Thread by @PsychScientists

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK Here’s a paper that explains the mechanisms of the ecological approach; it’s cites a lot of the relevant empirical literature cognitioninaction.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/golonk…

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK Mechanism research is about identifying the real parts and processes involved in producing a behaviour. In the ecological approach, they two main types of pieces are affordances and information

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK On information: there’s lots of work on the outfielder problem examining the possible parts involved. Turns out prediction plays no role, but two optical variables do, eg jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?a… and psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-02…

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK Gibson’s best information analysis was on occlusion vs ceasing to exist; I review and link to the papers here psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-in…. Behaviour AND perceptual experience depend on the information that’s present

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK We know about information variables that support visually guided locomotion (link.springer.com/content/pdf/10…), reaching (palab.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources/Publ…), shape perception (palab.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources/Publ…)

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK That should get your lit search working on information.

Now, affordances, but after I do the school run

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK OK, where was I? Right, affordances; the other proposed real parts of ecological perception-action mechanisms. How do they work?

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK Affordances are a way of describing an object from the point of view of an organism's perceptual systems. Perception is measurement, and the metric our our perceptual metric system is our effectivities (ability to act on an object)

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK So we've known for a while now that when you describe objects on this metric, we observe that people's behaviour is clearly organised with respect to that description. The first study was Warren's classic on judging stair climbability cog.brown.edu/research/ven_l…

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK You can run these kind of judgment studies on lots of things, like perception of aperture passability (cog.brown.edu/Research/ven_l…) or the perception of length, reachability etc from dynamic touch (sciencedirect.com/science/articl…)

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK The gold standard measure of perception is the action it supports, though (palab.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources/Publ…) so you eventually need to close the loop and reconnect perception to action

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK One example is Bingham's work on the perception of throwability. This work has people select objects they perceive they could throw the best AND has them throw them, in various combination (e.g. palab.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources/Publ…)

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK He and I and Zhu have extended this to the affordances of targets to be hit, where we mathematically specify the affordance description of the target (cognitioninaction.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/wilson…).

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK All this works helps us quantify that people's behaviour is closely aligned to the affordance; I reviewed it here cognitioninaction.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/wilson…

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK So, to answer your question: there is decades of research investigating the real parts and processes the ecological approach proposes are combined to form the mechanisms of perception and action. Those are affordances and information, and there's a great deal of support for both

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK Oh, almost forgot effectivities! These are the complement of affordances, the action capabilities of the organism. These matter too, and there's lots of work here

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK It tends to focus on (re)calibration following perturbation (eg messing with perception of body width tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.120…, false feedback on object size/shape/location, e.g. palab.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources/Publ…).

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK You can also just recruit people with different bodies (e.g. tall vs short cog.brown.edu/research/ven_l…, adult vs child, palab.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources/Publ…, people w/ or w/out anorexia, psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/misper…) - that sort of thing

@RCGreyMattersUK @erikwillander @DCGreyMattersUK So, that should get your literature search usefully focused. Good luck!