Andrew D Wilson

MY BLOGS
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Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/
Andrew D Wilson & Sabrina Golonka are two psychologists who are interested in developing a more coherent, naturalised approach to the scientific study of human behaviour. Andrew studies the perceptual control of action, with a special interest in learning. Sabrina studies similarity and categorisation. We're both interested in exploring non-representational theories in psychology, including dynamical systems and ecological psychology.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 188 )
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The Medium for Direct Perception (Notes on Van Dijk & Kiverstein, 2020)
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 contro... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Is Indirect Perception Plausible?
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... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Is Direct Perception Plausible? Ecological Information
We're in the home stretch of working through how direct perception is, at least, an option, and how the ecological approach in particular attempts to make it... Read more
Posted on 03 November 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Is Direct Perception Plausible? The Case for Affordances-as-Dispositions
The first post in this series laid out the rules for what makes a theory of perception direct or indirect. In order to avoid having to require organisms to... Read more
Posted on 02 November 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Are Affordances Plausible? Updating Some Intuitions
In the previous post, I laid out the basic distinction between direct and indirect theories of perception. The basic issue is how to get to behaviourally... Read more
Posted on 28 October 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
What Does It Mean for Perception to Be 'Direct' Vs 'Indirect'?
The ecological approach is a theory of direct perception. Put simply, direct perception proposes that our perceptual experience of the world is not mediated by... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Introducing...The Southampton Project
I am embarking on a very exciting and potentially game-changingly huge collaboration this year, with Southampton Football Club and a bunch of ecologically minde... Read more
Posted on 08 September 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Structured Flow on Neural Manifolds (Jirsa Et Al, 2019)
As I try to develop a vocabulary for an ecological neuroscience, I am looking for two things. First, I'm looking for help from existing methods to help... Read more
Posted on 20 May 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Do Markov Blankets Give Us Real Neural Parts?
In my last post, I laid out what I think the rules are for developing a mechanistic model of the neural scale contribution to behaviour. I ended there with a... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Mechanistic Models of the Brain
I'm getting increasingly interested in neuroscience, and how to make it ecological. I also think that the ecological approach is capable of supporting... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Constraints-Based Approach to Teaching in the Classroom
If you read this and think 'hey, this sounds like something they do in [insert teaching method here]', please let me know. I've had some chats about the... Read more
Posted on 02 February 2021 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
An (Draft) Ecological Approach to Hallucinating
Sabrina and I are planning our next papers, and in typical style she's been thinking about how to tackle a hard problem - this time, hallucinations. Read more
Posted on 24 November 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Verb Your Nouns
One of the things that makes it hard to communicate with people about the ecological approach is that it is actually a radically different way of thinking... Read more
Posted on 16 November 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Turvey, Lectures on Perception: The Story So Far
I have now reviewed the first 7 Lectures on Perception from Turvey' textbook (posts indexed here). I feel like I've reached a natural pause point before carryin... Read more
Posted on 09 November 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Verbal Instruction in Sports Coaching
A few days ago I posted a Twitter thread about the role of verbal instruction in sports coaching. It's a thing that comes up a lot as a key point of contention... Read more
Posted on 05 November 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Lecture 7: Empiricism and the Man in the Inner Room (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on...
The last two Lectures have laid out the mechanical, Cartesian analysis of the problems of perception. Every flavour of this analysis, right up to an including... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Lecture 6: The Cartesian Program (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)
Turvey is arguing that modern psychology is still operating within a mechanistic framework, which assumes things like linear chains of causation and... Read more
Posted on 12 October 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Lecture 5: The Mechanistic Hypothesis (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)
In the previous lecture, Turvey spent a lot of time defending the idea that nonlocal causality is a legitimate option for a physical system. Read more
Posted on 08 October 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Lecture 4: Simulative, Projective, and Locality Assumptions (Turvey, 2019,...
This lecture is a brief history of the common assumptions made in theories of perception about how things 'over there' can cause us to have a given perceptual... Read more
Posted on 09 June 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Lecture 3: Direct Perceiving, Indirect Perceiving (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on...
In this lecture, Turvey provides a formal definition of what it means to claim a theory of perception is direct vs indirect. A theory of direct perception... Read more
Posted on 29 April 2020 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE