The Perception & Action Podcast

A preview of new coach education workshops and how to schedule them. Tools and resources for building better presentations and interactive sessions. Workshop focus on ecological dynamics, representative practice design, and coaching methods. Ways to link coaching with strength, rehab, and analytics. A brief announcement of a forthcoming book exploring cognition, neurodiversity, and brain recovery topics.

A lively dive into Gibson's concept of affordances and why it shifted how we think about perception. They trace how opportunities for action exist independently and can appear or vanish as environments change. The conversation covers skill learning, calibration across the lifespan, nested action possibilities, and practical implications for sports, coaching, and robotics.

They unpack Gibsonian ecological information and how it differs from Shannon-style information. They explore events, directionality, and how optic arrays change with observer movement. They discuss perceiving self-motion and body parts visually, multisensory event structure, and how perception specifies affordances and action possibilities.

Andrew Wilson, a cognitive scientist exploring ecological approaches to perception and action, explains what representations are and why they are proposed. He contrasts internal models with information in the environment. He describes higher‑order invariants, neural resonance to information, how learning reshapes neural dynamics, and how language and symbolic thought might emerge.

Discussion of how route previewing shapes movement fluency in climbing and why experts benefit most. Exploration of gaze strategies used during route inspection and their links to performance. Reframing opponent statistics and advance information as informational constraints that guide intention. Practical coaching ideas for training previewing, attention education, and using simulated practice with situational info.

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.