham in order (I've done a couple already), as well as work from the animal literature because I want to find ways to use the analyses we're developing to answer questions about throwing and weight perception there.

These posts will do a few things. First, it's important to be as clear as possible about what affordances are, how we might possibly perceive them and how we can do the relevant science within the ecological approach to answer those two questions. Sabrina is developing ways to apply these methodological principles to the study of language, and we have both been working on the issue of information and how it comes to have meaning for us. Being clear about how this all unfolds in the perception-action literature is vital, because this is the foundation for what comes next. Second, I'm working on some throwing data right now and I need to work through the key papers in detail anyway. Third, I'm going to be developing an undergraduate perception-action class for 2014, and this will help me develop course material by laying out the form of the analysis and getting feedback on how well it's coming across. One of my goals is to look at all my collated and edited notes and realise I've accidentally written a text book :)

I'm going to talk about throwing because it's utterly fascinating. It's a complex task but it's one centred around a core dynamic (that of projectile motion) that physics has a pretty good handle on. This is letting us run detailed simulations of the task to identify the affordance structure of the task and see how throwers are operating with respect to those. Throwing entails perception of object and target affordances and the coordination of multiple body segments into precisely timed actions controlled by that perception. It also connects to all kinds of things in our evolutionary history (including, possibly, the origins of spoken language in the form we know) and our psychology (including the size-weight illusion and issues of the psychologist's fallacy). It's close to being that grail of psychology, something only humans do (other animals throw but rarely if ever for the kinds of distances and accuracy we can manage with ease). And most of all, it is endlessly interesting. The deeper I get into this, the cooler it gets. 

An Ecological Approach to Language

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 usually assume that catching a fly ball and talking about catching fly balls are two different kinds of thing. I reject this assumption (it is just an assumption) and I am going to treat language use as the same kind of thing as other examples of embodied cognition. Treating language as just another instance of embodied cognition allows me to import the lessons learned from perception-action type tasks and apply these to language tasks. This will lead to very different questions about language use than are typical in the literature. The next post will describe what I mean by this in some detail.

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.