Does Interface Theory Have Consequences for the Ecological Approach?

I've been working on a commentary about interface theory (Hoffman, Singh & Prakash, 2015) which I have previously blogged about here. I'm still interested because it is, in part, a fairly direct shot at the ecological approach and I'm always keen to break those if I can. My piece stalled out, though, so I thought I'd spend some time here thinking out loud about the argument that stalled and another critique that came up as I re-read the paper.

To unbury the lede I just finished writing: the primary thing Hoffman et al get wrong about Gibson is that they think he wanted his theory to produce veridical perceptions, not simply adaptive ones. Gibson actually wanted adaptive perceptions, but found a way in which they were also veridical. This emphasis matters; Gibson does not stand or fall on issues of veridicality. In addition, every one of Hoffman et al's big swings apply only to inferential, constructivist theories of perception; Gibson is immune on these grounds as well. All Hoffman et al have done is redraw the terrain inferential theories have to traverse, and it will be interesting to see if anyone takes the bait. But the major argument simply remains, is perception inferential or ecological, and may the best data set win.

Framing the Debate

In 2014 we published a book chapter with Eric Charles in which we argued that the most important thing psychology and neuroscience needed from people like us was a new language in which to talk about the problems we are trying to solve. Our Ecological Representations paper is part of this, and we have a much larger paper in development laying out the more complete set of conceptual tools needed to do ecological psychology across a wider range of problems.

One reason why this is important is a simple fact; we are asking psychology to change and it is up to us to clearly articulate what we want it to change into, or else nothing can happen. A related reason is that without a clear framework, we can't reformulate the questions in a useful way and we're left stuck because we can't explain something like 'theory of mind' because the actual solution is that ToM doesn't exist or need explaining. Ecological neuroscience, for example, will look very different to cognitive neuroscience.

A final reason is that the language in which psychology frames it's understanding of behaviour drives popular understanding of behaviour too. I recently came across my favourite example of this in a tweet by Alice Dreger;

My dominant eye is very blurry so my left eye has come online (it rarely does) and now I'm seeing 3D. 3D is SO WEIRD. How do you stand it?

— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) July 19, 2016

Dreger, for some reason, spends most of her life only using her right eye, even though her left is perfectly functional. She blogged about it here. Every now and again, something makes her left eye kick in and she suddenly has stereo vision.

What caught my eye here is her description of her experience is grounded in the myth that you need two eyes in order to perceive in 3D (I bug my students about this in class every year too). The myth is based in the standard image-based analysis of vision which I'll lay out below; but the point I want to make here is that people still describe their experience of monocular vision as 'not being able to see 3D/depth' even though this is inarguably, demonstrably not what is happening in their visual experience. It's like blind echolocators talking about how the sound creates 'an image in their minds'; this is just not the case, but this is the language psychology has provided them for talking about the perceived experience of spatial layout. What fascinates me is that it's trivial to demonstrate that monocular vision allows for 3D perception, but everyone lets the framing override their own experience. This, to me, is a big part of why our work right now is important - we will never make progress until we can reframe the debate.

Replication will not save psychology

"Replication is our only hope." "No. There is another"

Psychology is big into replication these days. A lot of people think that a major problem with the field is that many important results have not been replicated, and that this is in part because journals don't like to publish replications (not original or sexy enough). 

I'm all for replication; it's part of good science. But I've never been that into the whole 'replication movement' that's kicking around, and the reason crystallised for me during a 4am baby feed: 

Being able to replicate a study is an effect, not a cause of good scientific practice. So the emphasis on replication as a goal has the whole thing backwards. We should actually be focusing on improving the experiments we run in the first place. If we run better experiments, the replicability will take care of itself. 

Some Ground Rules for a Theory of Psychology

Add psychology to the list

A fairly common response to our theory post was 'here's my theory, which is designed to replace and fix all the others'. However, it's more a symptom of the problem I was discussing than a solution for everyone to have their own entirely separate theory which doesn't talk to any other work in the field (see above). One of my personal goals in science is to not be that guy. I want to see cognitive science become more integrated, not more fragmented. We have also been asked, however, and quite sensibly, what we think the solution to our problem is. The question then is how to propose a theoretical approach for psychology and cognitive science where we don't just reinvent the wheel.

Sabrina and I have been working on this for, well, the entire blog. It has been a place for our "brave attempt to think out loud about theories of psychology until we get some" since day one; we've been identifying problems but, just as importantly, solutions the whole time. The theory post identified the big picture problem we see in psychology; time to lay out some solutions.

Step one is to present a map of the blog, organised thematically to guide new readers to work we've already done here. This should also help map out the gaps in the approach, so we can focus on things to do next; feel free to point us to problems we can't yet address! (And yes, we know about episodic memory and language - we're working on it.) This post is not a comprehensive summary of past work - it's a map for you to use to find what we've done so far.

To summarise: in essence, and some minor details aside, we are advocating for Chemero's (2009) radical embodied cognitive science, with the addition of some elements he was missing (network science & task specific devices). Cognition is embodied, extended and held together by the direct perception of affordances and events; the result is a complex, nonlinear dynamical system that must be analysed as such. The brain is not the sole source of our behaviour, nor is it representing the world; it clearly plays a critical role in this system, though, and we propose that we'll need the tools of network science to describe what it's actually up to (Sporns, 2010). Methodologically, we must carefully characterise the task, the resources available to solve the task (which include brain, body and environment) and the information these resources create which can sustain the formation and control of an embodied solution. This method is Bingham's (1988) task specific device approach (the main piece Chemero was missing, I think).This approach applies to all and any behaviour you want to explain, including the hard stuff like episodic memory and language.

Critically, this approach, while new (and uncommon in insisting on a role for Gibson's ecological approach) isn't just something we invented: all these elements are active parts of modern cognitive science. The only new part is bringing it all under one roof, with the goal of getting on and getting some decent normal science under our belts.

Here's what we've covered so far. If you want more details on any point, click on the links!

Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Psychology has a problem. We have no core theory to guide our research; no analogue to the theories of evolution or relativity. When particle physicists recently found that some neutrinos had apparently travelled faster than light, it never actually occurred to them that this is what had happened. On the basis of the extraordinarily well supported theory of relativity, everyone went 'huh, that's weird - I wonder what we did wrong?', and proceeded to use that theory to generate hypotheses they could then test. It would take a lot of fast neutrinos to disprove relativity.

Psychology, though, when faced with an empirical result that violates the laws of physics, can't find any principled reason to reject the result and instead spends a lot of time squabbling about whether Bem's result might possibly be true because 'quantum'. Worse, when people do replicate the experiment and fail to support the original result, they can't get their 'null result' published. It's a bit embarrassing, really.

One of the problems of having no core theory is that you can't simply rule things out as options. Psychologists almost all consider this a strength: we can pick and choose from a variety of mechanisms which enables us to cope with our messy and erratic subject matter. Can't imagine how perception can explain a result? Just hypothesise a mental representation to fill the gap. After all, no single theory is going to account for the opportunistic and idiosyncratic behaviour of people, so why limit ourselves? We tried that with behaviourism, and it got us nowhere. Let's stay flexible.

Embodied cognition is not what you think it is

The most exciting thing in cognitive science right now is the theory that cognition is embodied. It is, in fact one of the things interested lay people know about cognitive science, thanks in part to a lot of high profile experiments that claim to show how cognition can be influenced and biased by states of the body, or that cognitive states can affect states of the body in ways that suggest abstract metaphors and concepts are grounded in the behaviour of the body. A recent blog post at Scientific American covers this ground quite nicely (although the large picture of Noam "not an embodied cognitive scientist" Chomsky hints that someone didn't actually read the piece).

The problem, however, is that this is not really what embodied cognition is about. Embodiment is not the weak claim that you can see small effects of the behaviour of the body in our mental representations of the world. Embodiment is the radical hypothesis that the brain is not the sole resource we have available to us to solve problems. Our bodies, and the meaning-filled perception of the world they allow, do much of the work required to achieve our goals, and this simple fact changes utterly what our theories of 'cognition' will look like.

Robots, Representation, & Dynamical Systems

When cognitive science tries to explain a given behaviour, it typically looks in one of two places for it's explanation. Some people go looking in the brain for the representation that encodes the solution to the task; these people typically treat the brain as the source of the observed structure in behaviour. Some of us, however, go looking in perception for the necessary access to the properties of the world that enable us to couple our resources to those in the environment. We consider the origin of behaviour to be the dynamical system formed by this coupling; the system provides a set of constraints and behaviour emerges as the constrained system works over time.

It's sometimes a little hard to tease these suggestions apart: after all, they  typically both predict that we succeed at the task at hand. When studying people, the best way to try and separate these two suggestions out is to examine how we succeed. For instance, in catching a fly ball, the brain-based prediction solution says we will run in a direct line to where we think the ball will land; the perception-based coupling solution suggests we will run along curved paths as we attempt to move so as to produce the information required. In this case, data supports the latter hypothesis, but it's not always that easy.

Sometimes, you've just got to start from scratch and build yourself a robot.

Review: Louise Barrett's "Beyond the Brain"

There are a lot of books about embodied cognition. Like psychology itself, the idea that cognition might not all be in the head has fractured off into about 5 distinct flavours, most of them quite annoying and pointless.There are also quite a few books about the thesis of the 'extended mind' (Clark & Chalmers, 1998) ; the idea that cognition quite literally extends into our bodies and environments, in terms of the tools we use and the objects we interact with. It's getting quite hard to find a book on these topics that isn't a) simply rehashing old ground or b) trying to come up with it's own distinct flavour of embodied, extended cognition that fixes some problem of everyone else's. I find this sort of fracturing and endless bickering quite distracting and troublesome, for reasons best expressed by xkcd. I also agree with Tony Chemero, that much of this work is still, sometimes deep down, representational. I think this is because they fail to embrace a sufficiently useful theory of information, such as that proposed by Gibson. So I often find myself reading these books finding nothing new and far too much that's depressing.

Louise Barrett's book, "Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds" is, refreshingly, not like this at all. Barrett is a psychologist who studies animal cognition and behaviour, and her book does a lot of things very, very well. I'm not planning on a chapter by chapter book club on this, although I may at some point; Eric Charles has posted a few thoughts on the book as well, here, here, here, and here. To cut to the chase: if you are new to the area of embodied cognition, read this book. If you're familiar with the literature but want a clear, well-structured presentation of many of the key ideas, then read this book. If you're bored with the same old examples and want some new, perhaps more convincing examples of embodied cognition in action, read this book. And if you have heard some of the arguments but still think behaviour really comes from the computational activity of our complex brains, then, for the love of science, read this book.

Perception, Action & Dynamical Systems

Over Easter I visited the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience at Aarhus University in Denmark, courtesy of the Interacting Minds group. I gave a talk, got the tour, and met some of the faculty and students - some interesting opportunities for future collaborations, I hope - thanks for the hospitality!

I wanted to lay out the basics of the talk I gave. I took the opportunity to present some ideas that have been developing as I work on this blog, reading Chemero and working on coordination experiments. There is a core of people in Aarhus interested in things ecological, as well as dynamical systems, so it was a good audience to try these ideas out and they seemed to go over well. This is also the sketch of a paper Sabrina and I are going to work on over the summer.

The take home message of the talk was simple - dynamical systems is the right kind of mindset for cognitive science, but it is not a theory of behaviour. Dynamics merely provides the right kind of modelling tools - the form of the model must be based on hypotheses about the specific kind of dynamical systems we are or else they are merely an exercise in data-fitting. Ecological psychology is the right theory, and the Bingham model of coordinated rhythmic movement is currently the only example of a genuinely perception-action dynamical systems model. My thoughts here are largely from my response to Chapter 4 of Chemero (on 'the dynamical stance') and Chapter 5, his initial attempt to use dynamics to serve as a guide to discovery which I think fails and which Chemero then replaces with ecological psychology. The description of Bingham's model comes from here.

It's not just us, honest

I need to put together posts on Heft and a couple of other points, but we've been noticing more and more examples of people expressing the same worry we have - that psychology is no longer a field with theories, merely phenomena. A couple of links that came our way this week:

Internal representation or behavioural dynamics?

More on Gibson later, but I wanted to get to this today. Yesterday I saw a talk about eye tracking, and how people control smooth pursuit movements (the tracking movements your eyes can make when you’re following something continuously). Tracking performance is a quandary for cognitive folks, because we are often very good at it. For instance, if you ask people to track a moving stimulus and record their eye movements, they will successfully foveate the target with almost no lag or erratic need to play catch up (foveating means using the fovea, the densely packed high resolution region on the retina we rely on for precise visual perception). The lack of ‘catch-up’ is the interesting bit, and cognitive psychology thinks that it is evidence of prediction by the system. Prediction requires a predictor, which for cognitive psychology is always a representation.

The main thing I learned from this talk is this: I am a rampant ego-maniac who is convinced I am right and other people are wrong, but at least I am capable of entertaining the idea that there is another way to conceive of the task. This speaker (and at least one other person in the room) was completely unaware that their perspective entailed assumptions about the underlying mechanism and simply couldn’t conceive of another way to describe the task: for them, prediction was clearly required and therefore internal representation was clearly required.