The Task Dynamics of Angiogenesis

In the last two posts, I have laid out the proposal that endothelial cells seem to actively perceive their environments, and set out the details of the argument in favour of explicitly taking an ecological approach to understanding why they do what they do during angiogenesis. It's now time to develop that analysis more explicitly.

To do this, I will apply the 4 questions we proposed in Wilson & Golonka (2013) to the question of the endothelial cell behaviour.  These are

1. What is the task to be solved? 
2. What are the resources the organism has access to that might solve the task?
3. How might these resources get assembled so as to solve the task?
4. Do organisms actually do what you describe in Q3?

We gave some worked examples of this analysis in the 2013 paper, and have described how it drives my work on coordinated rhythmic movement (Golonka & Wilson, 2012, 2019). This will hopefully serve as another example.

The Art of the New Collaboration

I love working with other people. It keeps me connected to a wide range of topics and drives me to push my work in ways I would never other think to do. I've had many wonderful conversations with people over the years in which we've thrown around ideas for collaborative projects. Often, however, these simply never get off the ground and I've struggled for years to figure out a way to turn good ideas into genuine collaborations. 

I have two new collaborations on the go right now and these are finally working, so I thought I'd write down what I think I finally did right that got these moving. I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about how to start new collaborations; I suspect there are many scientists out there, young and old, who would be very interested in what we think works.

My main thought is this. A new collaboration is, by definition, a new project that brings together the skills and resources of at least two groups. These two groups will know their stuff, but not necessarily the others, and that means there's work to be done bringing people up to speed. In addition, each group will have existing interests and projects, and that means finding a way to implement some new, probably unfunded work using what you have to hand without interfering with the existing work. 

My current solution that seems to be working: choose ONE simple, easy to implement project and work it through to completion. 

Bojana Danilovic, the woman who sees the world upside down

I came across an utterly fascinating case study on Twitter the other day (via Mo Costandi; see this video too):

Rare brain condition leaves woman seeing world upside down
Bojana Danilovic has what you might call a unique worldview. Due to a rare condition, she sees everything upside down, all the time.

The 28-year-old Serbian council employee uses an upside down monitor at work and relaxes at home in front of an upside down television stacked on top of the normal one that the rest of her family watches.

"It may look incredible to other people but to me it's completely normal," Danilovic told local newspaper Blic.

"I was born that way. It's just the way I see the world."

Experts from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been consulted after local doctors were flummoxed by the extremely unusual condition.

They say she is suffering from a neurological syndrome called "spatial orientation phenomenon," Blic reports.

"They say my eyes see the images the right way up but my brain changes them," Danilovic said.

"But they don't really seem to know exactly how it happens, just that it does and where it happens in my brain.

"They told me they've seen the case histories of some people who write the way I see, but never someone quite like me."

Newton International Fellowships 2013

If you from anywhere other than the UK and are looking for a post-doc opportunity in the UK, and are trained in perception, action, language or embodied cognition type research, then this is an excellent funding stream and we are both very interested in hearing from you to come and work in our labs. Please feel free to contact us if interested, and please spread the word to other interested parties!  

We are primarily interested in supporting a post-doc who is interested in helping us advance our work on an ecological approach to language and issues relating to how information gets its meaning, within our embodied cognition framework. These fellowships are highly competitive so you need to be good at what you do, and you need to work with us to develop an independent project so we can be sure we can support it.


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A new round of Newton International Fellowships - an initiative to fund research collaborations and improve links between UK and overseas researchers - has now opened.

The Newton International Fellowships are funded by the British Academy and the Royal Society and aim to attract the most promising early-career post-doctoral researchers from overseas in the fields of the humanities, the natural, physical and social sciences. The Fellowships enable researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution with the aim of fostering long-term international collaborations.

Newton Fellows will receive an allowance of £24,000 to cover subsistence and up to £8,000 to cover research expenses in each year of the Fellowship. A one-off relocation allowance of up to £2,000 is also available.

In addition, Newton Fellows may be eligible for follow-up funding of up to £6,000 per annum for up to 10 years following completion of the Fellowship to support activities which will help build long term links with the UK.

The scheme is open to post-doctoral (and equivalent) early-career researchers working outside the UK who do not hold UK citizenship. Early career means having held no more than one or two brief post doc positions.

Applications are to be made via the Royal Society’s online application system which is available at https://e-gap.royalsociety.org/ The closing date for applications is Wednesday 10th April 2013 but you should aim to get it to the host organisation at least a week in advance.

Further details are available from the Newton International Fellowships website: www.newtonfellowships.org

A Way Forward on Specification

It's been a while since we've blogged; it's been a crazy summer and we've been insanely busy, but things are settling back down. We have a lot planned for the blog, there's much work to be done on a variety of topics in perception, action, embodied cognition and language. First I want to get back on track with my specification project, so that maybe this can start to move forward.

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I've been reviewing work that has been undermining the concept of specification in perception. Specification is the idea that the information we detect and use to control our behaviour maps 1:1 with some action-relevant property in the world, and the idea that this is even possible is one of Gibson's key contributions to psychology. Rob Withagen, along with Tony Chemero (hence W&C) have reason to believe that specification is actually too high a bar, and that individual variation in perceptual ability makes it likely that different people will use different, often non-specifying information to solve the same task. This variation is highly likely to be present, because that's kind of how evolution works, and they cite various studies (in collision judgements and dynamic touch) that seem to empirically confirm that this variation exists and the fact that it doesn't go away with fairly extensive practice.

Ecological psychologists insist on specification for a reason: the idea of direct perception seems to require it. Direct perception is Gibson's hypothesis that we perceive the world directly in terms of our ability to act on it, without needing internal mental gymnastics to figure out what is going on. Turvey, Shaw, Reed and Mace (1981) proposed that, in order for this to work, perceptual information had to be generated by lawful processes that produced one and only one information variable per property of the world, and that perception required the organism to detect that one variable. Anything less, and it's not clear how the organism can count on having detected the right property in the world without some internal states tracking probabilities and correlations. 

Withagen and Chemero think that a) evolution demands a less strict policy for perception to work, b) that there is individual variation, that c) this all shows that specification, while possible, is not required for perception (no 1:1 between world and optics or between the optics and perceiver) but that d) perception can still be direct, just on a continuum - the organism has varying degrees of successful contact with properties in the world, rather than the all-or-none contact implied by the Turvey et al analysis. In one respect, they are throwing out the baby and the bathwater but claiming this still lets them have their cake and eat it too. It's exciting if true, but while I think the fact of individual variation needs to be addressed, I'm not yet convinced by the data or the theory and I think there's more to do. Here are some initial thoughts in that direction.

These thoughts  are designed to lead to real science, and if you want in, let us know. Sabrina and I are very interested in the basic question of how information gets it's meaning - Sabrina's language analyses, for example, depend critically on being able to find a way to have ecological style information in a domain where specification can't possibly work. I've been chatting to Tony and Rob about this work and I'm keen to collaborate: but Sabrina and I are interested in developing broad collaborations to go after this stuff from as many angles as possible, including neuroscientifically. The goal here is to develop and propose grants and experiments - we'll worry about access to equipment later, let's first figure out what we need.

We also want this to bring ecological researchers together, not be yet another schism. Rob suggested in an email that I simply put all this in a paper and we could argue back and forth in the literature. I may yet write that paper, just for the record, but I think we can cut through the "talking past each other" bit much faster here on this blog. I would much rather just crack on with a research programme that involves multiple labs all pulling in the same direction for a change.

Cracking the Tough Nut of Chimp Tool Use

A paper just out in PLoSOne reports that chimpanzees, given some experience and enough of a weight difference, prefer to use heavier hammer stones when cracking hard nuts. This is apparently quite exciting: this is the first study to isolate weight as a property relevant to the task of cracking open a nut.

This caught my attention because weight is not actually the only key property that determines nut cracking success. A heavy hammer is great, but it will eventually become too heavy to lift, and for a given size stone there may very well be an optimum weight (similar to how people choose very specific combinations of size and weight when asked to throw objects to a maximum distance; Zhu & Bingham, 2011). In the current experiment, when the only difference between the objects was weight, the chimpanzees often went to the heaviest stone because it took the fewest strikes and least time to crack the nut. But is this just an artefact of the current experiment? And if so, can an ecological approach find ways to find out just how chimps choose their tools?

Shared neural resources for throwing and language: a whacky idea for an experiment

For some time now, there has been an hypothesis floating around in evolutionary biology that the human capacity for language emerged, in part, from the development of our ability to throw long distances with high speed and accuracy. There are a few reasons to think this, mostly correlational, inferential kinds of reasons, but they are accumulating.

We were chatting one day about how to test this hypothesis a bit more directly, and we came up with a whacky experiment. We'd like advice from neuroscientists with experience in brain stimulation techniques about whether this sort of thing is feasible. We'd also like to brainstorm the logic of this experiment and see if we can come up with a practical design that stands a chance of finding something. We then need collaborators; I can handle the throwing side (analysis, measurement, etc) but we don't know anything about TMS and would need an expert on board.

There are many other reasons why this might fail, though - I still need to do a detailed lit review on the throwing/language references I have. Our main problem is that we don't know the kind of obvious difficulties in doing TMS in this kind of context. We'd like to assemble a) an experiment and b) a research team to do the experiment if we can get it to make sense, and if it works we will submit the hell out of this to Nature :)