Andrew D Wilson

LATEST ARTICLES ( 206 )

• 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

• The Ecological Approach to Sporting Performance

  Last week I took part in a Google Hangout with Mark Upton and Al Smith, who run the sports coaching blog 'My Fastest Mile' and who are generally all about... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Thoughts on Ding Et Al (2015) "Cortical Tracking of Hierarchical Linguistic...

  

  I happened to be reading Cummins (2000) paper “’How does it work?’ vs. ‘What are the laws?’ Two conceptions of psychological explanation”, when my Twitter feed... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Quantifying the Affordances for Throwing for Distance and Accuracy

  

  I have a new paper in press at JEP:HPP (Wilson, Weightman, Bingham Zhu, in press; supplemental material). It is the end result of five years work across two... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Oh Crap. Re-thinking Van Gelder (A Purple Peril)

  

  I have this problem where I like pretty much everything William Bechtel writes except when it pertains to cognitive science. It's annoying because, even when I... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Thinking About Representations in Relation to Mechanisms

  

  As Chemero (2011) observed, there are two ways to think about debates in science. We can either debate about the actual facts of the matter in the world or we... Read more

  Posted on 02 December 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dynamic Mechanistic Explanations in Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

  I'm on my way back from an enactivist/embodiment conference in Warsaw. I gave a talk (slides) in which I argued that in order to make theories of... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Interface Theory of Perception - The View from Ecological Psychology

  

  Psychonomic Bulletin Review has released, with much fanfare and a hashtag, an article called 'The Interface Theory of Perception' (Hoffman, Singh Prakash,... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• From Specification to Convention (A Purple Peril)

  

  I previously laid out how specification works and why it's important to the ecological approach. Read that first, because I build on it a lot here. Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brains Don't Have to Be Computers (A Purple Peril)

  

  A common response to the claim that we are not information processors is that this simply cannot be true, because it is self-evidently the case that brains are... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Would It Take to Refute Radical Embodied Cognition?

  People often send us papers and data via Twitter that they believe rule out a radical, non-representational theory of cognition. Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Perturbation Experiment as a Way to Study Perception

  

  When you study perception, your goal is to control the flow of information going into the system so that you can measure the resulting behaviour and evaluate ho... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is Autism a Deficit in Invariance Detection?

  

  If ASD is a problem detecting invariants, the world would remain a 'blooming buzzing confusion' and lead to the behaviours we see in children with ASD, claims... Read more

  Posted on 04 May 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Function Vs Structure (A Purple Peril)

  One of the apparently controversial things that I say is that psychology, as a science, needs to address function before it gets worried about structure; what i... Read more

  Posted on 22 April 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Specification and Some of Its Consequences (A Purple Peril)

  Perception is how we maintain psychological contact with functionally relevant objects and events in our environments. Explaining how we do this means describin... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE