People interested in how perception and action affect cognition have begun talking about affordances. This should be great news; the ecological approach suggests that affordances are the properties of the world that we perceive that enable us to control our actions, so if you are interested in how action can ground, say, memory or language, then discussing affordances should enable real progress.
The term 'affordance', however, is a technical term, and it refers to very particular properties of an organism's environment. There are methods for experimentally identifying exactly how these properties are composed, and there are methods for testing our perception of them. If you aren't using these methods, and if you aren't using the term correctly, then you aren't studying affordances.
Whoops, we did it again - a paper based on the blog! This time we are in press at Frontiers in Psychology, in a Research Topic on embodied cognition, with a paper we somehow got away with calling 'Embodied Cognition is Not What You Think It Is'.
This paper
draws from a lot of posts on the blog on embodied cognition, perception-action and language. We have used this opportunity to tackle some key issues head on, and we like this paper a lot :) We cover all the important issues and we set up what we think is the way forwards for embodied cognitive science. In addition, it sets up the ground work that we want to build on with our own Research Topic on Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. We've laid out what we think is the task facing the brain; this is what the brain is engaging with, and so this is what we think neuroscience needs to work with in order to understand what the brain is doing.
It's the kind of paper that will either land with a splash or vanish without trace. We want it to make some serious waves, and we're hoping that we can encourage people to publish free Commentaries on it at Frontiers, to challenge us or pick up our challenges, and, most fun for all, to come work with us to take all this forwards! We want this to be the basis of an empirical research programme and we want you all to work with us on it :) At the very least, feel free to pepper us with questions; this paper is the start of something for us, not the end and we're interested in the response to this paper to frame the next step.
Over the last couple of posts, I have reviewed data that shows people can perceive which object they can, in fact, throw the farthest ahead of time by hefting the object. Both the size and the weight of the object affect people's judgements and the distance thrown; however, only weight affects the dynamics of throwing (release angle and velocity are unaffected by changes in size). This rules out the smart perceptual mechanism proposed by Bingham et al (1989), which proposed that both size and weight changes affect hefting and throwing the same way. So how are people perceiving this affordance?
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
In the last post,
I reviewed Geoff's first paper looking at whether people can perceive
the affordance for throwing an object to a maximum distance and a first
swing at identifying the information specifying the affordance. People
can perceive the affordance. Bingham et al then identified an invariant
relation between the timing of the motions of the wrist and elbow when
people hefted the balls they chose as optimal for throwing, and showed
that this kinematic pattern specified a peak in the function which
determined how much kinetic energy was transferred to the ball. They
suggested that this relation in the joint movements served as
information for the dynamic property which led to a maximum distance
throw, and that this is how hefting was able to provide information
about throwing. They suggested that this was a smart perceptual mechanism for perceiving the affordance property.
That was where things stood until Zhu & Bingham (2008)
ran an extensive replication and extension of the original study, to
test the specific smart perceptual mechanism proposed by Bingham et al
(1989).
From the task dynamic analysis of throwing for maximum distance, we've identified the fact that for a given release angle and maximum release velocity, there is an object whose size and weight optimises the distance it will travel when thrown. Can people perceive this combination ahead of time? More specifically, can people identify the object which affords throwing to a maximum distance, and if so, how?
Bingham, Schmidt & Rosenblum (1989) is the first paper investigating this question. It is a bear of a paper; I've stripped a lot of the methodological detail out in my summary so I can focus on the bigger picture. That bigger picture is this; Bingham et al first check whether people can identify objects that afford throwing to a maximum distance by hefting them ahead of time (they can). They then investigate the kinematics of hefting to identify an invariant relation in the timing of the wrist and elbow velocities and relate that invariant to the dynamics of throwing (specifically how it maximises the transfer of kinetic energy from the torso muscles to the projectile). They propose that using this invariant reflects a smart perceptual solution (Runeson, 1977) to the problem of selecting objects to throw to a maximum distance - future work (Zhu & Bingham, 2008) will actually show that this specific smart mechanism doesn't hold up, although the replacement is smart too.
If you sit in the bath for more than 10 minutes or so, you'll notice that your fingers get wrinkled like a prune. People thought for a while that this was a local response to the wet conditions, but it turns out the wrinkling is an active, neurally controlled process. In 1936 two scientists observed a boy who had suffered some temporary damage to the median nerve; he lost feeling in his thumb, index and middle finger and, surprisingly, those fingers didn't wrinkle in the wet. There's a great post on this case and some more recent work here.
Things that are under active control are usually functional; that is, they're usually doing something useful. In 2011, Mark Changizi and colleagues published a speculative piece in which they suggested that our fingers do not wrinkle randomly. Instead, they noted that the form of the wrinkles match efficient drainage networks, and suggested that perhaps the wrinkles act like rain tread to help water drain away from our fingertips when we grip things.
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