Heft (2001): 3.1, Animal-Environment Mutuality & Phenomenology

We've finally reached Gibson! In Chapter 3, Heft explores some broad ideas about animal-environment relations that are shared between James, Holt, and Gibson. These include the mutuality between animal and environment, phenomenological experience, affordances, and self-perception. This post focuses on the first two ideas, while the latter two will be covered in a future post.

Animal-environment mutuality

Ecological psychology was formally introduced in James Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), where Gibson emphasised the importance of the mutual and reciprocal relationship between animal and environment. Rather than viewing the physical environment and within-organism psychological processes as separate (like in traditional Descartes-rooted psychology), Gibson argued that no animal could exist without a surrounding environment, while no environment could exist without an animal to surround. In other words, the animal and the environment make an inseparable and reciprocal pair, with each existing in relation to the other. 

Heft (2001): 2.2, Molar Behaviourism and the Recession of the Stimulus

The second half of Chapter 2 goes into further detail about Holt's ideas surrounding cognition, causality, and learning processes. In this post, I'll mainly be covering his ideas of molar behaviourism and the recession of the stimulus, which were subsequently adopted and further refined by Gibson in his ecological psychology. 

Molar behaviourism

To Holt, molar behaviourism highlights the methodological push to study behaviour as whole, integrated actions, instead of breaking it up into smaller bits. Back when this was introduced by Holt, the classical behaviourist approach (championed by the likes of John Watson) tended to take a fairly isolated view of behaviour, frequently studying behaviour in terms of reflexes and muscle movements. The issue with this, however, is that when you break behaviour up into such molecular components, it gets really easy to attribute the wrong cause to behaviour. Here, Holt argues that meaningful features of behaviour (like purpose and intentionality) only appear at the coarser molar level of analysis. While behaviour does depend on lower-level components like muscle movements or nerve reflexes, such behavioural features cannot be explained merely by studying these components.

Heft (2001): 2.1, Holt's New Realist Approach to Perception and Cognition

We're now onto Chapter 2! If Chapter 1 focused on William James, the Chapter 2 spotlight is firmly placed on Edwin B. Holt. Being James' student and James J. Gibson's eventual supervisor, Holt plays an important role in connecting James' philosophies of radical empiricism and pragmatism to Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception. According to Heft, Gibson never directly cited the work of James, making it all the more surprising how closely their works align. Heft hence suggests that this connection was likely mediated by Holt, who served as the historical and intellectual linkage between the two. In this post, I'll explore the first half of Chapter 2, focusing on Holt's defence of realism through the work of the New Realists, before diving into how he conceptualised perception and cognition with a pretty cool searchlight analogy!

Heft (2001): 1.3, Percepts, Concepts, and Pragmatism

One final bit I'd like to address in this very dense first chapter is the distinction between percepts and concepts, as well as James's more well-known philosophy of pragmatism. While the former is James's way of explaining cognition without the need for intermediary mental representations, the latter is an approach to verifying the 'truth' or meaningfulness of concepts with respect to percepts. Let's get right into it!

Percepts and Concepts

Heft starts this section by reminding us that knowing is a functional and selective process involving a knower and the object known. Knowing is functional in that it allows organisms to adapt to their environments, while it is selective in how in knowing, we specifically pick out certain parts of the 'quasi-chaos' (i.e., undifferentiated but with latent lines of structure) of pure experience. Here, James argued that this selective process gives us two outcomes: percepts and concepts. 

Heft (2001): 1.2, James's Radical Empiricism

In Heft's view, the issue with contemporary psychology is its (often) implicit and uncritical adoption of mind-body dualisms. Regardless of the variant, each theory of mind associated with the dualistic tradition faces insurmountable problems in addressing issues of causality, mental content, and consciousness (to name a few). Instead of attempting to solve these issues, perhaps we've simply been barking up the wrong tree. This calls for a drastically different philosophical approach that gives us permission to bypass the problems above. Enter William James's radical empiricism, which will be covered in this post. While I have encountered the term radical empiricism here and there over the past year, this represents my first sincere attempt to grapple with James's philosophy. Here, I aim to convey the main points that stood out to me. Hopefully, I'll come to appreciate the full extent of radical empiricism as I mature as an ecological psychologist. 

Heft (2001): 1.1, Psychology & Cartesian Dualism

In the prologue, Heft begins by describing the dominant perspective, the Cartesian perspective, that has guided psychology theories and methods for the past centuries. By highlighting some of its glaring weaknesses, Heft sets the stage for the more attractive, albeit unintuitive, philosophical alternative of radical empiricism developed by William James. Then, in the first part of Chapter One, we turn our attention to the counterintuitive argument that psychological behaviourism, despite rejecting any notions of the mental and nonphysical, actually played a significant role in keeping the Cartesian tradition alive. This serves to underscore the need for a radically different approach to studying psychological phenomena, one that avoids the same pitfalls as faced by a dualistic framework.

Heft (2001): Introduction

I'm starting a new blog series! Over the next few weeks (and probably months), I'll be covering Harry Heft's 2001 book "Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism". At least from the title and my reading of the first few chapters, Heft (2001) goes beyond the principles of Ecological Psychology and explicitly attempts to outline the historical context in which Gibson's ecological psychology was formed. Far from being an outright original conception, the first glimpses of an ecological psychology could be seen in William James's writing. One of the main goals of this book, then, is to trace out the historical evolution of ideas (i.e., from William James, to Edwin Holt, and finally to James Gibson) that led to the eventual thesis of ecological psychology. 

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 5.2, Subcortical Involvement in Motivation

In the previous post in my blog series on Pessoa's 2022 book, The Entangled Brain, we began examining subcortical regions and their potential role in the production and regulation of emotions, such as fear and anger. In this post, we round out the chapter by taking a brief look at subcortical involvement in motivation.

The origins of motivation research

What does it mean to study motivation? According to Pessoa, research on motivation involves understanding how animals go about seeking rewards. Here, the first wave of motivation research in neuroscience was sparked by Olds and Milner (1954), who placed electrodes in different brain areas of rats, before placing the rats in a box (see Fig. 1). If the rats happened to hit a lever, this would send an electrical stimulation to their brains, to which the rats would start exploring the box excitedly if they found the stimulation desirable. After pressing the lever (by accident) a couple of times, the rats would cease their search and simply start hitting the lever incessantly.

Fig. 1 Electrical self-stimulation by rats (Pessoa, 2022)

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 5.2, Memory for Melody

In the first part of Chapter 5, we focused predominantly on the elements that make up melody and how Gestalt principles might be used to perceive these elements as a coherent whole. Continuing the discussion on the perception of melody and musical pitch, Tan et al. (2010) round out this chapter by focusing on memory for melody and potential neural bases for pitch and melody perception.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 5.1, Gestalt Principles in Melody Perception

Chapter 5 marks the start of a new section of the book. While we've been covering foundational concepts that will serve us well in future parts of the book, this chapter begins our exploration of perception and cognition in music. Specifically, Tan et al. (2010) discuss the perception of melody and, more specifically, musical pitch. In this chapter, the authors begin with an introduction to the various elements of melodies, followed by a Gestalt perspective on melody perception. In a separate post, we'll also discuss memory-related findings on pitch and melody, as well as what neuroscience can tell us about melody perception.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 4, Neuroscience and Music

Chapter 4 of the book takes a slight detour from sound and music per se and instead provides us with a general introduction to neuroscience. Given the importance of neuroscientific methodologies and approaches that will be utilised in later chapters, it makes sense for the authors to include this before moving on to more specific topics in music. Given that I am already writing another blog series on a neuroscience-focused book, I will cover these aspects of the chapter briefly and, as far as possible, try to link them back to the study of music psychology.

In this post, we'll begin by touching on some general issues facing the neuroscience of music as a discipline, explore the important neural structures and functions related to music, and introduce some common methods for studying the brain. Finally, we'll end off by discussing the link (or lack thereof) between music and language abilities.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 3.2, The Anatomy of Audition

In this post, we'll cover the latter half of Chapter 3 on the (neuro)anatomy and physiology of the auditory system. Specifically, we'll discuss the 3 main components of the auditory system: the external ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. The section on the inner ear will focus on the cochlea and how it may help us identify pitch. Finally, the last part of the chapter briefly talks about the auditory cortex.

Fig. 1 The anatomy of the ear (Plack, 2018)

Building a BSc Thesis 2: Representative Learning Design

In a previous post, we talked about the importance of Brunswik's (1956) representative (experimental) design and how it aims to create experimental tasks that sufficiently represent real-world behavioural settings to which results are intended to be generalised. Consequently, it motivated me to design a fully in situ task (i.e., a task performed in participants' natural behavioural or performance settings) for my participants. Now that I have my population group (i.e., volleyball players), main apparatus (i.e., eye-tracking glasses), and in situ task (i.e., a volleyball spiking task on a volleyball court), what independent variables will I manipulate? This is what we'll explore in this post!

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 5.1, Subcortical Involvement in Emotion

After 4 chapters, we're finally taking a deeper dive into specific functions of the brain. Firstly, we're going to look at areas conventionally thought to be heavily involved in emotional regulation, including the hypothalamus and the amygdala. In a separate post, we'll cover the final part of the chapter that touches on motivation. Of course, cortical regions feature too, but these will be the topic of the following chapter.

As we go along, just keep in mind Pessoa's thesis of the highly distributed and networked brain. Independent functions do not singly map onto spatially isolated parts of the brain. Instead, a many-to-many function-to-structure mapping is involved. As you'll see, while we'll start with emotion and motivation, the subcortical areas discussed are heavily implicated in many more diverse functions.

Building a BSc Thesis 1: Representative Experimental Design

I'm running a student-initiated project for my undergraduate thesis next academic year, where I'm hoping to strap on some eye-tracking glasses on volleyball players while they perform variations of a spiking task. But how did I even come up with this idea in the first place? Over the next few weeks, I'll be taking you through some of the key papers that inspired the project.

To start, I knew I wanted to do something in volleyball. After all, I had spent the past 2 years working as a mental skills coach and skill acquisition consultant for various volleyball clubs, and had not only built a solid network of connections, but also grown quite fond of the sport. Next, I knew that I wanted to use eye-tracking glasses in my dissertation project. Not only was the technology available, but I also had access to a supervisor who was an expert in conducting such research. At this point, it was a no-brainer to capitalise on these currently available resources and expertise.

So, we now have the sport (i.e., volleyball) and the main dependent variable-measuring apparatus (i.e., an eye-tracker measuring gaze behaviour). But what kind of tasks would I want participants to complete? To answer this question, we turn to a paper by Dicks et al. (2010), who examined gaze behaviour differences in football goalkeepers under different task constraints.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 3.1, Psychological Properties of Sound

Now that we've covered the physical properties of sound waves, we move on to the first part of Chapter 3, which explores the psychological properties of sound. While they may be related, there are some crucial differences between the two. For one, the physical properties of sound waves are the objective features that are independent of the listener. On the other hand, the psychological properties of sound (see Fig. 1), such as pitch, loudness, duration, and timbre, depend on the phenomenological or first-hand auditory experience of the listener.

Fig. 1 Mapping between the physical and psychological properties of sound (Tan et al., 2010)

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 4, Thinking about Brain Regions

The past few chapters have provided a general overview of the structure of the brain and have also briefly mentioned a few important functions associated with those brain regions. But before we delve deeper into conventionally explored brain regions, one question remains: how should we be thinking about these brain regions? Are we taking a modular view, that is, each region is defined as a spatially isolated area of the brain that carries out its own independent function? Or should we subscribe to Pessoa's view that modularity is an oversimplification, and we should instead be interested in the multifunctionality of regions? This is what I'll be attempting to answer in this post.

Discovering the function of brain areas

Historically, one of the most important methods of uncovering brain function is the use of lesion studies. Briefly, lesion studies explore how different behaviours and mental capacities might be impaired after naturally occurring damage in human brains, or surgically induced damage in animals. One of the most important findings from lesion studies came from Paul Broca in 1961, who concluded that speech impediments in his patient (nicknamed 'Tan') were caused by lesions in the frontal lobe. Meanwhile, other researchers like Hitzig and Fritsch carefully removed different brain areas from dogs and saw movement impairments in their contralateral side (i.e., lesions in left brain areas caused movement impairments on the right side, and vice versa). Importantly, other functions and behaviours were left unaffected in the cases of Tan and the dogs.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 2.2, The Acoustics of Musical Instruments and Venues

Let's continue looking at the science of musical acoustics. In Chapter 2.1, we looked at the physics of sound, progressing from simpler sine waves to more complex sound waves. In this blog, we'll finish up the rest of the chapter, which looks at how the properties of sound change as a function of differences in musical instruments and venues.

The acoustics of musical instruments

We now move on to applying acoustic principles to musical instruments. The key principle that Tan and colleagues put across is that of coupled acoustics. The idea here is that, within most instruments, there exists at least two sources of vibration. While the first source is what generates the initial sound wave, the second vibrating device is responsible for amplifying that sound wave. The reason for this coupling is that the initial sound wave (activated when the performer vibrates the first device) often does not have enough energy to be propagated through a large space and be heard by others. To solve this, instruments have a secondary device, called a resonator, that is coupled to the first and that vibrates alongside it, thereby amplifying the initial sound wave.

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 3, The Minimal Brain

In this chapter, Pessoa aims to build a hypothetical 'minimal brain'. Why might this be important? For starters, the brain is an immensely complex organ, and this is even before we talk about human brains! Before we increase the level of complexity and look at more advanced capabilities, we begin by establishing the parts of the brain that contribute to basic animal functions like defending oneself and seeking rewards, that is, survival! 

An aside

Before we move on, I'd like to point out an implicit assumption that runs throughout the chapter -- that the brain is an information-processing computer that processes and transforms input signals to generate some form of output. While commonly conflated, the reductionist view (i.e., that the brain can be reduced to isolated regions of interest) and computational theory of mind are separate. My understanding so far is that while Pessoa rejects the reductionist view of the brain in favour of one that is more integrated, complex, and network-based, he hasn't thus far said much about the brain-as-a-computer analogy.

Coming from an ecological perspective, I naturally reject the computational theory of mind. An alternative exists, though -- ecological neuroscience argues that the brain resonates instead of computes. That being said, I don't yet have the requisite knowledge or vocabulary to provide a comprehensive and convincing overview of this alternative. At the moment, I'll continue using the language as used by Pessoa, and refrain from interjecting with too many anti-computation comments (if only because this might disrupt the flow of the blog). 

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 2.1, The Physics of Sound

In this chapter, we look to the science of acoustics, which explores how sound is produced by a source, propagated through a medium, and received by an auditory system. More specifically, we are focusing on musical acoustics, which Hall (2001) defines as the study of how sound is produced by musical instruments, how architectural design affects sound transmission, and the perception of sound as music. As such, the current chapter explores 3 main areas, namely: the physical properties of sound waves, the acoustics of musical instruments, as well as the acoustics of music performance environments. In this blog, I'll talk about the first area and cover the other 2 in a separate post.

The physics of sound

How is sound produced? Sound can simply be thought of as the transmission of energy from a sound source to a receiver through a medium (usually, air). This process starts with the vibrations of a sound source, which agitate and compress nearby air molecules. These air molecules, now carrying energy from the sound source, then transfer this energy to other air molecules in their immediate vicinity. Importantly, this results in a series of compressions and expansions (i.e., rarefactions) of the air molecules, which can be graphically represented by the peaks and troughs of a sine wave (see Fig. 1), respectively. This oscillating (i.e., repeatedly moving in a cycle) wave is called a sound wave, which is the physical basis of what we know as sound.

Fig. 1 Sound as a sine wave (Tan et al., 2010)