Projects

Resonance

We are using virtual reality (VR) and EEG to study the dynamical properties of a well-known psychological task – the Fitt’s Task. The first aim of the project is to examine the perceptual information that participants use to control their movements during the Task. This is a study at the scale of behavior. The second aim is to investigate whether the perceptual information used by the participants constrains brain dynamics through a process called “resonance” (as described in the ecological psychology literature). This is a study at the scale of neural activity, combining the use of virtual environments and EEG methods. ​

Questions? ​Contact Vicente Raja or Jonathan Bowen!

Figure (Right): psychology by HeadsOfBirds from the Noun Project.

The Meaning of Information

This project aims to examine and compare how information is defined in predictive processing, ecological psychology, and embodied cognition. We aim to examine how differing notions of information lead to different understandings of the roles that the brain, body, and environment plays in cognition and behavior. One of our central concerns is that the notions of information used in predictive processing—thermodynamic and Shannon information—result in an epistemic divide between organisms and their environments. We are exploring how the notions of information used in ecological psychology and embodied cognition might be able to avoid this epistemic problem. 

Questions? Contact Mike Anderson or Tyeson Barton!

Figure (Right):  environment by Nithinan Tatah from the Noun Project

Enabling Constraints

​An enabling constraint is something that fixes some of the degrees of freedom in a system so as to allow that system to function properly. This project seeks to discover the enabling constraints that play a role in stabilizing brain-body-environment systems and to establish the importance of enabling constraints in explanations of function (including, most recently, explanations of skill learning).

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Questions? Contact Vicente Raja or Mike Anderson!

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Figure (Right): arc by Akyo Nishiura from the Noun Project.

Embodiment and Split Brains

We seek to investigate Elizabeth Schecter’s (2018) treatment of the consciousness of split-brain patients through the lens of embodiment. In contrast to Schechter, who focuses almost entirely on the inner neural processing and simple responses of split-brain patients in highly controlled experimental settings, we aim to focus instead on the totality of behaviours of the whole embodied subject. For instance, patients seem to use various compensatory behaviors, such as self-cueing with gesture and writing with one hand upon the other, to overcome the obviously and otherwise disabling effects of their commissurotomy.

Questions? Contact Jonathan Bowen!

Figure (Right): Brain by Clockwise from the Noun Project.

Cross-Modal Illusions

Ecological psychology and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis seem to hold the key to understanding why we evolved in such a way that we are capable of experiencing cross-modal illusions – where what we perceive with one sensory modality has a noticeable effect on what we perceive with one or more other modalities. This project seeks to evaluate the hypothesis that our visual perceptual system may have evolved through the exaptation of many of the same situated behaviours and neural mechanisms which underwrite our olfactory perceptual system.

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Questions? Contact Charles Bakker!

The Cognitive Science of Cognitive Science

This project studies cognitive scientific explanations: what they do, and how they work. To do this, we blend traditional philosophical approaches (like the study of scientific theories and the analysis of scientific concepts) with psychological ones (like the study of laypeople's explanations and the role of concepts in cognition). At root, this is an attempt to treat science as a cognitive phenomenon, and to study it with the methods that cognitive phenomena call for.

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Questions? Contact Andrew Richmond!

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You can also check out our Past Projects, and some of our other Activities (like courses and reading groups). And you can listen to the interview below for a guide to some of our central questions and research.