I've been working for a while to connect the perception of affordances to motor abundance methods such as the uncontrolled manifold. I proposed the idea in this book chapter, and then I have a paper under review that is my first swing at making this work; the details of the hypothesis are in those, and I recommend you read them. The paper in particular has my most recent thinking spelled out as clearly as I can in the Introduction and Discussion sections.  As I've been chatting to people about progressing this programme, one thing that keeps coming up is 'why has no-one thought to do this ..read more

This post is part of my current series where I am developing a research programme to formally connect affordances and motor abundance analyses (see the intro post here). The first thing I need is a task that has a formal affordance analysis; my chosen task is reaching-to-grasp (sometimes called prehension). I'm pivoting to this task from throwing for a few reasons. First, I need a simpler task. The logistics of data collection and analysis for throwing tasks are large and I just don't have the resources right now; I do have the kit for these studies. Second, I want to expand my own skill ..read more

Movements are never the same twice, even when you are trying to do that same thing over and over. Variability is an inescapable fact of trying to organise and run a complex system such as a human body. But there is more than one source of variability in movement; there's noise, and then there's redundancy, and these are not the same thing.  Our movement systems are redundant; specifically, they always have more degrees of freedom available than are ever required to perform a given task. This means that there is always more than one way to perform any given task, and this can range from sl ..read more

It started, as these things always do, on Twitter. Someone posted a training drill they were excited about (kids kicking a ball against a wall) and I made a comment to suggest I didn't think this was the most football-useful activity I had ever seen. That's all I intended to say, but enough people (coaches, mainly) got mad at me that more was said, and it quickly devolved into the standard entrenched lines this argument lives between. There were two related themes to the replies. The first was essentially 'how dare you'; apparently questioning a coach's practice crosses a line (I admit I had b ..read more

The first space enigma was the fact that vision lives in the two dimensions of Flatland, but produces an experience of three dimensional Spaceland. You can't logic or experience your way from Flatland to Spaceland (as described in the famous book). Berkeley tried to solve this problem by providing a guide, in the form of the Spaceland-dwelling body, but this fell apart and the only remaining suggestion was an unrepayable loan of intelligence from God.  Another way to consider this problem that leads to another proposal is what Turvey calls 'the outness problem'. This is the annoying fact ..read more

I've spent the past few months getting a new paper to the 'complete first draft' stage (you can find a copy here in the meantime; it's still got some work to do though). It's about affordances, using targeted long-distance throwing as the task, and it's my first dip into the world of the uncontrolled manifold. I collected this data over five years ago, and it's been deeply satisfying to actually use it after all this time. Part of what's taken so long is that I've had to learn the details of the uncontrolled manifold analysis. I blogged some about it here and here but this was the year I ..read more

Traditional vision science is very excited about illusions. These are cases when perception seems to break down; there is a mismatch between what is out there and what we experience, and traditional approaches consider these breakdowns as clues to how vision has to work, given what it is working with.  Ecological psychologists don’t like illusions. Typically, they occur when information is either made ambiguous or faked, and in general we think these are the wrong situations to study perception in. We sometimes engage with the literature on these effects, but usually to show how the trick ..read more

One of the big problems that emerges from all the proceeding discussions of perception is how we are able to perceive space. Space has been considered as a mathematical concept (in terms of Euclidean geometry), as a psychological concept (a construction of the mind) but never really as a biological, ecological concept. This first chapter about space perception is focused on one mathematical conception, some of it's implications, and one specific attempt to deal with those implications (Berkeley's New Theory of Vision).  Space perception has to work with whatever space is, so a theory of ..read more

The ecological approach has hit a point in its history where it has become interested in expanding its scope, to go beyond the real time coordination and control of action. There are many challenges from non-ecological cognitive science about how to tackle representation-hungry problems, and how to conceptualise things like language, social behaviour, and what the brain is up to. I am all on board with this move - it was important we waited till we were ready, but since Gibson died in 1979, the empirical programme on the basics has matured into a solid foundation and we have a lot of developed ..read more

There are two basic ways perception might work to let us experience the world in behaviourally relevant ways. Direct perception is the idea that perception only requires two components; the environment and the organism. Indirect perception is the idea that perception requires at least three components; the environment, the organism, and at least one other component that mediates between the organism and the environment. Over the last few posts, I've been working through the specifics of the ecological approach to making direct perception plausible, because this is a question I often get (usual ..read more