Andrew D Wilson

LATEST ARTICLES ( 200 )

• Can the Free Energy Principle Be Made Ecological? (Bruineberg Et Al, 2018)

  Everyone loves Friston's free energy principle (FEP), and everyone wants it for their own. Not everyone can have it, though (well, at least not if it's going... Read more

  Posted on 30 September 2019 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Where is the Haptic Information? (A Purple Peril)

  

  Haptics (or proprioception) is the sensory modality built into our bodies; it's provides constant information about the state of the body and things it is in... Read more

  Posted on 01 November 2018 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Tolerance, Noise and Covariation in Skilled Action

  

  The field of motor control has been recently steadily moving towards the idea that there is no such thing as an ideal movement. Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2018 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• You Cannot Perceive a Relational Affordance (A Purple Peril)

  

  One of the more enduring arguments in ecological psychology is about the best way to formally describe affordances. The two basic approaches are that they are... Read more

  Posted on 15 July 2018 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Evolution of Sex Differences in Throwing

  

  One of the most robust sex differences occurs in throwing. Men can throw (on average) much faster and therefore much farther than women, and this gap even exist... Read more

  Posted on 31 May 2018 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Ecological Approach to Virtual Reality

  As virtual reality (VR) gear gets better, cheaper, and easier to use, there is renewed interest in trying to figure out how best to make a virtual environment... Read more

  Posted on 27 April 2018 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Affordance Maps and the Geometry of Solution Spaces

  

  I study throwing for two basic reasons. One, it is intrinsically fascinating and I want to know how it works. Second, it's become a rich domain in which to stud... Read more

  Posted on 17 April 2018 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• General Ecological Information Does Not Support the Perception of Anything

  One common critique of the ecological approach is how can we use perception to explain behaviour that is organised with respect to things in the world that... Read more

  Posted on 01 March 2018 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Muscle Homology in Coordinated Rhythmic Movements

  

  One of my main experimental tasks is coordinated rhythmic movement. This is a simple lab task in which I ask people to produce rhythmic movements (typically wit... Read more

  Posted on 19 December 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Test of Direct Learning (Michaels Et Al, 2008)

  

  Direct learning (Jacobs Michaels, 2007) is an ecological hypothesis about the process of perceptual learning. I describe the theory here, and evaluate it here. Read more

  Posted on 05 November 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Evaluating 'Direct Learning'

  

  In my previous post I laid out the direct learning framework developed by Jacobs Michaels (2007). In this post, I'm going to evaluate the central claims and... Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Direct Learning (Jacobs & Michaels, 2007)

  

  The ecological hypothesis is that we perceive properties of the environment and ourselves using information variables that specify those properties. Read more

  Posted on 02 November 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Limits the Accuracy of Human Throwing?

  Throwing a projectile in order to hit a target requires you to produce one lot of the set of release parameters that result in a hit; release angle, velocity... Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Information for Progressive Occlusion

  

  Gibson's ecological psychology is weird, if you are coming from a more traditional information-processing background. The two approaches make radically differen... Read more

  Posted on 16 September 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Expectations and the Size-Weight Illusion

  The size-weight illusion (SWI) occurs when people are asked to judge the weights of two different sized but identically weighted objects. The smaller object is... Read more

  Posted on 31 August 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dear Disney; Let Me Help You VR

  

  Disney posted a video recently from some researchers getting people to catch real balls in virtual reality (VR). It was a nice demo of some technology, and I... Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ecological Information Is a Perceptual Mapping That Tracks Evolutionary Fitness

  

  Interface theory in cartoon form. Thanks to Louise Barrett for reminding me this exists :)In my last post I was thinking out loud about some ecological lines... Read more

  Posted on 21 May 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does Interface Theory Have Consequences for the Ecological Approach?

  

  I've been working on a commentary about interface theory (Hoffman, Singh Prakash, 2015) which I have previously blogged about here. Read more

  Posted on 20 May 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Exploring Some Handwriting Data (Experiment 1)

  

  I have been trying to science handwriting for a year or two now, and I've had some time to dive into some recent data I collected to address some issues coming... Read more

  Posted on 02 May 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Some Thoughts on Handwriting

  

  A few years a go I reviewed a paper about a method, the sigma-lognormal model, to quantitatively assess handwriting (Plamondon et al, 2013). Read more

  Posted on 19 April 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE