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John Kirkland (20130929)
JK: Whilst reading para 3, page 140 I was reminded of Stephen Potter’s little book ‘Gamemanship: the art of winning without actually cheating’. For instance if you’re being beaten at golf ask your opponent to show you how they wrap their little finger of the left hand. This is enough to break the event sequence. Potter offers a number of ruses which follow the same principle.
http://www.heretical.com/potter/
Of course academics have done this since too, possibly unaware of the basic PCT principle involved.
RM: Wow, someone else who knows about “Gamesmanship”; wonderful, gentle, sly, self-deprecating humor. What you describe is a case of disturbing a sequence if you ask the question while they are putting. If your golf friend stops the putt sequence to answer you, this is a disturbance to the sequence (which can be annoying to your friend) but the sequence can be started over and carried our expertly after the explanation.
I think what Potter was getting at in this little piece of gamesmanship was not the winning by interrupting but, rather, winning by making your golf friend “self-conscious”. In PCT, what you are doing when you try to explain how you do something is bringing consciousness to a control process (making a putt) that you do (when you do it skillfully) without much consciousness. When you become conscious of what you are doing (controlling) you are bringing the reorganizing system into play (or so says PCT) which starts changing the parameters of control, the initial result being that your performance (control) becomes worse.
I think Potter, in this little piece of gamesmanship, was demonstrating the importance of “the zen of the game” for doing things well. Once you’ve learned to do something skillfully – once the reorganization system has done it’s work of building a good control organization - you want it to bug out (go into a zen state). Potter understood this (as do many people who do things skillfully) and knew, then, that the way to screw up your opponent was to get their reorganizing system into the game.
This aspect of PCT – the role of reorganization in skillful control – will be the main topic of chapter 14, on learning. So we’ll be getting their pretty soon!
Best
Rick
With respect to leading question #5, consider Morse Code where V = …- Two sound sound configurations, dit and a dah. If there was no change there would be an ‘h’ (4 dits), and all the other Morse characters (and I don’t mean Lewis). Morse code is known as c/w (continuous wave) but perceptually there are sequences obtained by varying the ‘on/off’ switch.
As for Q#4 Rick’s set a little puzzle. This could lead to an understanding of speech/language therapy, say with dyslexia. The phenomenon Bill mentions in Q#4 gained some publicity recently, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia
From a PCT perspective could these ‘words’ be considered as events, with redundancy?
Perhaps txt messages are of the same ilk.
With one of the grandchildren the other day reading Dahl’s Matilda the word ‘queer’ appeared. I asked her to spell queen and was told ‘quine’.
Kinds regards
JohnK
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:
[From Rick Marken (2013.09.24.1345)]
Erling Jorgensen (2013.09.24 1300 EDT)–
Rick Marken (Mon, 23 Sep 2013 20:35:28 -0700)
Hi Rick,
I’m very impressed with the paper you, Warren Mansell, & Zahra Khatib
have put together, on “Motor Control as the Control of Perception,”
Perceptual & Motor Skills: Perception, 2013, 117, 1, 1-12. It
is exceedingly clear & well written. It also gets your elegant
simulation / demonstration of levels of perceptual control out among
a wider readership.
Thank you! Thank you. On behalf of Warren & Zahra I would like to thank the Academy… Oops, wrong award;-)
Seriously, thanks very much Erling. It’s feels really nice to get praise but it’s especially nice to get such intelligent praise!
Best regards
Rick
I like the method of strong inference that you folks use, by noting
a key difference in predictions between the “controlled outputs”
approach versus the “controlled results” approach. You lay out the
distinction very well about whether the timing delay of more complex
levels would arise from the motor output side or the perceptual
input side. By settling on the same motor output (i.e., a mouse-press)
for any of the conditions of your study, you identify a key place
where differences in those predictions would show themselves.
The instructions to press the mouse button as quickly as possible,
following introduction of a disturbance to the task, thereby restoring
the previous condition, allow you to operationalize the task in a
very straightforward way with your “% on Target” metric. The sooner
the button was pressed, the greater the percentage of time spent under
effective control, allowing clear measurements across conditions.
In the Discussion section, I especially liked how you anticipated &
dealt with the possible criticism that a higher level perception
would require more animation frames to perceive – in your words,
"it is true that shape cold be perceived in a single frame while
motion and sequence could be perceived only after at least two frames"
(p. 10). You go on to show that a change in any of those conditions
could be detected right away within one frame, & thus the motor task
would be equivalent among all of them.
I also like that you folks include the caveat that some motor tasks
are more complex than others, & so would lead to differential rates
of motor production. The reason for utilizing the same motor output
on all the conditions of the experiment was not to ‘stack the deck’
against “controlled output” theories, but simply to test a spot where
“controlled output” versus “controlled result” would lead to
different predictions.
I always think it’s a good idea, in such write-ups, to be very clear
about the limiting conditions of what is being advanced. Not only
is the humility better received by the reader, but it subtly invites
the reader to expand the study into those new areas that have not
yet been tested.
Again, kudos to you, Warren, & Zahra, on an excellent article. Here’s
hoping that its clean logic will be persuasive to a variety of readers.
All the best,
Erling
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com