Last year we were invited to contribute to a special issue of Avant, an interdisciplinary open access journal that publishes in English and Polish. The issue is on affordances, and we were asked to contribute a piece detailing the contribution ecological psychology is making to modern cognitive science. Our paper is here; the complete issue is open access and available here (as separate files, a single issue pdf, and an ongoing Polish translation).
We had a lot of fun with this paper. The core of the paper comes from our posts about how psychology lacks a central theory and how Gibson serves as a good model for why theory matters, as well as being a key part of any more complete theory. We take a quick swipe at Daryl Bem and JPSP and then use the contrast between dynamic pattern vs. perception-action approaches in explaining coordinated rhythmic movement. In particular, we highlight Geoff's model as an exemplar of what psychologists should be up to - not just models, but theoretically motivated models.
We'd like to thank Tony Chemero for mentioning us to the people at Avant, and to the Avant team who do interesting work and gave us space to write what we hope will be a fun and useful paper.
By the by, Avant are hosting a very interesting looking conference next year:
THINKING WITH HANDS, EYES AND THINGS. The 1st edition of the International Avant-Conference “Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies”, 8-10 November 2013, Torun, Poland
UPDATE: This topic is now live! We welcome all and any submissions that fit the remit. Please email Andrew if you are interested and I will add you to the contributors list, or you can also simply contribute via the Frontiers page.
A couple of years ago, Sabrina and I were chatting about the brain and running into the problem that we just don't know enough about how it works. We realised that what we needed to do was host a conference, invite some useful people, and pick their brains for a few days.
We've had two goes at funding such a conference; we've had a lot of interest from the academics we've contacted but no luck convincing anyone to give us any money. Over the process, however, we got Tony Chemero (author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science) involved, and he recommended Louise Barrett to us (that's how we came across her excellent book). The four of us have been scheming for a while to try and make this a reality, and two things have developed.
First, we are going to host a workshop on Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience, hopefully at the Lorentz Centre in the Netherlands. Before that can really be worth doing, however, we've realised we need a little more momentum, so we've advanced our plans and are about to announce a Research Topic at Frontiers in Psychology. We'd like to invite all interested parties to play.
The goal is simple: we want this to be a virtual conference, in effect, where people pose problems and offer solutions to the problem of developing a radical (non-representational) embodied cognitive neuroscience. We want real collaborations to come out of this, so we want people coming looking for ways to help and be helped. And we want to create a resource that we can point to to shape discussions at future workshops.
What we need from you
I've pasted the text of the call we will run below. If you are interested in submitting something to this, send us your name, affiliation and email address (either in the comments below or email us, psychscientists@gmail.com). At this point, this commits you to nothing; we just need a decent length list of people to initially invite to submit, to indicate that there is going to be enough interest. If you change your mind later there's no problem.
Any thoughts on the call, let us know. We all like that this call is short, direct and to the point; too many of these research topic calls are inflated by too much detail. But if there's any flags, let us and know.
If you can help us by promoting this post on social media, that would also be excellent. We are looking to cast a wide net.
In my last post I went over the formal concept of task dynamics as a way of analysing a task to identify the affordances in that task. This post will examine the task dynamics of projectile motion and relate these to throwing to a maximum distance.This version of the task has been studied in detail over the last few years. There is another version of the task, namely throwing to hit a target (same dynamic, different parameters, therefore same task) and we will get to that later; we're working now on data from this task.
Part of my goal here is to lay out the research programme you should be following, if you want to study anything to do with perception and action. If you are interested in movement, and you aren't doing this kind of analysis as part of your work, then, I will suggest, you are doing it wrong. As we will see in future posts, this level of detail isn't just playing with numbers; a formal understanding of the underlying dynamics governing the task we are studying is utterly crucial if we want to be able to understand what people are doing, rather than simply describe their behaviour.
Also it's fun :)
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.
Psychological Science, I think we need to talk. I was reading this farewell from your outgoing editor, and it would all be nice enough if I hadn't also just read your latest offering to the altar of 'embodied' cognition. Frankly, it made me wonder whether you actually read all the things you publish.
Robert Kail, the outgoing editor, had this to say about the ideal Psychological Science paper:
...the ideal Psychological Science manuscript is difficult to define, but easily recognized — the topic is fundamental to the field, the design is elegant, and the findings are breathtaking.
There are a few problems here; 'breathtaking' results have the tendency to be wrong, for example, and while I'm all for elegant design, sometimes, to make a breath taking claim, you need to run those 4 control conditions. But my main problem is less with these criteria and more with the papers that apparently meet them.
Previous work has established that people with throwing experience can perceive the affordance of 'throwability'. If you let these people heft objects with a range of sizes and weights, they will confidently select the one they think they can throw the farthest, and they tend to be correct. It's a very natural task, one you have probably done yourself on a beach or lakeside looking for stones to throw into the water.
This is only the first, and relatively easy step in any ecological task analysis. Once you've identified an affordance property and established that people are sensitive to it, you need to identify the information supporting this perception. For throwing, this has not been done, and while the paper I'm reviewing here doesn't solve the problem, it does rule out a highly likely contender for the source of the information that has implications for a lot of other research.
Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a surprisingly common problem; it's thought that 6-8% of school aged children are diagnosable. DCD is a motor disorder, where children have great difficulty in producing skilled actions, especially anything requiring fine motor control. Handwriting, tying your shoelaces, sports of any kind are all huge problems for these children.
One key question about DCD is why does it occur. Part of the problem in answering this is that it is a behavioural diagnosis; you get diagnosed if you have severe motor impairments that aren't a known side effect of something else. Regardless, there are two basic ways in which children might end up with such problems; crudely, they might have difficulties in producing movements, or they might have difficulty learning movements. My colleague and author on this paper, Mark Mon-Williams, uses the analogy that children with DCD may be bad drivers of perfectly working cars or good drivers of malfunctioning cars. It's obviously a little messier than that, but this is the essential idea, and the answer has implications for the kind of interventions you'll try and design.
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