The Perception & Action Podcast

They unpack Gibson's idea of the ambient optic array as structured light surrounding the observer. They debate how vision begins in the environment, not the eye. Locomotion is shown as central for generating informative variation and revealing invariants. Occlusion, texture loss, and higher-order relations like Pythagorean invariants are used to illustrate how the world specifies perception.

Discussion of Gibson's ecological terms for surfaces, substance, and medium. Exploration of places, attached versus detached features, and navigation from a place-centered view. Examination of affordances, effectivities, and how skill and tools extend the body. Consideration of ambient light, ecological optics, information vs stimulation, and the ambient optic array.

A discussion of decision-making as a behavioral state transition emerging from performer-environment interactions. Demonstrations use finger coordination and gait shifts to show dynamical bifurcations. The ecological view challenges representational, brain-centered explanations and contrasts lab tasks with real sport behavior. The talk highlights affordances, attractors, and how perception, action, and decision-making form an integrated system.

A lively book-club discussion of Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception. They trace Gibson's intellectual journey and his practice of revising ideas. The conversation highlights the environment-first framing, mutuality of animal and environment, and the idea of behaviorally relevant units. They cover media, surfaces, texture laws, multiple transmission modalities, and how surfaces create perceptual information.

A deep dive into radical embodied cognitive science and why cognition can be seen as agent–environment dynamics rather than internal computation. Traces the history from structuralism and behaviorism to robotics and dynamical systems. Discusses experiments and models showing behavior arising without internal representations. Explores challenges like scaling and tasks thought to need internal representation.

An ecological take on flow in sport, framing it as a product of performer-environment interactions. Discussion of affordances that make perception both objective and subjective. Exploration of flow as self-organization and thermodynamic-like behavior. Connections between dexterity, intentionality, metastability, and real-world examples illustrating cognition’s dependence on the environment.

A lively tour of resonance as an alternative to brain-as-computer thinking. Everyday demos and Gibson's resonance metaphor show how organism and environment can lock together. Discussions cover neural reuse, multifractal timescales, nested coupling across scales, and how nonlinear resonance could underlie perceptual learning and flexible behavior.

Marianne Davies, a practitioner-researcher linking perception-action to sport and flow, and Andrew Wilson, an ecological perception researcher analyzing theory distinctions. They debate strong vs weak anticipation, how event structure and information guide action, connections to flow and animal behavior, deception and randomness in timing, and how affordances, coupling, and action shape anticipation.

A series kickoff that reframes thinking about problem solving, memory, intention and decision making from an ecological viewpoint. It contrasts classic brain-centered definitions with cognition as an emergent property of performer and environment. The host previews future deep dives into memory, decision-making, brain resonance and practical applications.

Join Andrew Wilson, a specialist in perception-action and ecological psychology, and Marianne Davies, a researcher focusing on perception-action topics, as they dive into compelling discussions on Turvey's ecological perspective. They explore the intricacies of affordances, their connection to intention, and the importance of lawful information for perception. Discover how optic flow influences action and the parallels between haptics and vision. The conversation also touches on the concept of dynamic touch, sensory integration, and the implications of educating attention versus intention.