Situated anticipation

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as ‘higher’ cognition in terms of engaging with affordances.

     

Direct perception in context: radical empiricist reflections on the medium

Synthese - Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from...     

Temporalizing ontology: a case for pragmatic emergence

Synthese - Despite an attempt to break with the hierarchical picture in traditional emergentist thought, non-standard accounts of emergence are often still committed to a premise that ontology is...     

A reversal of the search asymmetry favouring negative schematic faces

Quite a number of studies have tested whether the affective valence of stimuli can guide attention in visual search. Studies using schematic affective faces frequently found a relative search asymmetry (RSA), with more efficient search for a negative face in a friendly crowd than vice versa. Whether, however, this effect relates to differences in affect or to the confounded differences in perceptual features is unknown. The present study proposes and tests a similarity-based account for the RSA. Experiments 1a and 1b first replicate the typical RSA. Experiment 2 shows that the stimulus could be simplified to some degree without losing the RSA. Experiments 3 and 4, finally, demonstrate that the RSA could be reversed by a rather simple stimulus change, that leaves the facial expression intact. It is concluded that the strong dependence of the RSA on stimulus factors seriously questions the claim that emotional factors drive the RSA.     

Severity of childhood attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder--a risk factor for personality disorders in adult life?

Some evidence points to an increased rate of cluster B and C personality disorders (PDs) in adult ADHD patients. In order to assess axis II disorders comprehensively we used the diagnostic instrument of the WHO. In sixty adult out-patients with ADHD according to DSM-IV criteria PDs were assessed with the International PD Examination (IPDE) and severity of childhood ADHD with the Wender-Utah-Rating Scale (WURS). We found at least one PD in 25% of cases. Cluster C PDs were most common (36.6%) followed by Cluster B (23.3%) and A (8.3%). Avoidant (21.7%) and borderline (18.3%) were the most frequent single PD entities. ADHD patients with PD suffered from significantly more severe childhood ADHD compared to those without co-occurring PD. Applying the IPDE we confirmed a high number of PDs among adult ADHD patients. Our findings point to a higher vulnerability for the development of PDs in patients with severe childhood ADHD.     

Laying down a path in talking

This paper aims to provide a starting point for a non-representational approach to language. It will do so by undoing some of the reifying tendencies that are at the heart of the ontology of scientific psychology. Although non-representational theories are beginning to emerge, they remain committed to giving explanations in terms of ontological structures that are independent of human activity. If they maintain this commitment it is unlikely that they will displace representationalism in domains such as language. By following some of Wittgenstein’s remarks on language, I explain the phenomenon of reification by carefully considering the formative, situational flow of language—thus without invoking representations. In this way, the paper sketches a direction of approach for a non-representational theory of language, undercutting the most important assumptions that justify an explanatory ontology devoid of human activity.     

Reductive and Emergent Views on Motor Learning in Rehabilitation Practice

To allow different views on motor learning to inform rehabilitation research, the authors aimed to explicate a frequently missed yet fundamental difference in starting point of such views. By considering how rehabilitation in practice answers the question of what parts an activity consists of, reductive and emergent approaches to motor learning are identified and traced throughout rehabilitation practice. The authors show that when a task is cut up along reductive dimensions while also apparently relying on emergent components, this unequally favors the reductive approach and acts to limit the views on motor learning available. By showing the approaches in practice, the authors hope to inspire an awareness that brings both approaches the opportunity to independently inform research so that new theories and practices can proliferate.     

The Emergence of an Action System: The Organization of Gaze in Creating Novel Tools

This exploratory study examined the role of gaze in the emergence of a new action system for tool making. We designed an experiment in which a novel tool had to be created. Participants had to perform a task that required them to construct a tool for scooping, prodding, or cutting from a set of objects. We monitored gaze and the objects manipulated over learning. Performance got more efficient across Trials A through C: trial duration as well as the number of fixations decreased, whereas the goal-directedness of gaze (i.e., the percentage of fixations directed at the objects ultimately used in tool construction) increased. Trial A had only a few goal-directed fixations before trial-and-error constructing commenced. In Trial B the goal-directedness also started low but increased sharply during subsequent exploration. In Trial C, gaze was highly goal directed from the start and construction started immediately. This demonstrated that early in learning gaze is part of exploratory and performatory acts over a short time span, whereas later in learning gaze served a behavioral unit of a longer timescale. Gaze therefore gets organized to accommodate a new functional unit of action.     

Ecological Neuroscience: From Reduction to Proliferation of Our Resources

Abstract

In one common view, human activity is explained by neural processes, because these implement psychological functions that underlie overt behavior. In the ecological approach, such accounts are taken to be nonexplanatory, because they reify the phenomena they wish to explain. We argue that ecological psychology offers an antidote to such reification with concepts such as resonance, attunement, and anticipation, if they are considered as relational, world-involving activities. Our main claim is that we can understand our scientific explanations of neural phenomena as itself an attunement to sociomaterial practices. This allows us to understand neuroscientific processes as conditions that enable a resonating organism-environment system. In this view, neuroscientific and psychological phenomena are usually found in widely different sociomaterial practices. But we can occasionally achieve coordination between those practices. Establishing that a dependence of a psychological phenomenon on neural events holds is an achievement of a novel practice that we developed and to which we resonate. Thus the more we want to understand what happens inside the nervous system, the more we also need to scrutinize the sociomaterial environment in which we do so.