Andrew D Wilson

LATEST ARTICLES ( 200 )

• The Ecological Approach, Explained to an 8 Year Old

  

  About 3 weeks ago I got an email from a person who had found our blog via Robert Epstein's piece 'The Empty Brain'. The email saidI've had a good read this... Read more

  Posted on 06 April 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Language, Thought and the Ecological Approach; A Purple Peril

  

  As part of a class on cognitive psychology, I give a seminar in which we talk about the research on the relationship between language and thought. In particular... Read more

  Posted on 25 March 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Evidence for the Kinematic Specification of Dynamics

  Gibson’s most detailed analysis of the KSD problem came from work on the perception of dynamic occlusion (viewing one surface become progressively hidden... Read more

  Posted on 26 February 2017 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Ecological Approach - The Accidental Textbook

  Over the years this blog has collected 232 posts on a wide range of topics and we have multiple papers out and forthcoming working on the ecological approach... Read more

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

• The Nature of Ecological Perceptual Information

  The central issue in the perception of the world is how the perceptual system comes into contact with that world. In vision, the assumption for centuries has... Read more

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

• Affordances Are Not Relations, Part 1: Chemero (2009)

  Affordances are on my mind right now as I develop the throwing research programme, and a major commitment of that work is that affordances are (dispositional)... Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Affordances of Natural Vs Designed Environments (A Purple Peril)

  I had a conversation with Eric Brymer (@Ericbrymer) a few weeks ago. Eric is a Reader at Leeds Beckett and is an ecologically minded psychologist interested in... Read more

  Posted on 10 December 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is the Ecological Approach Radical Enough?

  Radical enactivists do not just want to get representations out of their explanations for our mental life. They also want to get rid of the notion of content.... Read more

  Posted on 03 December 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Scarantino (2003) “Affordances Explained”

  Turvey, Shaw, Reed and Mace (1981) laid out an ontology of affordances; a formal account of the kind of things they are. They described them as dispositions,... Read more

  Posted on 02 December 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Free Energy: How the F*ck Does That Work, Ecologically?

  Karl Friston has spent a lot of time recently developing the free energy principle framework as a way to explain life, behaviour and cognition; you know,... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Field is Full, Just Not of Affordances - A Reply to Rietveld & Kiverstein

  I recently posted about relational accounts of affordances and how one way to summarise my objections to them is that they cannot support mechanistic models of... Read more

  Posted on 08 November 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Nonlinear Covariation Analysis (Müller & Sternad, 2003)

  

  I have been working my way through some analyses that fall under the idea of the motor abundance hypothesis (Latash, 2012) - the idea that motor control does no... Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Optimal Feedback Control and Its Relation to Uncontrolled Manifold Analysis

  Motor control theories must propose solutions to the degrees of freedom problem, which is the fact that the movement system has more ways to move than are ever... Read more

  Posted on 13 October 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Can You Do With Uncontrolled Manifold Analysis?

  

  There is generally more than one way to perform a task (the ‘bliss of motor abundance’) and so it’s possible for a movement to incur a little noise that... Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Uncontrolled Manifold Analysis

  

  Human movement is hard to study, because there are many ways to perform even simple tasks and given the opportunity, different people will take different routes. Read more

  Posted on 15 September 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Bliss of Motor Abundance

  The fundamental question in psychology boils down to "why did that person do that thing they just did?". Welcome to my new favourite example.Figure 1. Read more

  Posted on 07 September 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Affordances of Prehistoric Objects

  

  I have a new paper in press at Scientific Reports (Wilson, Zhu, Barham, Stanistreet Bingham, 2016; see also the slides from my EWEP14 talk) and I am so excite... Read more

  Posted on 10 August 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Relational Theories of Affordances Are Functional, Not Mechanistic (A Purple...

  Everyone and their dog has a theory about how to interpret Gibson's famously vague definition of affordances;The affordances of the environment are what it... Read more

  Posted on 25 July 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Framing the Debate

  

  In 2014 we published a book chapter with Eric Charles in which we argued that the most important thing psychology and neuroscience needed from people like us wa... Read more

  Posted on 21 July 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reply to Hamlyn: In Detail

  This is a detailed reply to the critique Jim Hamlyn wrote critiquing our Ecological Representation preprint (and related blog post). Read more

  Posted on 19 July 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE