Ecological indirect perception

I want to follow on from Sabrina's important posts about information, and why psychology should be about information for the forseeable future. Sabrina's taxonomy includes information beyond what ecological psychologists talk about, information that needs to be investigated to find out exactly what kind of behaviour it can support. (This is what Gibson did for perception, and it paid off in spades.) 

I'm particularly interested in the information in pictures and mirrors; surfaces that present information about being surfaces and about being something else. This post is me thinking out loud about the implications; these are by no means my final thoughts on the matter, it's me taking the taxonomy for a spin and seeing where I end up. Feedback welcome!

A new direction for psychology

I have my doubts about psychology. 

Anyone who's read this blog before knows that Andrew and I are fairly opinionated about what we think is right and wrong with psychology research. This isn't about small effect sizes or falsified data, which are currently popular (and valid) concerns. It's about the the types of questions psychologists usually ask and whether they are useful and likely to move the discipline forward. These questions are dominated by constructs - self esteem, prejudice, working memory capacity, intelligence, motivation - to the point where an alien reading a psychology journal would be forgiven for assuming that the point of psychology was to understand constructs, not people. 

Psychologists ask questions about constructs because the dominant theoretical paradigm (cognitive psychology) says that mental states play a causal role in behaviour and that, to understand how people work, you have to understand the content of these states and the nature of the cognitive processes that operate on them. This doesn't sound crazy. Even though I think cognitive psychology is a fatally flawed paradigm (see here, here, and here), I am enculterated enough in mainstream psychology that this doesn't automatically sound like a bad way of doing things. And anyway, I'm done doing active battle against cognitive psychology, so this post isn't to re-hash what I've written about elsewhere. Instead, I want to lay out what I think psychology should be doing. The idea is simple, but it's radically different from the mainstream. 

Here's the claim:

Information is the primary external cause of behaviour. If psychology is going to make any real progress, it must be grounded in a thorough analysis of the types of information available and the mechanisms by which information is used to control or precipitate behaviour. 

Here's the argument:

Grounded vs. embodied cognition: a (hopefully uncontentious) note on terminology

Our Frontiers paper made the case that embodied cognition is, by definition, a fairly radical affair. We argue 

...if perception-action couplings and resources distributed over brain, body, and environment are substantial participants in cognition, then the need for the specific objects and processes of standard cognitive psychology (concepts, internally represented competence, and knowledge) goes away...

We argue that this is compulsory; as soon as you allow the perceived environment to play any kind of critical role in cognition, it's game on for what Shapiro calls 'replacement style' embodied cognition. This is why we don't think that we're just at one extreme end of a continuum of embodiment research; we think the rest of the field is making a category mistake. Chapter 2 of Chemero (2009) does an excellent job of laying out the history here; representations come from the structuralist school of thought, embodiment from the functionalist school. They are, quite literally, two different kinds of approach and mixing them is just an error.

I need to talk about this other stuff, though, and I'm tired of calling it 'not embodied cognition'. For one thing, the critical tone gets in the way of the argument. Shapiro calls it 'the conceptualisation hypothesis' and while this is basically accurate, it's a slightly non-intuitive technical term I'd have to explain all the time. So I want to be slightly cheeky and rename that other work, while picking a name they will hopefully not mind. This work, I think, is really grounded cognition (as per Barsalou, 2008) and that's how I'll talk about it from here on in.

Misperceiving the affordances in anorexia nervosa

Alice had a few problems with doors too

It's always hard to evaluate the impact of your research, although funding bodies are increasingly asking that we do so. I always struggle a bit, because the connection between studying, say, the perception of affordances and impact on policy or clinical practice is rarely a straight forward story. My problem is that I think that, if you ask a question the right way the answer will always come in handy to someone at some point, and that this is a big part of how science has its impact. 

Case in point: in 1987 Bill Warren was investigating the perception of affordances for passing through an aperture, such as a door. Apertures can vary in width, but the question facing the observer isn't 'how wide is it?' but 'can I fit through it?'. Bill was describing affordances using pi numbers, ratios of widths in the world divided by widths of some relevant body scale. An aperture wider than your shoulders, say, would yield a ratio larger than 1. For a given person's shoulder width, different apertures would produce different ratios. Across people, apertures of different sizes will produce the same ratio as shoulder width changes. It's a way of factoring out the effect of the size of the observer, and it's based on the idea that we percieve the world in terms of our own ability to act on it.

The embodied cognition of Tesco's gendered toys

 

Update: giving them information in a useful way changed their behaviour!

Tesco got in trouble on the internet last week for having toy chemistry sets labelled as being for boys, not girls in their online store. There's a lot of noise about how inappropriate all this gender labelling is (and rightly so - it's everywhere and it's awful). Lots of potential customers are being very annoyed all over Twitter: so why does Tesco do this? Why is this sort of thing so very common? Oddly, I think an embodied task analysis (using our 4 questions which we describe in our Frontiers paper) might shed some light on this question, while also perhaps serving as an accessible example of what it is we're up to with our work.

The thing that got me thinking was this: a Tesco spokesperson said on Twitter that “Toy signage is currently based on research and how our customers tell us they like to shop in our stores”. No one believed them, with replies ranging from 'what kind of research' to the less useful but more common 'I would never tell you to do this so what the hell?'. I think they are telling the truth, and I think their behaviour can be readily explained using our four key questions. More importantly, I think it reveals how we can change Tesco's behaviour, and the answer means knowing about the extended system from which that behaviour emerges.

The Information Available in Pictures

I've become fascinated with the problem of pictures and how they relate to the things they are pictures of. One reason is the regular use of pictures of objects to study how the affordances of those objects might ground cognition; this, I think, is a major problem. 

A more positive reason is that, like language, pictures contain information about something they themselves are not (see Sabrina's information taxonomy). I have a hunch that an ecological study of picture perception might help guide an ecological study of language, because the former can take more direct advantage of the work already done about how we perceive meaning in events via ecological laws but then act as a bridge, a point along the way to the conventional world of language meaning.

Finally, the topic seems to be woefully understudied in the ecological approach. There is some, however. In the comments section on my rant about using pictures to study affordances, I was pointed to the work of John Kennedy (a Gibson student, now emeritus at the University of Toronto). I have downloaded his 1974 book, 'A Psychology of Picture Perception' and am working my way through it. Matthieu de Wit then linked me to an archive of a discussion, in papers, between Gibson and Ernst Gombrich about picture perception. I thought I'd start with Gibson (1971), The Information Available in Pictures, to begin to sketch out what we know and what we don't.

The current question at hand is, can pictures provide the same information about the things they depict?

Embodied cognition in practice - some thoughts and an open invitation

Since our Frontiers paper on embodied cognition came out, Sabrina and I have been giving talks and fielding questions in emails about what we're trying to achieve. People first ask us 'why should we do this?' and the answer, from the paper, is because it works really really well. Research in this field has produced extremely powerful explanations of behaviours with extraordinary predictive power; no more small effect sizes plus a successful research programme for as long as you want to run it! What more reason could you need?

The question we then get from people who have become interested in using what we've done is 'How can I apply this approach to my research?'. The paper itself describes four key questions that we think are critical for guiding good experimental practice in psychology and cognitive science:

1. What is the task to be solved?
2. What are the resources available to solve the task?
3. How might these resources be assembled so as to actually solve the task?
4. Does the organism actually do what your described in 3?

We think this is really just good practice. The basic question in psychology is 'why did a person behave like this rather than like that?' and answering this means figuring out what the task is, from the point of view of the person doing the behaviour. We think these questions will help keep psychologists on the right track, and not get distracted by hypothetical mental entities like theory of mind and object concepts until the evidence demands them. 

We give two examples of this method in practice (the outfielder problem and the dynamical systems model of the A-not-B error), but people are still left wondering how to apply this to their niche. We want to help here; obviously we want people to start working this way and also we want people across a variety of topics to start working this way, so we can finally start accumulating some results outside of perception and action type tasks. 

I want to do two things with this post

1. I want to describe the mindset you'll have to get into to start doing embodied cognition in your field, which I hope might make our steps and our examples make a little more sense.
2. I want to open an invitation to people to post questions in the comments. We're busy and so I can't promise an immediate response, but if you have a task and you want to start thinking about it from our embodied perspective, post a comment with some details and we'll see what we can do to help.