The River Tiger Podcast from Dynamics Coaching
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Join us as we delve into spontaneous and insightful conversations with practitioners and researchers across the fields of learning, skill acquisition, movement sciences, ethics, and philosophy, particularly in relation to adventure and equestrian sports. Our focus is on sports that embrace fluidity and lack rigid boundaries or rules, inherently involving risks that cannot be completely eliminated. We believe that these sports present unique challenges and opportunities that differ from those found in many traditional sports. However, we aspire for our podcasts to resonate with coaches and participants across a diverse spectrum of sports and activities.
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The River Tiger Podcast from Dynamics Coaching
Exploring 'the affordance hypothesis' with Ed Baggs. What are affordances and are they different for non-human animals?
Ed Baggs, assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark, joins me for a conversation about his research on affordances. I invited Ed to join me after reading his latest (preprint) paper ‘The Affordance Hypothesis. In this paper Ed and his co-author Vicente Raja delve into affordance research, using examples like an African fish eagle hunting bee-eaters to illustrate direct perception.
Ed discusses his journey from traditional cognitive science to exploring affordances in language and human interactions. Though the paper they reference, among many others, James's Principles of Psychology and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, to contextualise Gibson's work. Ed emphasises the need to move beyond categorisation-based thinking to a field-based approach, using action boundaries to operationalise affordances.
As a key part of the operationalisation problem (how to study affordances without falling back into categorical thinking), Ed explains the long-standing debate over affordances' ontological status, referencing Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique and Turvey et al.'s response. In their paper, Ed and Vicente propose viewing affordances as regions of movement space rather than categories.
The discontinuity problem addresses how humans use language to categorise things, and therefore perceive affordances differently from other animals.
The conversation also touches on the practical implications for coaches and athletes, emphasising the importance of shared perceptions and meaningful affordances.
There is so much in here. It is worth listening to Episode 60 with Dr Andrew Wilson for an introduction to affordances, and to Episode 1 with Dr James Stafford and Warren Lampard for a conversation about action boundaries and using affordances in practice.
About my guest
Edward Baggs is assistant professor in humanities at the University of Southern Denmark and a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. His work focuses on the problem of scaling up embodied cognitive science beyond the individual mind to encompass collaborative activity as well as cognitive development and language. His current interests include direct social perception theory and developing field-based methods for observing cognition in everyday settings.
Links
Ed Baggs on ‘x’ https://x.com/edbaggs/status/1867584095720779812
Preprint full paper DOI https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xu4wk
YouTube clip of the African Fish Eagle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-BSDZ7iqc&pp=ygUWYWZyaWNhbiBmaXNoIGVhZ2xlIGJiYw%3D%3D
Karen Adolph visual cliff research clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WanGt1G6ScA
How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson's “ecological approach.' J.A. Fodor, & Z.W. Pylyshyn (1981) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010027781900093?via%3Dihub
Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981) Turvey et al. (1981) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/16000703_Ecological_laws_of_perceiving_and_acting_In_reply_to_Fodor_and_Pylyshyn_1981