[Avery Andrews 931001.1624]
Interesting book:
Warren, R. & A.H. Wertheim (1990) _Perception and Control of
Self-Motion_, Lawrence Erlbaum.
This week I'm doing coordinative structures, but it seems to be full
of interesting ideas about perceptions that can help organisms to find
their way around.
Interesting articles:
Fel'dman, A.G. and Latash M.L. (1982) `Interaction of Afferent and
Efferent Signals Underlying Joint Position Sense: Empirical
and Theoretical Approaches', Journal of Motor Behavior 14:174-193.
Fel'dman himself on the mass-spring hypothesis. Explicitly rejects
the interpretation that it's all mechanical, except in the
deafferented case. He credits Kugler, Turvey, et. al. with accepting
the correct interpretation where reflex loops are part of the
story, but this seems overly generous to me. There's also a lot
of stuff about interneuron pools that I haven't figured out yet.
Turvey, M.T. (1977) `Preliminaries to a Theory of Action with Respect
to Vision', in Shaw and Brasford (eds) _Perceiving, Acting and
Knowing_, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
One of the founding documents of `neo-Gibsonianism' (= `action
theory'). I haven't read it carefully, but it looks much less
hostile to feedback than some of the later stuff. In fact, I rather
liked what I saw of it. Too bad he wasn't clever enough to see that
2nd order feedback systems were proposed explanations (the only
extant one, as far as I have been able to ascertain) for the
existence of `coordinative structures'.
And, for Rick:
why bother to define `affordances'? Well, it seems to me that if we
can provide more intelligible definitions of their concepts than they
can themselves, it might help encourage people to pay more attention to
us than to them. About the actual utility of the concept, I make no
argument.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au