On "The poverty of embodied cognition" (Goldinger et al, in press)

A new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (Goldinger, Papesh, Barnhart, Hansen & Hout, 2015) has taken a swing at the field of embodied cognition, claiming that it is vague, trivial and unable to add anything scientific to the investigation of cognition.

...our goal is to zoom out from specific empirical debates, asking instead what EC offers to cognitive science in general. To preview, we argue that EC is theoretically vacuous with respect to nearly all cognitive phenomena. EC proponents selectively focus on a subset of domains that work, while ignoring nearly all the bedrock findings that define cognitive science. We also argue that the principles of EC are often (1) co-opted from other sources, such as evolution; (2) vague, such that model building is not feasible; (3) trivially true, offering little new insight; and, occasionally, (4) nonsensical. 

My basic take is a) I actually agree with a lot of the criticisms in the context of the kinds of 'embodied' cognition we critique for similar reasons, but b) there is nothing new to any of these critiques, none of them are compulsory failings of the field and nothing about them makes embodiment an intrinsically empty notion. 

Affordances are not probabilistic functions

The journal Ecological Psychology is hosting a special issue with papers from a Festschrift for Herb Pick. Karen Adolph and John Franchak have a paper that caught my eye about treating affordances as probabilistic functions, effectively applying standard psychophysical techniques to the study of affordance perception. 

The idea is this: affordance research typically treats affordances as all-or-none, categorical properties. You can either reach that object or you can't; you can either pass through that aperture without turning or you can't. You then measure a bunch of people doing the task as you alter some key parameter (e.g. the distance to the target, or the width of the aperture) and find the critical point, the value of some body-scaled measurement of the parameter where behaviour switches from success to failure. For instance, you might express the aperture width in terms of the shoulder width and look for the common value of this ratio where people switch their behaviour from turning to not turning.

Perceiving causes; why knowledge doesn't trump perception

You're an organism, wandering round the world. Some stuff happens; then, other stuff happens. How do we know whether the first stuff caused the second stuff to happen, or whether it's all just one damn thing after another? A new study in Psychological Science (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013) investigates whether what we know can affect what we perceive, and claims to show that perception can get overridden. This caught my eye because it sounds like the kind of result that will be a problem for our embodied cognition (Wilson & Golonka, 2013), but thinking through the experiment using the tools of dynamics and event perception shows that this result is not going to cause us much concern - it just isn't studying what it says it's studying.