Andrew D Wilson

LATEST ARTICLES ( 206 )

• Do Our Fingers Wrinkle in the Wet to Improve Our Grip?

  

  If you sit in the bath for more than 10 minutes or so, you'll notice that your fingers get wrinkled like a prune. People thought for a while that this was a... Read more

  Posted on 11 January 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Using Coordination to Study Learning Across the Lifespan

  

  What happens to our ability to learn new movement skills as we age? There is surprisingly little research on this topic; a relatively recent review... Read more

  Posted on 03 January 2013 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our First Paper Based on the Blog is out in Time for Christmas!

  

  Last year we were invited to contribute to a special issue of Avant, an interdisciplinary open access journal that publishes in English and Polish. Read more

  Posted on 25 December 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience - A Frontiers Research Topic

  A couple of years ago, Sabrina and I were chatting about the brain and running into the problem that we just don't know enough about how it works. Read more

  Posted on 17 December 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Task Dynamics of Throwing to a Maximum Distance

  

  In my last post I went over the formal concept of task dynamics as a way of analysing a task to identify the affordances in that task. Read more

  Posted on 06 December 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Task Dynamics And The Information They Create

  Over the next weeks I want to turn my attention to a detailed account of the process by which you go about studying affordances (formalised as task dynamics) an... Read more

  Posted on 30 November 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Psychological Science...meet Me at Camera 3

  Psychological Science, I think we need to talk. I was reading this farewell from your outgoing editor, and it would all be nice enough if I hadn't also just rea... Read more

  Posted on 15 November 2012 LANGUAGES, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Do We Perceive Which Objects Afford Throwing the Farthest?

  

  Previous work has established that people with throwing experience can perceive the affordance of 'throwability'. If you let these people heft objects with a... Read more

  Posted on 09 November 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Giving Children with Movement Problems a Leg up with Robots

  

  Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a surprisingly common problem; it's thought that 6-8% of school aged children are diagnosable. Read more

  Posted on 24 October 2012 HEALTH, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Does Linguisitic Information Mean What It Does?

  Sabrina has been working on a series of posts on an ecological analysis of language (here, here and here, plus more on the way). Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Breaking the (ecological) Law: Why Illusory Sounds Don't Make for Safer Cars

  

  Electric cars are great for the environment, but they come with a problem - they're too quiet, and this makes them dangerous to pedestrians used to the loud... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2012 SCIENCE

• A Way Forward on Specification

  It's been a while since we've blogged; it's been a crazy summer and we've been insanely busy, but things are settling back down. Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Small Effect Size Effect - Why Do We Put Up With Small Effects?

  

  Small effects sometimes matter - but psychology can do betterOne of the things that bugs me about 'embodied' cognition research is that the effects, while... Read more

  Posted on 17 August 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 'Embodied Cognition', by Lawrence Shapiro

  

  'Embodied Cognition', by philosopher Lawrence Shapiro, is not a book advocating for any particular brand of embodiment. Instead, Shapiro has performed an... Read more

  Posted on 27 July 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cracking the Tough Nut of Chimp Tool Use

  

  A paper just out in PLoSOne reports that chimpanzees, given some experience and enough of a weight difference, prefer to use heavier hammer stones when... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Evolution vs.Specification (Specification V)

  One of Gibson's key contributions was to reveal that it was possible for the optic array to specify a meaningful property of the world. Read more

  Posted on 06 July 2012 PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sabrina & I Were Interviewed for 'The Psych Files Podcast'

  Michael Britt (@mbritt on Twitter) runs the popular Psych Files podcast, which is downloaded by thousands of students and interested people. Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Individual Variation in the Use of Perceptual Information (Specification IV)

  If it is the case that perception requires the use of specifying variables, then there should be no individual variation in what information variables people... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Non-Specifying Variables in the Perception of Collisions (Specification III)

  

  Part of Withagen's critique of specification and whether it's necessary to underpin direct perception is a brief review of some empirical literature that shows... Read more

  Posted on 15 June 2012 PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 4 PhD Studentships in Psychology

  We are advertising four, fully-funded studentships in Psychology over here at Leeds Metropolitan University. I've got two projects listed on embodied... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2012 LANGUAGES, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE