Dio D. Vicen

James J. Gibson (1904–1979) In this entry, we detail the academic journey of J. J. Gibson through his career as a perceptual psychologist. We make special emphasis on direct perception and the theory of affordances.

@tonychemero.bsky.social and I have written a short James Gibson's bio for The Palgrave Encyclopaedia for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Check it out! ⬇️
doi.org/10.1007/978-...

Three ecological psychologists on the right and wrong ways to use the field’s principles in neuroscience Matthieu de Wit, Luis H. Favela and Vicente Raja weigh in on the recent trend of neuroscientists importing concepts from ecological psychology, the study of how an organism’s interactions with its…

@braininspired.bsky.social talks to @dewitmm.bsky.social, Luis Favela and @diovicen.bsky.social about the trend of neuroscientists importing concepts from ecological psychology, how an organism’s interactions with its environment explains perception and action.

#neuroskyence

bit.ly/3OyNEkp

BI 232 How Should Neuroscience Integrate with Ecological Psychology? YouTube video by Brain Inspired

Luis Favela, @dewitmm.bsky.social, and yours truly talked to @braininspired.bsky.social about ecological neuroscience. Among other things, we tried to comment on how to make "affordances" and "ecological information" helpful for neuroscientists. Check it out!
youtu.be/p987y_v-_PE?...

Dynamical Cognitive Science! Wherefore Art Thou? How has dynamical systems theory—especially the dynamical hypothesis—influenced the cognitive sciences since the 1990s? This topic brings together informatics, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, ...

Luis Favela and I just finished editing a special issue on dynamical cognitive science for topiCS. The great contributors of the issue talk a little bit about what happened in the last 30 years, where we are now, and where we are heading to.
Here's the intro (open access): doi.org/10.1111/tops...

Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear The vision of human-level machine intelligence laid out by Alan Turing in the 1950s is now a reality. Eyes unclouded by dread or hype will help us to prepare for what comes next.

Ah... I'm so invested in what we could call "non-standard approaches to cognition" that I often forget that out there in the real world we still lay comfortably in the arms of Immanuel Kant/René Descartes/pick-your-own-Modern-poison...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

That'd be a good solution 😁

I'm having this unpopular opinion since I noticed the word "representation" barely appears in 1966 and 1979 and when it does is specially when the topic is painting or photography.

I like the idea of the book. Indeed, ecological resonance is pretty much about it.

Now, unpopular opinion: ecological psychology is not a form of anti-representationalism. I say more: representations are NOT (or, at least, should NOT be) a relevant topic within the ecological approach.

Frontiers | The Predictive Processing Paradigm Has Roots in Kant Predictive processing is a paradigm in computational and cognitive neuroscience that has recently attracted significant attention across domains, including p...

At least in the case of PP, ActInf, and similar, this line of argumentation is in the air. The focus is usually Kant and not Descartes, but it's kind of the same idea mutatis mutandis. Two examples:
doi.org/10.3389/fnsy...
doi.org/10.1111/nous...

"Ecological psychology and the mirror of nature" is now open access. (by @tonychemero.bsky.social and yours truly)

www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/read-...

Elements in Philosophy of MInd Welcome to Cambridge Core

Just signed a contract for a Cambridge Elements in Ecological Neuroscience! With @diovicen.bsky.social Look for it in a year or so.

www.cambridge.org/core/publica...

As an ecological psychologist, when I read:

"the PBDR approach is always grounded in the physics of light transport... [...]... because it allows the identification of perceptual invariants."

It actually sounds like: "we use the optic array to find perceptual invariants."

I like it!

A little bit of spam, but this one is honestly one of my favourite papers I've participated in.
I still think there's a whole dissertation to be written on this topic--ecological psychology & epistemology.

BI 223 Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology Motifs in Neuroscience YouTube video by Brain Inspired

There are always divergences in ALL fields 😁

I was talking a little bit about resonance recently here: youtu.be/Aj3LyStBgpg

In terms of papers, these two might help:
doi.org/10.1111/ejn....
doi.org/10.1111/psyp...

"meaningful affordances"
"bio-mechanical affordances"
"mental affordances"
"non-representational affordances"

Please stop. Stop with the adjectives. It makes no sense. Thank you.

BI 223 Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology Motifs in Neuroscience YouTube video by Brain Inspired

I've been talking about ecological neuroscience and other topics with @braininspired.bsky.social on the Brain Inspired podcast. You can check it out here 👇
youtu.be/Aj3LyStBgpg

What is plant nutation?
What is a motif in science?
What lessons does ecological psychology have for neuroscience?
How does Vicente @diovicen.bsky.social enjoy the band Judas Priest yet still do good philosophy and science?

Here are the answers:
braininspired.co/podcast/223/

Some friends and I submitted a commentary

Preprint here:

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

@guicogsci.bsky.social @segundo-ortin.bsky.social @diovicen.bsky.social @tonychemero.bsky.social

<em>Psychophysiology</em> | SPR Journal | Wiley Online Library This study bridges brain and body through ecological psychology and neuroscience by demonstrating how ecological information—in this case, “time to contact” or tau—constrains brain activity and as mu...

Is ecological neuroscience a feasible enterprise? After some theoretical work on ecological resonance, we've engaged on experimental research to test some of the hypotheses that follow from it. These are the first results of (hopefully) many more to come! It's open access 👇
doi.org/10.1111/psyp...

Want to make sure @mljanderson.bsky.social and @diovicen.bsky.social are seeing this.

To be completely honest, I think that, in general, neuroscientists are far more open to this issue than the "philosophers of".

Aligning brain and behavior To understand how the brain generates behavior, both brain activity and behavior must be measured accurately. Although neuroscience has developed powe…

"Although neuroscience has developed powerful tools for measuring brain activity, its behavioral measures are far more primitive, as it lacks a coherent conceptual framework for analyzing and interpreting behavior."

True! Happy to see this idea is growing.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It never ceases to amaze me how angry some people in mainstream cognitive science get when one talks about non-representation/non-computation while they completely refuse to at least read something about it so they can have an actual reason to be angry that is not just "hey, normal science, bro".

#1124 Miguel Segundo Ortín & Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology YouTube video by The Dissenter

@segundo-ortin.bsky.social and I were talking about ecological psychology with @thedissenteryt.bsky.social:
youtu.be/s6EwRYqmP64
www.thedissenter.net

My impression is we’ve lost this kind of thinking in contemporary neuroscience: that we need good theories of the brain and *behavior* to explain stuff. James, Lashley, Hebb, Tolman, Skinner, Gibson… They all agreed on that.

David Lee just died.
He formulated tau/time-to-contact, the most famous bit of ecological information.
He is one of the main reasons why ecological psychology is still alive.
We all are indebted to him. I met him once and ended up having dinner at his place. Very cool guy!
RIP

Affordances are motifs. Representations are motifs. A sentence with both words can mean anything! 😱

No os lo vais a creer, pero en el otro lado hay un grupo de filo-bros discutiendo durante días sobre si hay ideología en la ciencia. Al quinto día empiezan a apelar a Popper. Hay que quererlos.

I work (mostly) on ecological psychology and (often) on plant intelligence. And you can’t imagine the amount of ideological reviews I get. Really bad scholarship, if you ask me.
Is this also the case for people working on more mainstream frameworks?

The best of all left 15 years ago.
#longlivedio
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RiJ...

¡NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!

"A World of Minds: Ecological Psychology as a Framework for Comparative Cognition"

Authors: Miguel Segundo-Ortin, Paco Calvo, & Louise Barrett

You can download it from here: miguelsegundoortinphd.com/publications