Andrew D Wilson

LATEST ARTICLES ( 200 )

• Reply to Graziosi: In Detail

  This post is a detailed reply to Sergio Graziosi's useful critique of our Ecological Representation pre-print. As such, it's specific to his particular... Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mechanisms for Cognitive and Behavioural Science (#MechanismWeek 5)

  

  This week we have reviewed what a mechanism is, various ways to model mechanisms, and talked about the kinds of functional and dynamical models cognitive scienc... Read more

  Posted on 24 June 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ecological Mechanisms and Models of Mechanisms (#MechanismWeek 4)

  

  Mechanistic models are great, but so far cognitive science doesn't have any. We have functional models (of, for example, memory or categorisation) and... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Do Dynamic Models Explain? (#MechanismWeek 3)

  

  So far we have learned what a mechanism is, two ways of modelling mechanisms (functional and mechanistic) and we've identified that cognitive science is... Read more

  Posted on 22 June 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive Models Are Not Mechanistic Models (#MechanismWeek 2)

  So far we have talked about what mechanisms are and what sort of model counts as properly mechanistic. The next question is to have a look in more detail at... Read more

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

• Mechanisms and Models of Mechanisms (#MechanismWeek 1)

  

  In this first #MechanismWeek post, I will define a mechanism and briefly describe the kind of models of mechanisms you can build. I begin with various kinds of... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ecological Representations

  Funny story. One day, I got a text from Sabrina that said "Holy crap. I think ecological information is a representation." "Uh oh", I thought - "Twitter is gonn... Read more

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

• #MechanismWeek (a Week of Posts Commencing June 20th 2016)

  Cognitive science is, in principle, the search to understand the mechanisms that cause our behaviour to look the way that it does. Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Shrunken Finger Illusion

  

  Ed Yong has a great write-up of an interesting little study in Current Biology (Ekroll, Sayim, Vander Hallen Wagemans, 2016) that caught my eye. Read more

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

• Information Use is Shaped by Bodily Dynamics

  

  I've just discovered a treasure trove of 30 talks recorded at the 2015 International Conference on Perception and Action (the main US ecological psychology... Read more

  Posted on 27 April 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brains Learn to Perceive, Not Predict, the World

  

  The current trendy way to think about brains is as predictive machines. Bayesian methods, free energy, generative models, and all the other things in Andy... Read more

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

• Peer Review: Solemn Duty Or Merely Extra Work?

  The other day on Twitter I saw Rolf Zwaan tweeting about Collabra's policy of rewarding reviewers with credit that can be traded in for credit for organisationa... Read more

  Posted on 14 April 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Art of the New Collaboration

  I love working with other people. It keeps me connected to a wide range of topics and drives me to push my work in ways I would never other think to do. Read more

  Posted on 09 April 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The High Price of Open Access

  We've been chatting about open access journals, and how surprisingly expensive it is to publish in them. Obviously there are costs involved in publishing, but... Read more

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

• Affordance-based Control (Fajen 2005, 2007)

  The most commonly studied tasks in the ecological approach involve the perceptual control of actions such as interception and steering. Read more

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

• How Worried Are You By The Symbol Grounding Problem?

  

  Imagine you're a mental representation. You are a computational symbol system, and your job is to contain knowledge that is about the world and that can help... Read more

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

• On "The Poverty of Embodied Cognition" (Goldinger Et Al, in Press)

  A new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (Goldinger, Papesh, Barnhart, Hansen Hout, 2015) has taken a swing at the field of embodied cognition,... Read more

  Posted on 05 February 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Information is Typically Dense and Continuous (A Purple Peril)

  

  Optic flow is everywhere, all the time (same with other energy arrays, like the acoustic array). We depend on this fact deeply. Read more

  Posted on 26 January 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Quick Review and Analysis of Perceptual Control Theory

  

  Perceptual Control Theory (PCT; Powers, 1973) is a theory that proposes behaviour is about the control of perception. We act so as to keep some perceived part o... Read more

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

• Tasks from the First Person Perspective (A Purple Peril)

  

  The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter... Read more

  Posted on 06 January 2016 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE