I'm pleased to share a preprint of a chapter I wrote for an upcoming book on embodied cognition. I try to tackle some thorny questions surrounding unit and scale as they relate to symbols and dynamics in cognitive science. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Madhur poses some excellent questions to predictive processing approaches in cognitive science here. I'd be curious how proponents would respond! www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Damian has arrived! Also, really enjoyed co-authoring this chapter with this group. Check it out here 👇

www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy... @jcassidysport.bsky.social thoughts?

Great new piece from Madhur Mangalam's lab. Some clear reasoning around the concept of optimality with empirical examples to back it up. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

A rather puzzling statement from Hubert Ripoll here (perspectives on cognition and action in sport, Araujo, Ripoll, Raab eds.) First of all, what is a "conventional playing system" if not an evolved form of interaction?? Second, if not from repeated interactions where the heck does it come from?

Transfer of calibration between hand and foot: Functional equivalence and fractal fluctuations (Stephen & Hajnal, 2011) link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

Question for academics: I often see academics speak about journal-specific readership. I'm curious how common it is for academics to follow journals. Personally, I don't think "hmm let me see what's out in journal x".

it is grimly hilarious that, given the immense, decades-long fetishization of "leadership" and "leadership skills" in business-oriented academia and politics, even unto the formation of leadership institutes, there should turn out to be no leaders in any positions of power

What is cognition? www.wiringthebrain.com/2025/03/what... - some weekend musings on this tricky concept, with lots of help from all you Blueys!

The problem is that cognitive science wants it both ways when it comes to the "hard core" of computation over representation. Strong empirical programs have been scoffed at and quickly dismissed because they didn't explain in these terms (see below) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Question for academic bluesky: A lot of my work is on co-adaptation. Co-adaptive couplings include both competitive and cooperative couplings. I've used De Poel's taxonomy of couplings quite a bit but I'm trying to decide how to refer to the nature www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

Some excellent reflections on the different claims made by the FEP. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The open access version of A Drive to Survive is now available to download for free! direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon... (If you've already read the preprint, I'd really appreciate a download of the official version... for the *metrics*) - also it has way less typos.

I'm very pleased to share the latest work from my PhD. I would like to thank all of my fantastic co-authors as well as the anonymous peer reviewers. doi.org/10.1016/j.ac...

Cognitive science moved away from the difficult questions without ever answering them. "Unfortunately, difficulties that are not faced do not simply go away" - Benoit Mandelbrot Turvey and Kugler (1984) pinpointing them here👇 #complex

"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ...

The second paper from my PhD should be out in acta psychologica in a few days! Also just finished a book chapter on the role of unit and scale in cognitive science.

I get more from this talk every time I listen to it www.youtube.com/live/Xb0sLm5...

The whole field of pan-computationalist AI is typically both boring and frustrating to read. It can be hard not to pre-judge stuff coming out of that vicinity. So this recent paper by Lehman et al was a pleasant surprise! The authors explore some fundamental arxiv.org/abs/2501.13075

Starting a new thread to avoid unwittingly dragging people into my rant. This paper articulates 3 criteria for being an affordance and I think they are wildly wrong. It's high citations give me pause, but I really struggle to see where I'm wrong. academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

“Psychology... is a second rate discipline. The main reason is that it does not stand in awe of its subject matter. Psychologists have too little respect for psychology.” -J. J. Gibson

Is embodied cognition just a fondness for dynamical systems theory and a distaste for representations? I often see opinions to this effect so I thought I would add a little historical context. A lot of critical issues were discussed much more clearly and explicitly in the 70s and 80s, imo

One thing I'm starting to recognize with discussions around evidence for ecological approaches in sport is that there are huge differences in how much of a "special science" people see sport as. E.g., how willing are you to consider more general findings about pure.au.dk/ws/portalfil...

I don’t want to make a fuckin account to use my toaster. I don’t want to fuckin subscribe to software. I don’t want to create a fuckin profile to watch TV. I don’t want to fuckin register my whatever to unlock whatever. I don’t want to download a fuckin app to access anything. Death to new logins

I've always seen a tension between two poles when "cognition" is defined in neuro/psych/phil: General Pole - Cognition is all things providing knowledge/meaning of the world. Shopping-List Pole - Cognition is reasoning, decision-making, planning... I prefer the first one. They might be compatible.

I feel seen

Ok, just had a regrettable peek back at the other place and saw the prominent critic of ecological dynamics refer to uncontrolled manifold hypothesis as the "intake manifold hypothesis". A good summary of the state of things😂 @adw.bsky.social

Haven't said anything about this yet so thought I'd chime in/add a few thoughts to Andrew's nice overview of the Collins et al piece.

Anyone else remember when iTunes cooked with this gem in the free songs that came with it? www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rgp...

If ChatGPT’s performance appears PhD worthy to you, you should not be supervising phds

Can confirm this was a good book

The high percentage of foreign players in NCAA soccer is commonly framed as a failure of the American youth system. In reality it has much more to do with the nature of the global talent pool in soccer compared to other sports.

Episode 7 of The Adaptive Coach Podcast- David Farrokh on Ecological Dynamics, a theory of human motor learning. open.spotify.com/episode/0JNA...

In today's lecture in my nonlinear dynamics and chaos course, I tried to give intuition for where chaos comes from. It's caused by repeated stretching and folding of phase space.

There are few better feelings than when former students go off and do great things, and then write to you and let you know about them. Students: never wonder if you should get in touch with a former teacher or supervisor to share this kind of thing. It is one of the purest rewards there is. /1

How heavy is the colour yellow? How bright is 20kg? 🤔 📖Johnston & Turvey in 1980 introduced a meta theory of learning. A highly generalisable meta theory that positioned learning as the ability to adapt to an ever changing environment. Nothing new right?

I'm not a meme-maker but there's one that needs to be made. IQ truthers will often say "IQ is the most robust finding in all of psychology, if you don't believe in it you shouldn't believe in any of it." We need that followed by some badass character responding "exactly, burn it all down."

“Too many people don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to them.” —William Howard Taft

We totally did not see this coming 🙄 www.businessinsider.com/agi-predicti...

“The root of the matter is that the greatest stimulus of scientific discovery are its practical applications.” - Lewis Fry Richardson

Eating too much cake is the sin of gluttony. However, eating too much pie is okay because the sin of pi is always zero. 🖖

A few reflections on coaching and culture. bigpicturesoccer.substack.com/p/local-cons...

Cognitive science will always be a contested field with diverse perspectives. Chemero does a great job recounting one of the major empirical clashes of 20th century cognitive science and offering some implications for abduction and deduction in science. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

11-year-old me: "FIFA 98 is like I'm actually PLAYING as Beckham in the World Cup!" FIFA 98:

Allow me to vent about the worst genre of influencer and content that is always pushed on grad students. It goes like this: "Academia is crumbling, you will never get a job, if you do, your research will never get funded." (ok, checks out so far) BUT

Pattee on discrete and continuous processes in brains and computers 👇

Yes, libraries are invaluable for their collections and public services they offer, but also social contact without the expectation to interact with anyone or spend any money is so important to so many people