Establishing the Role of Perception in Coordination: Proprioception and Action Measures

Other coordination posts are here.

The dynamic pattern hypothesis had led to some predictions which, when tested, turned out not to be true. Instead, it seemed that the way in which we perceive relative phase (i.e. the coordination between two things) was the limiting factor. Visual judgments, in the absence of the need to produce an action, produced results that mirrored the movement stability data.

There were two immediate objections to these results, which we addressed empirically in the following way.

On being (briefly) unimanual - and worse, right handed!

Six weeks ago I broke my left wrist playing soccer. For the first two weeks I was in the temporary cast from the Accident & Emergency ward. It was only supposed to be a couple of days, but I had to travel to the US before my appointment to get a proper cast. I therefore had this unwieldy cast on while everything was sore, rendering me effectively one handed. The real cast was lighter and gave more support, and enabled me to use my arm more; the wrist was still constrained, though, and so I still had to rely on my (non-preferred) right hand for many tasks. I'm out of the cast as of Tuesday, although I need to rehabilitate the muscles back before I'll be 100%.

The experience has been quite interesting (in between being very boring). I've observed transfer of learning, recalibration of my arm as effector, and adaptation of numerous actions to the point where I can't really remember what it felt like to do them prior to the injury. I'm going to have to spend some time going back again now the cast has come off, and these things all touch on the topics I'm interested in covering on this blog.

A caveat: the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm not trying to convince anyone of my interpretations here, just thinking about my experience through the lens of my theoretical understanding of perception/action.

Gibson vs Physics: Gibson Wins, at the Ecological Scale

One of the interesting questions that popped out of our discussions with Ken Aizawa about Runeson and the Ames Room is this: did Gibson and his followers banish physics and geometry from his psychology? And if so, is Runeson breaking this prohibition by talking geometrically about the Ames Room? And how can you banish physics anyway - what the hell?

I think I've convinced Ken that there is no such prohibition in the comments at the posts linked to above (I think). But it's a topic of fairly central importance to the ecological approach, so I wanted to summarise some of these ideas and examples here.

Visual perception of coordinated rhythmic movements

Other coordination posts are here.

Fontaine et al (1997) and Wenderoth et al (2002) had empirically established that a key prediction of the dynamic pattern hypothesis was false: learning was easier closer to 0° than it was to 180°. The HKB attractor layout did not appear to be pulling behaviour in the expected manner; what was going on?

The Ames Room and the Bower Bird

A recent study (Endler et al, 2010) has shown that bowerbirds take advantage of forced perspective (the Ames Room effect) in the construction of their bowers. This study has a few interesting things to say on the topic of the origin of the Ames Room effect and the likelihood of equivalent configurations popping up by chance. (This article got a lot of popular press when it came out: Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science covered it best here.)

Is it time to abandon the cognitive / non-cognitive distinction?

We've been having some good debates with Ken Azawa over at The Bounds of Cognition and Gary Williams at Minds and Brains. A recurring theme is where to draw the line between the cognitive and the non-cognitive. A lot hinges on this distinction. For example, whether we consider things external to the brain to be coupled with a cognitive process or to constitute a cognitive process depends on what we're willing to call "cognitive." Ken has written extensively about this on his blog, but this is a simple summary of the problem: [T]he coupling-constitution distinction comes down to a distinction between X causing, or being caused by, a cognitive process, versus X being a cognitive process.

Runeson, the Ames Room and the Irrelevance of Equivalent Configurations

Recently we’ve been discussing several topics with Ken Aizawa at his blog, The Bounds of Cognition; there are several posts brewing from the two of us on this, but some travelling (plus, for me, a broken wrist) has slowed things a little.

I want to spend some time talking about some recent discussions on aperture vision and the Ames Room. This post will go over two papers on the Ames Room; the next few will discuss some of the more interesting points about the ecological approach that came out of the discussion with Ken. This is a really rich topic, and there’s a lot of ground. First, though, we need the set up.