Thematic relations affect similarity via commonalities

Thematic relations are an important source of perceived similarity. For instance, the rowing theme of boats and oars increases their perceived similarity. The mechanism of this effect, however, has not been specified previously. We investigated whether thematic relations affect similarity by increasing commonalities or by decreasing differences. In Experiment 1, thematic relations affected similarity more than difference, thereby producing a non-inversion of similarity and difference. Experiment 2 revealed substantial individual variability in the preference for thematic relations and, consequently in the non-inversion of ratings. In sum, the experiments demonstrated a non-inversion of similarity and difference that was caused by thematic relations and exhibited primarily by a subgroup of participants. These results indicate that thematic relations affect perceived similarity by increasing the contribution of commonalities rather than by decreasing the contribution of differences

Gibson’s ecological approach – a model for the benefits of a theory driven psychology

Unlike most other sciences, psychology has no true core theory to guide a coherent research programme. It does have James J Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception, however, which we suggest should serve as an example of the benefits a good theory brings to psychological research. Here we focus on an example of how the ecological approach has served as a guide to discovery, shaping and constraining a recent hypothesis about how humans perform coordinated rhythmic movements (Bingham 2004a, b). Early experiments on this task were framed in a dynamic pattern approach. This phenomenological, behavioural framework (e.g. Jeka & Kelso 1989) classifies the behaviour of complex action systems in terms of the key order parameters, and describes the dynamical stability of the system as it responds to perturbations. Dynamical systems, however, while a valuable toolkit, is not a theory of behaviour, and this style of research is unable to successfully predict data it is not explicitly designed to fit. More recent work by Bingham & colleagues has used dynamical systems to formalise hypotheses derived from Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and action, with a particular emphasis on perceptual information. The resulting model (Bingham 2001, 2004a, b; Snapp-Childs et al. 2011) has had great success with both the phenomena it was designed to explain as well as a wide range of empirical results from a version of the task it is not specifically designed to explain (specifically, learning a novel coordination). This model and the research programme that produced it stand as an example of the value of theory driven research, and we use it to illustrate the contemporary importance the ecological approach has for psychology

Imagined Steps: Mental Simulation of Coordinated Rhythmic Movements Effects on Pro-Sociality

Rhythmically coordinating with a partner can increase pro-sociality, but pro-sociality does not appear to change in proportion to coordination success, or particular classes of coordination. Pro-social benefits may have more to do with simply coordinating in a social context than the details of the actual coordination (Cross, Wilson, & Golonka, 2016). This begs the question, how stripped down can a coordination task be and still affect pro-sociality? Would it be sufficient simply to imagine coordinating with others? Imagining a social interaction can lead to many of the same effects as actual interaction (Crisp & Turner, 2009). We report the first experiments to explore whether imagined coordination affects pro-sociality similarly to actual coordination. Across two experiments and over 450 participants, mentally simulated coordination is shown to promote some, but not all, of the pro-social consequences of actual coordination. Imagined coordination significantly increased group cohesion and deindividuation, but did not consistently affect cooperation

A Remedy called Affordance Gibson's ecological approach -a model for the benefits of a theory driven psychology

Abstract Unlike most other sciences, psychology has no true core theory to guide a coherent research programme. It does have James J Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception, however, which we suggest should serve as an example of the benefits a good theory brings to psychological research. Here we focus on an example of how the ecological approach has served as a guide to discovery, shaping and constraining a recent hypothesis about how humans perform coordinated rhythmic movements (Bingham 2004a, b). Early experiments on this task were framed in a dynamic pattern approach. This phenomenological, behavioural framework (e.g. Keywords: Gibson; Bingham; ecological psychology; theory; coordinated rhythmic movement. AVANT Volume III, Number 2/2012 www.avant.edu.pl/en 41 When particle physicists recently found that some neutrinos had apparently travelled faster than light Similarly, the core of modern biology is the theory of evolution. When creationists say 'we can't see how a bacterial flagellum which rotates like an outboard motor could possibly have evolved, it's irreducibly complex ' (e.g. Dembski 2002), biologists are entitled to say 'we have evidence that lots and lots of other things have evolved. Let's see if we can figure out how the flagellum did it, and in the meantime, we're going to operate on the assumption that it did evolve until we have strong evidence to the contrary'. The resulting theory driven empirical work then happily led to a coherent evolutionary story for the flagellum (e.g. Musgrave 2004). Psychology has many individual theories describing isolated phenomena but no core theory of behaviour to guide our research, no analogue to the theories of relativity or evolution. This is beginning to cost the discipline. Recently Bem (2011) published a series of experiments purporting to demonstrate evidence of precognition. Bem took several standard psychological experiments and reversed the temporal ordering of the elements. Analyses showed a series of statistically significant effects that suggested that events in the near future were affecting earlier performance. For example, he showed participants a list of words then tested their free recall. After this test, he trained the participants on a subset of the words, and showed that there was improved recall of those words, even though the training had come last. Because he followed the rules of experimental design and had statistically significant results, the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology was unable to find a reason to reject the paper. The editors only noted that "the reported findings conflict with our own beliefs about causality and that we find them extremely puzzling" (Judd & Gawronski 2011: 406, emphasis ours). Note that the cited conflict was with their beliefs about causality, and not, for example, the laws of physics and what they have to say about time travel. This should have been an opportunity for Bem to discuss problems with the standard methods and analyses that produced these physically impossible results (the approach taken in a companion paper by Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom & van der Maas 2011). Instead, his discussion was framed in terms of a loose reading of quantum physics and an appeal to psychologists to keep an open mind. The paper simply described what had happened, without any real attempt to explain how it had happened. A failure to replicate Bem's key effects has recently been published Psychology needs a core theory in order to mature as a science. Theory serves a dual role in science. It allows the scientist to identify when a result is likely to be anomaly (e.g. faster-than-light neutrinos), and, more critically, it provides a guide to discovery to A Remedy called Affordance 42 structure the search for explanations of novel phenomena (e.g. the bacterial flagellum). The Bem experiments demonstrate how, without a theory, psychology is unable to deal rigorously with anomalous results. This paper will discuss how an example psychological theory (James J. Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception; The ecological approach -a brief review of some key points Gibson famously begins his 1979 book on visual perception with an extended analysis of the environment organisms inhabit, rather than the more traditional starting point of the anatomy of the eye. The reason is simple: Gibson knows that in order to understand why the anatomy of the eye is the way it is, we need to first understand what kinds of properties it has evolved to detect. The traditional analyses note that the eye works similarly to a camera, with a lens that focuses light (presumably an image) upside down onto a pixelated retina that varies wildly in resolution and which contains an enormous blind spot. The analysis then takes this poor quality image as the basis of visual perception and begins to investigate the internal (representational) structures that are now required to enrich the image to a point where it can support the rich phenomenology of visual experience (e.g. Marr 1982; Rock 1985). Gibson's first powerful move is simply to recognise that the eye is not the starting point of the analysis. Eyes evolved under selective pressure to enable access to information in the environment that could support action and guide behaviour. The question then becomes, what is that information, and what is it about? This move pays off immediately. If the function of vision is to support action, then vision must provide us with access to information about action relevant properties of the world. Organisms don't need to know how far away an object is; instead, we need to know whether we can reach it, and if so can we grasp it (e.g. Mon-Williams & Bingham 2011); or perhaps we need to know whether it is approaching us on an interception path, and if so do we have enough time to respond by evading or intercepting the object (e.g. Tresilian 1999). We therefore need to know about properties of objects measured according to our ability to act with respect to those properties, and how the current layout of properties is varying over time. Gibson coined the term affordances to describe the organism-scaled action relevant properties of the environment, 24 and changes in the layout of the organism's environment are ecological events. Gibson's analysis of the environment identifies two key facts. First, the basis for vision is not light, per se, but structure in light. The clearest demonstration of this is the Ganzfeld experiments, in which an observer is presented with plenty of light in an entirely homogeneous light field and perceives nothing at all Second, organisms are always moving throughout the environment. This motion provides us with a constantly changing sample of the optic array, and, more importantly, the changes are not random. Instead, the structure in the array will transform smoothly and in ways specific to the relation between the organism and the ecological properties of the world that caused the structure. Higher order relational structure in this optic flow, which is caused by these world properties, can remain invariant over the transformation, and these invariants are specific to the properties that caused them. These invariant features are therefore specifying information about affordances and events, and an organism that can detect the information is directly perceiving ecologically relevant properties of the world The ecological approach serves contemporary psychology and cognitive science in two ways. First, while Gibson's theory is not a complete theory of behaviour, it is an excellent foundation for one, because it provides a detailed account of how we perceive the environment that changes how we treat perception. Direct perception of affordance properties changes the job description for any cognitive, post-perceptual processes, from inference about the source of the information to using that information to coordinate and control skilled action. If you have direct access to action relevant properaccount, but the difference is not crucial for the current discussion; in both cases affordances are considered to be real and capable of creating information. 25 Ecological optics has since been refined into the theory of kinematic specification of dynamics (e.g. Runeson & Frykholm 1983 ). Properties of the world are defined dynamically, in terms of both their motions (kinematics) and the forces that caused those motions (kinetics). Perception has access only to kinematic information (this is the perceptual bottleneck; Bingham 1988) but this is capable of specifying dynamical properties. A Remedy called Affordance 44 ties such as affordances, for example, there is no need for any internal process that infers the existence of the affordance from a more limited set of perceptual information. In other words, any theory about behaviours that depend on perception (i.e. all of them) should work out what Gibsonian perception has already done to allow the behaviour to emerge before placing all the responsibility in the central nervous system. In this way, the ecological approach should be treated as the starting point for any theory of behaviour. In particular, embodied cognition researchers are beginning to realise that if cognition is a system which spans body, brain and environment (e.g. Clark 2008) we need a way for information to flow through this system in order to softly assemble (temporarily couple) the task relevant components. The ecological approach has many of the relevant tools already in place (specifically, methods for identifying the relevant perceptual information and how action systems use this information to coordinate functional responses to a given task; Bingham 1988) and is therefore already ideally placed to support extended, embodied cognition (Barrett 2011). Chemero The second contribution of Gibson's theory (and the focus of this article) is how it stands as an example of what a theory driven research programme in psychology looks like and is capable of. Specifically, the theory serves as a guide to discovery, capable of driving forward an empirical research programme by asking the right questions and constraining what counts as a legitimate answer. Instead of simply summarising and describing what happened in an experiment (as is common throughout cognitive psychology), the ecological approach postulates a theory about the nature of perceptual information and what it means that enables researchers to explain their results and make novel predictions that go beyond the current data. In the next section, we will review a recent programme of empirical work on the identity of the information specifying the relative phase between two coordinated rhythmic movements. This work, led by Geoff Bingham in concert with a variety of collaborators, has culminated in a perception-action model of the task in which, for the first time, a specific hypothesis about information features prominently AVANT Volume III, Number 2/2012 www.avant.edu.pl/en 45 Perception, action and coordinated rhythmic movement Coordinated rhythmic movement has been a staple of the perception-action literature since the basic task characteristics were described by Kelso (1981; see Kelso 1995 for a detailed overview). The core task is simple: take your two index fingers and move them up and down so that they do the same thing at the same time; this is 0° mean relative phase and is easy to produce and maintain over a wide range of frequencies. Now make your fingers alternate; this is 180° mean relative phase, and is also easy to produce and maintain, though over a smaller range of frequencies; at 3-4Hz, under a 'non-interference' instruction, 180° becomes unstable and people typically transition into 0°. Other coordinations (especially the intermediate 90° rhythm) are typically unstable without training and people cannot maintain them in the face of perturbations such as an increase in frequency. These phenomena were described by the famous Haken-Kelso-Bunz model The research strategy advocated by Kelso is behavioural and dynamical (e.g. Jeka & Kelso 1989). Researchers should identify the order parameters of a system along which behaviour is organised (here, relative phase) and determine the nature of the dynamics by investigating the stability of the system in response to perturbations such as frequency scaling and the imposition of a to-be-learned rhythm. Experiments taking this approach have identified critical stability fluctuations as frequency increases, fluctuations which abruptly decrease after a phase transition from, say, 180° to 0°, as well has phase resetting and an inverse frequency-amplitude relation (Kay, Overall these results suggest that coordinated rhythmic movements are an example of an autonomous non-linear dynamical system. However, the HKB model and this modelling strategy are entirely phenomenological: the equation is abstract and designed solely to fit the basic pattern of the data. There is no account of the origin of the attrac- A Remedy called Affordance 46 tors; if behaviour is organised with respect to relative phase, why are 0° and 180° so easy? Why is 90° maximally difficult? In effect, Kelso's approach provides a clear understanding of how rhythmic movement is organised in people, but has no account of why it should be this way. This weakness revealed itself when the approach was applied to a phenomenon it wasn't specifically designed to explain: trained performance at relative phases other than 90°. Learning (the dynamic pattern approach) The dynamic pattern approach considers learning to be a process of competition over limited dynamical resources between the intrinsic task dynamics (the HKB model) and extrinsic task demands (an externally paced rhythm). Zanone and Kelso (1994) laid out several predictions about how this competition should unfold when learning various novel coordinations. Learning something close to 0° (e.g. 45°) would be more difficult than learning something an equal distance from 180° (e.g. 135°) because the attractor at 0° would exert a stronger pull on this unstable state and prevent people from being able to maintain it. This has been tested twice, by Fontaine, The perceptual basis of coordinated rhythmic movements Schmidt, Following on from this, A perception-action model of coordinated rhythmic movement Bingham had now established that the movement phenomena reflect the perception of relative phase. However, remember that skilled actions are perception-action systems -perception is not the entire game (as erroneously claimed by Mechsner, The first step was a task analysis to identify the dynamical resources that were available to be softly assembled into a task-specific device that produces the observed behaviour The model as guide to future discovery -learning (the ecological approach) Like the HKB (and any decent cognitive model) Bingham's model is very successful in explaining the things it is designed to explain. However, it has an extra dimension that the HKB lacks. Specifically, it is the product of a theory-driven process which uniquely demands that the model be built from components that have been empirically determined to matter, and that these components must be built so as to reflect the real composition and organisation of the system at hand. The model does not yet explicitly handle trained performance at, say, 90°; however, recent learning research inspired and guided by the ecological theory the model embodies has met with great success. The model assumes that movement stability is a function of perceptual ability. This suggests that if people became expert perceivers of 90°, they should then be able to move at 90° with no practice at the task. This is indeed the case (Wilson et al. 2010a The model also predicts that there should be transfer of learning between bimanual and unimanual versions of the task because while the coupling in the unimanual case is only in one direction, it is still composed of relative motion information (SnappChilds et al. 2011). This is indeed the case; there is transfer, and the form of the transfer matches the predicted stability characteristics of the unimanual and bimanual versions of the task (Snapp-Childs, Wilson & Bingham, submitted). This is quite remarkable; predicting how learning will transfer is a notoriously difficult problem in motor control Summary Sciences need theories, to guide discovery and constrain explanation. Gibson's ecological approach has shown itself capable of supporting productive and successful empirical research across a wide range of tasks and serves as a model for what a theorydriven psychology could achieve. Reviews of other work in this vein can be found i

Laws and Conventions in Language-Related Behaviors

The goal of this article is to look at language-related behaviors in light of a strict definition of direct perception. I highlight a key dimension, conventionality, which discriminates between behaviors that are coordinated with respect to law-based information and those that are not (and, therefore, do not qualify as direct perception according to the definition used in this article). The difference between conventional and law-based information does not break down clearly along obvious lines such as natural versus human-made, social versus nonsocial, or linguistic versus nonlinguistic. Therefore, it is necessary to take a task-specific approach to deciding whether a behavior is organized with respect to conventional or law-based information. A tacit assumption in ecological psychology seems to be that anything that has an effect on behavior must be grounded in the perception of an affordance and, therefore, must be guided by law-based information. In this article, I question this assumption. I suggest, instead, that ecological information can be based on both laws and conventions. This move allows us to maintain rigorous definitions of affordances and direct perception, suitable for underpinning action-control, while still expanding the ecological study of behaviors into those that rely on conventional information

Ecological mechanisms in cognitive science

© The Author(s) 2019. In 2010, Bechtel and Abrahamsen defined and described what it means to be a dynamic causal mechanistic explanatory model. They discussed the development of a mechanistic explanation of circadian rhythms as an exemplar of the process and challenged cognitive science to follow this example. This article takes on that challenge. A mechanistic model is one that accurately represents the real parts and operations of the mechanism being studied. These real components must be identified by an empirical programme that decomposes the system at the correct scale and localises the components in space and time. Psychological behaviour emerges from the nature of our real-time interaction with our environments—here we show that the correct scale to guide decomposition is picked out by the ecological perceptual information that enables that interaction. As proof of concept, we show that a simple model of coordinated rhythmic movement, grounded in information, is a genuine dynamical mechanistic explanation of many key coordination phenomena

Thematic thinking : the apprehension and consequences of thematic relations

A thematic relation is a temporal, spatial, causal, or functional relation between things that perform complementary roles in the same scenario or event. For example, cows and milk are related by a production theme, and sails and anchors are related via a boating theme. Thematic relations are distinct from mere associations, scripts, and ad hoc categories. They also contrast and complement taxonomic (categorical) relations such as "fruits" and "furniture." Thematic relations and taxonomic relations arise from distinct processes, as evidenced by numerous neuropsychological and behavioral dissociations. Thematic relations may be apprehended uncontrollably and rapidly according to how frequently and recently they have been encountered. They exert profound effects on many core cognitive processes, including similarity, categorization, memory, language, inference, and analogy, and they exhibit robust processing differences across individuals and cultures. In sum, without such thematic thinking, models of cognition will remain categorically limited