Andrew D Wilson

LATEST ARTICLES ( 200 )

• 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

• (Re)Introducing "The Purple Perils"

  'Note for a tentative redefinition of behaviour', 1975. James J Gibson ran an afternoon seminar for many years at Cornell. This seminar was widely attended by... Read more

  Posted on 10 April 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Kind of Thing is an Information Variable? The (Annoying) Case of Tau

  

  The central contribution of the ecological approach is the idea of ecological information. Information variables are higher order relations that remain invarian... Read more

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

• Are We Infomation Processers? (A Brief Note)

  

  I thought about it a lot and I kept thinking: OK, he’s right, I guess, the information is in the light, it has to be there, because where else are you going to... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It's Time to Relabel the Brain

  

  Another day, another study finds that 'visual' cortex is activated by something other than information from the eyes:A research team from the Hebrew University... Read more

  Posted on 20 January 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Size-Weight Illusion Induced Through Human Echolocation

  

  Echolocation is the ability to use sound to perceive the spatial layout of your surroundings (the size and shape and distance to objects, etc). Lots of animals... Read more

  Posted on 15 January 2015 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Do People Really Not Know What Running Looks Like?

  

  Faster, higher, stronger - wobbly!When we run, our arms and legs swing in an alternating rhythm. Your left arm swings back as your left leg swings forward,... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2014 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE