Thursday, 5 December 2013

Help with a lay summary of my throwing research

I am applying for a research fellowship and part of the application is a 2500 character lay summary; see below. I would love all and any feedback from you about how well it scans for you.

I have also put a public copy of this and the scientific abstract on Google Drive that can take comments, if you are so inclined:

Lay summary
Scientific abstract

The remit of the section is
Provide a lay summary of your proposed project. This should be understandable by an A-level science student. Explain why you have chosen to work in this subject area and what it is about your proposed research that you find particularly exciting, interesting or important. Also explain the potential impact or wider benefits to society of your research. 

Imagine you are standing on the rocky shore of a lake with a friend, who challenges you to a competition: who will be first to hit that floating branch with a rock? You and your friend hunt for suitable rocks to throw, hefting them in your hand until you find some that feel just right. You then take turns throwing those rocks to try and hit the branch, getting closer on each throw until finally one of you scores a direct hit.

The simplicity of this commonplace game is deceptive. Throwing is actually so difficult that humans are the only species who have specialised in it. We have hands that can grasp objects; bodies that help make the precisely timed throwing action possible; and the ability to perceive which objects are most suitable for throwing. Evolutionary biologists believe that throwing provided our relatively small and weak ancestors with the ability to hunt large animals such as mammoths. But throwing still plays a large role in modern life, even if it is more likely to show up these days in the sports arena than on the plains of North America.

Thanks to sports science, we know a lot about what throwing looks like when it happens. What we don’t know is how a skilled thrower produces that throw in the first place. What makes an object ideal for throwing, and how do we perceive this when we heft that object? How do we perceive where our target is? And, most importantly, how do we use this information to select a throw that will move this object in just the right way so as to hit that target? This project is all about answering those questions. We will measure expert and novice throwers aiming to hit distant targets and track their movements with high speed cameras. We will then analyse this data using cutting edge techniques to identify how people produce the throws they do.

I find throwing fascinating because there are so many unanswered questions from many different disciplines. Psychologists want to know how we perceive the environment and produce the throw; neuroscientists want to know how our brain works to support this behaviour; evolutionary biologists want to know how all these skills came together in our species and how this might have supported the evolution of language. My colleagues and I have the tools we need to actually answer these questions, and we believe that the answers will be of interest to many people, including scientists but also coaches and athletes interested in improving their techniques and accelerating their learning.
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This game might seem an odd thing to want to study scientifically – it all seems so straight forward. But this simplicity is deceptive. Throwing to hit a target like this is actually a surprisingly difficult action that requires you to produce a precisely timed movement that suits the task at hand (how far is the target? How big?). Throwing is in fact so difficult that humans are the only species who have specialised in it. We have hands that can grasp objects, bodies that help make the precisely timed throw possible, and the ability to perceive which objects are most suitable for throwing. Evolutionary biologists believe that throwing provided our relatively small and weak ancestors with the ability to hunt large animals such as mammoths. But even today, throwing still plays a large role in modern life, even if it’s more likely to show up in the sports arena than on the plains of North America.


I find throwing fascinating because there are so many unanswered questions from so many different disciplines (e.g. psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology). But even better, my colleagues and I have the tools we need to actually answer these questions! We believe that the answers will be of interest to many people, including scientists but also coaches and athletes interested in improving their techniques and accelerating their learning. It’s rare to find a research question with such wide appeal, and this makes it a very exciting topic for me to work on as a scientist.

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Wednesday, 20 November 2013


Perception is an act of measurement, and, like all acts of measurement, it needs a scale in order to be useful. Think about placing something on your kitchen scales; all that actually happens is that the object presses on the scale and the scale registers that something has changed by some amount in response (the location of a tray, for example). In order to know what that change means, the change is presented to us on a calibrated scale (by moving a needle around to point at some number, for example). The needle always moves the same amount for a given weight but the resulting number can vary (you might have an imperial rather than metric kitchen scale, for example). Without the scale, you can say that one thing is heavier than another by noting that it moves the scale more (this is an ordinal evaluation) but you need the scale in order to say what the weight difference is (the metric evaluation).

Visual perception measures the world in terms of angles; objects subtend a certain number of visual angles that depends on their size, distance, etc. Your thumbnail held at arm's length is about 1° of visual angle. You can get ordinal information directly from angles (the fact that one thing is closer/bigger/etc) but you need a scale to get the metric information required to use vision to control action. For example, you need to perceive how big something actually is in useful units in order to scale your hand size appropriately when grasping it; relative size doesn't help. One of the fundamental questions in (visual) perception research is, therefore, what are the metric units that the perceptual systems use to scale their measurements?

Dennis Proffitt has been studying this question for a long time and is in favour of task-specific, body-scaled units. His evidence comes from studies in which people perceive their environments differently as a function of their ability to act on that environment. Probably the most well-known example is the study that showed people judge hills to be steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). The idea is that the backpack will make traversing that hill more difficult, and when the visual system measures the slope, it scales its measurement in line with this perceived effort. The hypothesis is that this is functional; it's a feature of the visual system that helps us plan appropriate actions. 

Perspectives on Psychological Science recently hosted a point-counterpoint debate on this topic. Firestone (2013) reviewed the literature on this type of action-scaling in perception and concluded that not only do the data not really support Proffitt's account, but that this account couldn't work even in principle. Proffitt (2013) rebutted Firestone's arguments and defended his view. I'm interested in this because Proffitt is at least a little ecological, and the basic idea he defends is one I would defend as well (although not in the form that he proposes). So who won?

Thursday, 7 November 2013

Replication will not save psychology

"Replication is our only hope." "No. There is another"
Psychology is big into replication these days. A lot of people think that a major problem with the field is that many important results have not been replicated, and that this is in part because journals don't like to publish replications (not original or sexy enough). 

I'm all for replication; it's part of good science. But I've never been that into the whole 'replication movement' that's kicking around, and the reason crystallised for me during a 4am baby feed: 


Friday, 11 October 2013

Embodiment and design; the affordances of pedestrian crossings




Friday, 20 September 2013

Social priming: Of course it only kind of works



Friday, 6 September 2013

Perceiving causes; why knowledge doesn't trump perception


Friday, 9 August 2013

Why don't giraffes fall over more often?


Friday, 2 August 2013

Is embodied cognition a "no brainer"?

Brains, HUH, yeah, what are they good for?
When we say "there are no mental representations", people often hear 'the brain doesn't do anything'. Because this is obviously not true, people sometimes just assume we simply cannot be talking sense about cognition and stop listening. 

Of course, we aren't saying this at all. Of course the brain is up to something. I've sketched out a few ideas here and here (some of which is finding it's way into a book chapter we're writing with Eric Charles), and we're working on a Research Topic at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience about how to do radical embodied cognitive science (to which any interested parties are warmly invited to contribute!).

So we aren't denying that the brain is interesting and important. We just think it's doing something very different from what mainstream cognitive neuroscience thinks it is doing. Our embodied cognition (Wilson & Golonka, 2013) redefines the job description for the brain. Whatever it is that the brain is doing, it doesn't have to be representing anything (this is what the 'radical' part means). Instead, the brain is a key player in the system that interacts with information to produce behaviour, and that is a very different thing. 

This basic fact motivates Sabrina's proposed 'new direction for psychology' (which obviously I endorse too). Her argument is that psychologists are interested in explaining behaviour, and that the primary external cause of behaviour is the various kinds of information we are able to interact with. There are interesting contributions to behaviour made by internal factors, including the brain, but these, she argues, have their effects by modifying how and when we interact with different sources of information. Given this, psychology should get very interested in information as quickly as possible in order to really start explaining behaviour; it's paid off in spades in perception and action and there's no reason why it won't pay off everywhere else too (see Sabrina's post on language here and here, plus our handy dandy Frontiers paper).

Of course the brain is a major player in cognitive systems, but in order to really know what it's up to, we have to be sure to ask it the right questions, and this means doing things in the right order. So the argument that 'the behaviour I study clearly requires internal support, and that therefore there are representations doing that work and the brain is important' is not actually an argument against doing your work from an embodied perspective. Throw away your assumptions about representations (see the section of links 'Representations & Why We Should Abandon Them' on the Rough Guide for more reasons), get serious about the information present in your task to support behaviour and only then start speculating about the form of the internal support that is required. We think you'll be surprised where you end up when representations are not the default. 

And please tell us what you're up to - we'd love to help if we can!


Thursday, 18 July 2013

Ecological indirect perception



Tuesday, 9 July 2013

A new direction for psychology

I have my doubts about psychology. 



Here's the claim:


Here's the argument:

Monday, 1 July 2013




Thursday, 6 June 2013

Misperceiving the affordances in anorexia nervosa

Alice had a few problems with doors too


Friday, 17 May 2013

The embodied cognition of Tesco's gendered toys


Tesco got in trouble on the internet last week for having toy chemistry sets labelled as being for boys, not girls in their online store. There's a lot of noise about how inappropriate all this gender labelling is (and rightly so - it's everywhere and it's awful). Lots of potential customers are being very annoyed all over Twitter: so why does Tesco do this? Why is this sort of thing so very common? Oddly, I think an embodied task analysis (using our 4 questions which we describe in our Frontiers paper) might shed some light on this question, while also perhaps serving as an accessible example of what it is we're up to with our work.

The thing that got me thinking was this: a Tesco spokesperson said on Twitter that “Toy signage is currently based on research and how our customers tell us they like to shop in our stores”. No one believed them, with replies ranging from 'what kind of research' to the less useful but more common 'I would never tell you to do this so what the hell?'. I think they are telling the truth, and I think their behaviour can be readily explained using our four key questions. More importantly, I think it reveals how we can change Tesco's behaviour, and the answer means knowing about the extended system from which that behaviour emerges.

Friday, 26 April 2013

The Information Available in Pictures





Thursday, 18 April 2013

Embodied cognition in practice - some thoughts and an open invitation


  1. What is the task to be solved?
  2. What are the resources available to solve the task?


I want to do two things with this post

Wednesday, 20 March 2013

Bojana Danilovic, the woman who sees the world upside down

Rare brain condition leaves woman seeing world upside down









Tuesday, 12 March 2013

A taxonomy of information

Over the past several months I've been thinking about how perception falls within a hierarchy of types of information use. This was spurred by my ideas about an ecological approach to language, in which perceptual information and linguistic information are distinguished on the basis of the relationship between event structure and meaning. As part of this work, I defined perception as the apprehension of structure in an energy array where 1) the structure is specific to an event or property in the world, 2) where the meaning of the structure (for that organism in that task) is about that event or property (i.e., a dog's bark is about the event of a barking dog), and 3) where the meaning of the structure must be learned (or, more correctly, where an organism must learn how to coordinate action with respect to this structure). I arrived at this definition because it seemed to capture the ecological approach to perception and because it makes it obvious how perceptual information and linguistic information differ (also because I am crazy-obsessive about definitions).

Thursday, 28 February 2013

The affordances of objects and pictures of those objects



Tuesday, 12 February 2013



This paper


Friday, 8 February 2013

Learning the affordances for maximum distance throwing


Friday, 1 February 2013

Newton International Fellowships 2013









Further details are available from the Newton International Fellowships website:

Thursday, 24 January 2013




Thursday, 17 January 2013

Hefting for a Maximum Distance Throw



Friday, 11 January 2013

Do our fingers wrinkle in the wet to improve our grip?



Thursday, 3 January 2013

Using coordination to study learning across the lifespan


