What Science Has to Offer the World of Coaching

It started, as these things always do, on Twitter. Someone posted a training drill they were excited about (kids kicking a ball against a wall) and I made a comment to suggest I didn't think this was the most football-useful activity I had ever seen. That's all I intended to say, but enough people (coaches, mainly) got mad at me that more was said,...

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Lecture 9: The Space Enigmas II: Kant, the Nature of Geometry, and the Geometry of Nature (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

The first space enigma was the fact that vision lives in the two dimensions of Flatland, but produces an experience of three dimensional Spaceland. You can't logic or experience your way from Flatland to Spaceland (as described in the famous book). Berkeley tried to solve this problem by providing a guide, in the form of the Spaceland-dwelling body,...

Jan 2023

Trip Report from the Uncontrolled Manifold

I've spent the past few months getting a new paper to the 'complete first draft' stage (you can find a copy here in the meantime; it's still got some work to do though). It's about affordances, using targeted long-distance throwing as the task, and it's my first dip into the world of the uncontrolled manifold. I collected this data over five years ago,...

Dec 2022

Are Illusions Even a Thing?

Traditional vision science is very excited about illusions. These are cases when perception seems to break down; there is a mismatch between what is out there and what we experience, and traditional approaches consider these breakdowns as clues to how vision has to work, given what it is working with. Ecological psychologists don’t like illusions. Typically,...

Sep 2022

Lecture 8: The Space Enigmas I: Berkeley (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

One of the big problems that emerges from all the proceeding discussions of perception is how we are able to perceive space. Space has been considered as a mathematical concept (in terms of Euclidean geometry), as a psychological concept (a construction of the mind) but never really as a biological, ecological concept. This first chapter about space...

Jun 2022

The medium for direct perception (Notes on Van Dijk & Kiverstein, 2020)

The ecological approach has hit a point in its history where it has become interested in expanding its scope, to go beyond the real time coordination and control of action. There are many challenges from non-ecological cognitive science about how to tackle representation-hungry problems, and how to conceptualise things like language, social behaviour,...

Dec 2021

Is Indirect Perception Plausible?

There are two basic ways perception might work to let us experience the world in behaviourally relevant ways. Direct perception is the idea that perception only requires two components; the environment and the organism. Indirect perception is the idea that perception requires at least three components; the environment, the organism, and at least one...

Nov 2021

Is Direct Perception Plausible? Ecological Information

We're in the home stretch of working through how direct perception is, at least, an option, and how the ecological approach in particular attempts to make it work. We've talked about what direct vs indirect means, the kinds of properties direct perception needs to be out there in order to work, and affordances/effectivities-as-dispositions as the specific...

Nov 2021

Is Direct Perception Plausible? The Case for Affordances-as-Dispositions

The first post in this series laid out the rules for what makes a theory of perception direct or indirect. In order to avoid having to require organisms to somehow figure out behaviourally relevant properties (indirect perception), direct perception requires that such properties are out there already, ready and able to be detected. Such properties are...

Nov 2021

Are Affordances Plausible? Updating Some Intuitions

In the previous post, I laid out the basic distinction between direct and indirect theories of perception. The basic issue is how to get to behaviourally relevant properties. Such properties of the world have to be partly about the organism, and not just the world; not just 'mass', which is something about the world, but 'moveability' which is something...

Oct 2021