Andrew D Wilson

LATEST ARTICLES ( 206 )

• Embodiment and Design; the Affordances of Pedestrian Crossings

  

  I'm a sucker for good design. I'm interested in things that work well because they are designed with the right task in mind. Take the greatest potato masher of... Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Priming: Of Course It Only Kind of Works

  

  Social priming is the field of research about how thinking about or interacting with something (like warm coffee, or old age) can affect later, vaguely related... Read more

  Posted on 20 September 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Perceiving Causes; Why Knowledge Doesn't Trump Perception

  

  You're an organism, wandering round the world. Some stuff happens; then, other stuff happens. How do we know whether the first stuff caused the second stuff to... Read more

  Posted on 06 September 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Don't Giraffes Fall Over More Often?

  

  One of the major reasons psychologists think we have mental representations is to overcome delays in the nervous system. Information has to come from sensors... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is Embodied Cognition a "no Brainer"?

  

  Brains, HUH, yeah, what are they good for?When we say "there are no mental representations", people often hear 'the brain doesn't do anything'. Read more

  Posted on 02 August 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ecological Indirect Perception

  I want to follow on from Sabrina's important posts about information, and why psychology should be about information for the forseeable future. Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A New Direction for Psychology

  I have my doubts about psychology. Anyone who's read this blog before knows that Andrew and I are fairly opinionated about what we think is right and wrong... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Grounded Vs. Embodied Cognition: a (hopefully Uncontentious) Note on Terminology

  

  Our Frontiers paper made the case that embodied cognition is, by definition, a fairly radical affair. We argue ...if perception-action couplings and resources... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Misperceiving the Affordances in Anorexia Nervosa

  

  Alice had a few problems with doors tooIt's always hard to evaluate the impact of your research, although funding bodies are increasingly asking that we do so. Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Embodied Cognition of Tesco's Gendered Toys

  

  Tesco got in trouble on the internet last week for having toy chemistry sets labelled as being for boys, not girls in their online store. Read more

  Posted on 17 May 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Information Available in Pictures

  

  I've become fascinated with the problem of pictures and how they relate to the things they are pictures of. One reason is the regular use of pictures of... Read more

  Posted on 26 April 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Embodied Cognition in Practice - Some Thoughts and an Open Invitation

  Since our Frontiers paper on embodied cognition came out, Sabrina and I have been giving talks and fielding questions in emails about what we're trying to... Read more

  Posted on 18 April 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Woman Who Sees the World Upside Down

  

  I came across an utterly fascinating case study on Twitter the other day (via Mo Costandi; see this video too): Rare brain condition leaves woman seeing world... Read more

  Posted on 20 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Taxonomy of Information

  

  Over the past several months I've been thinking about how perception falls within a hierarchy of types of information use. This was spurred by my ideas about... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2013 SCIENCE

• The Affordances of Objects and Pictures of Those Objects

  

  People interested in how perception and action affect cognition have begun talking about affordances. This should be great news; the ecological approach suggest... Read more

  Posted on 28 February 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 'Embodied Cognition Is Not What You Think It Is' - the Paper!

  

  Whoops, we did it again - a paper based on the blog! This time we are in press at Frontiers in Psychology, in a Research Topic on embodied cognition, with a... Read more

  Posted on 12 February 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Learning the Affordances for Maximum Distance Throwing

  

  Over the last couple of posts, I have reviewed data that shows people can perceive which object they can, in fact, throw the farthest ahead of time by hefting... Read more

  Posted on 08 February 2013 SCIENCE

• Newton International Fellowships 2013

  If you from anywhere other than the UK and are looking for a post-doc opportunity in the UK, and are trained in perception, action, language or embodied... Read more

  Posted on 01 February 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is Hefting to Perceive the Affordance for Throwing a Smart Perceptual Mechanism?

  

  In the last post, I reviewed Geoff's first paper looking at whether people can perceive the affordance for throwing an object to a maximum distance and a first... Read more

  Posted on 24 January 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Hefting for a Maximum Distance Throw

  

  From the task dynamic analysis of throwing for maximum distance, we've identified the fact that for a given release angle and maximum release velocity, there... Read more

  Posted on 17 January 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE