Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Dio D. Vicen

@diovicen.bsky.social

490 followers 490 following 99 posts

Vicente Raja; but I want to be Luffy. Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the University of Murcia (Spain). Associate Faculty at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy (Canada).

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Dec 29

Last summer, we asked some friends what "radical embodiment" is. These are their answers. They are diverse and cool. Check them out! ⬇️
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwtS...
(w/ @tonychemero.bsky.social, @edbaggs.bsky.social, and others).

What Is Radical Embodiment? - Interviews at Dimensions of Radical Embodiment

YouTube video by Myrtos Research Group - MINT Lab

www.youtube.com

3 11

Reposted by Dio D. Vicen

Ed Baggs @edbaggs.bsky.social · Sep 10

Some friends and I submitted a commentary

Preprint here:

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

@guicogsci.bsky.social @segundo-ortin.bsky.social @diovicen.bsky.social @tonychemero.bsky.social

1 6 20

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Sep 5

Is ecological neuroscience a feasible enterprise? After some theoretical work on ecological resonance, we've engaged on experimental research to test some of the hypotheses that follow from it. These are the first results of (hopefully) many more to come! It's open access 👇
doi.org/10.1111/psyp...

<em>Psychophysiology</em> | SPR Journal | Wiley Online Library

This study bridges brain and body through ecological psychology and neuroscience by demonstrating how ecological information—in this case, “time to contact” or tau—constrains brain activity and as mu...

doi.org

5 11

Reposted by Dio D. Vicen

Tony Chemero @tonychemero.bsky.social · Sep 4

Want to make sure @mljanderson.bsky.social and @diovicen.bsky.social are seeing this.

Ben Hayden @benhayden.bsky.social · Sep 4

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

www.nature.com

2 2 8

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Aug 26

To be completely honest, I think that, in general, neuroscientists are far more open to this issue than the "philosophers of".

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Aug 26

"Although neuroscience has developed powerful tools for measuring brain activity, its behavioral measures are far more primitive, as it lacks a coherent conceptual framework for analyzing and interpreting behavior."

True! Happy to see this idea is growing.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Aligning brain and behavior

To understand how the brain generates behavior, both brain activity and behavior must be measured accurately. Although neuroscience has developed powe…

www.sciencedirect.com

1 2 10

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Aug 14

It never ceases to amaze me how angry some people in mainstream cognitive science get when one talks about non-representation/non-computation while they completely refuse to at least read something about it so they can have an actual reason to be angry that is not just "hey, normal science, bro".

1 2

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Jul 17

@segundo-ortin.bsky.social and I were talking about ecological psychology with @thedissenteryt.bsky.social:
youtu.be/s6EwRYqmP64
www.thedissenter.net

#1124 Miguel Segundo Ortín & Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology

YouTube video by The Dissenter

youtu.be

5 7

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Jul 6

My impression is we’ve lost this kind of thinking in contemporary neuroscience: that we need good theories of the brain and *behavior* to explain stuff. James, Lashley, Hebb, Tolman, Skinner, Gibson… They all agreed on that.

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · Jul 6

Karl Lashley, writing in 1930, on the Basic Neural Mechanisms of Behaviour: wexler.free.fr/library/file...

1 7

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Jul 3

David Lee just died.
He formulated tau/time-to-contact, the most famous bit of ecological information.
He is one of the main reasons why ecological psychology is still alive.
We all are indebted to him. I met him once and ended up having dinner at his place. Very cool guy!
RIP

3 5 10

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Jun 19

Affordances are motifs. Representations are motifs. A sentence with both words can mean anything! 😱

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · Jun 18

This'll drive the ecological psychology / direct perception folks nuts! Yes, affordances have to be represented! 😅

Iris Groen @irisgroen.bsky.social · Jun 16

We studied affordances, a term introduced by Gibson (1979) to describe the idea that vision entails perceiving the action possibilities of environments. We wanted to know: can we find evidence that the human brain represents perceived affordances of scenes?

www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

1 1

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Jun 4

No os lo vais a creer, pero en el otro lado hay un grupo de filo-bros discutiendo durante días sobre si hay ideología en la ciencia. Al quinto día empiezan a apelar a Popper. Hay que quererlos.

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · May 28

I work (mostly) on ecological psychology and (often) on plant intelligence. And you can’t imagine the amount of ideological reviews I get. Really bad scholarship, if you ask me.
Is this also the case for people working on more mainstream frameworks?

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · May 16

The best of all left 15 years ago.
#longlivedio
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RiJ...

www.youtube.com

Reposted by Dio D. Vicen

Miguel Segundo Ortin @segundo-ortin.bsky.social · May 13

¡NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!

"A World of Minds: Ecological Psychology as a Framework for Comparative Cognition"

Authors: Miguel Segundo-Ortin, Paco Calvo, & Louise Barrett

You can download it from here: miguelsegundoortinphd.com/publications

Publications – Miguel Segundo Ortín, PhD

miguelsegundoortinphd.com

1 9 20

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · May 1

This might be the best BlueSky thread to date.
Don't be like Vinny.

Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · May 1

Philosophy has jumped the shark.

If anyone in the philosophy community wonders why their neuroscientist colleagues don’t pay them any mind, read this paper.

bsky.app/profile/zoed...

Zoe Drayson @zoedrayson.bsky.social · Apr 30

My paper 'Representations are (still) theoretical posits' is forthcoming in a special of Theoria on representations in cognitive science. Preprint available at philpapers.org/rec/DRARAS-2.

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 29

Exactly! We hope the ecological information that specifies the affordance will be somehow reflected in brain activity. With apologies for further self-promotion, we are trying to figure out how to test this: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

OSF

doi.org

1 1

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 28

I think the main issue re affordances is that eco. psychs. think they are not/cannot be encoded/represented in the brain. If anything, brain activity is coupled to ecological info.
A little bit of self-promotion, but I think this an accesible primer on contemporary eco. psy.: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Ecological Psychology

Cambridge Core - Biological Psychology - Ecological Psychology

doi.org

1 5

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 27

In an alternative universe, cog. scientists *read* eco. psych. and find out that...
1. The foundational texts of eco. psych. (Gibson 1966, 1979) don't talk about representations.
2. Affordances aren't what they think they are.
3. The core is ecological information.
4. 50 years+ of experimental work.

1 3 9

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 27

To be fair, the press release says "SCENE builds on principles from ecological psychology", so I guess the Andrew's question is legit.

1 5

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 26

Maybe they are motifs 😇
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The motifs of radical embodied neuroscience

The notion of motif is proposed to enrich the philosophical toolkit of cognitive neuroscience. Motifs are highly unconstrained, open-ended concepts that support equally open-ended families of explana....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 25

Just coming here to say I admire your constraint in answering this kind of stuff. You are a saint 😇

1 5

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 24

I'm happy & sad.
Happy part: the word "ecological" becomes usual in neuroscience.
Sad part: "affordances", yes, but the aim is to find how they are encoded in the brain.

Some eco. psychs. in the project would've made it radical but perhaps more interesting? Something like: doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

2 3 8

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 24

I should probably know this, but there's any ecological psychologist in the Toronto area (maybe Southern Ontario in general)?

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 21

We all have at some point, I think 😁

Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · Apr 21

What do you think is the statement most often (uncritically) repeated in cognitive science, biology, and their philosophy that is nevertheless quite obviously false?

In my opinion, it is:
"Organisms face an uncertain, ever-changing environment."

1 1 6