"Transfer is in the overlap between the human and the information" - a conversation with Dr Andrew Wilson - The Talent Equation Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:23):
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Speaker 2 (00:27):
Now.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
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Speaker 3 (01:56):
Welcome to the Townent Equation Podcast.

Speaker 4 (02:01):
If you are passionate about helping young people to leash
their potential and want to find ways to do that better,
then you've come to the right place. The Talent Equation
podcast seeks to answer the important questions facing parents, coaches,
and talent developers as they try to help young people
become the best they can be. This is a series

(02:22):
of unscripted, unpolished conversations between people at the razor's edge
of the talent community who are prepared to share their knowledge,
experiences and challenges in an effort to help others get
better faster. Listen, reflect, and don't forget to join the
discussion at the Talent Equation dot co dot UK.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Enjoy the show.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Andrew Wilson, Welcome back to the Tullent Equations Podcast. I
don't know how many appearances you've made, but you definitely
feel like you're one of the sort of pop returning guests,
so it's great to have you back. Thanks, good to
be beck it's been a little while, I think, yeah,
I think you're right. It feels like it's been a
little while. I think we've got a lot to catch
up on. So starting point, I just wanted to because

(03:20):
people may not have listened to your previous episodes, I
wonder if you could just quickly give people the sort
of your backstory in this space, and it'd be useful
also maybe for you to just touch on a little
bit about, you know, what you're working on at the moment,
because you've got some exciting projects on the go, including
opportunities for people to come together and learn together. So yeah,

(03:42):
catch us up. Well.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
So for those of you who don't know me, I'm
Andrew Wilson. I'm a reader in psychology at Leeds Beckett
University in Leeds in the UK, and I'm an ecological psychologist.
I'm a sitting in the layer of doing the basic
science kind of guy. Is my main bread and butter,
and obviously i'm a university lecturer as well. I've been
doing this now for it's twenty years in August, since

(04:08):
I've got my PhD. I've been around for a little
while now and so yeah, so my interests are I'm
interested broadly in learning actually as fundamentally i'm skill acquisition
in the sports context, but I'm interested in how we
perceive our environments, how we use that to control our behaviors,
and importantly, how we come to be able to do

(04:29):
best through learning. So learning, and yeah, I've been really
focused a lot of the last few years on questions
of learning, using sort of basic land tasks, but trying
to use those tasks to answer bigger questions about about learning.
And the thing that's really got my attention over the
last couple of years is thinking about transfer of learning
from an academic research point of view, and obviously that

(04:53):
feeds into the whole point of you know, in coaching, right,
the whole thing about training is that you're teaching someone
one environment and you need that learning to show up
in another environment. How do we make that happen? What
do you what do you do to facilitate that and
to make it likely? And it turns out, you know,
historically the recent it's a complicated question, but I've been

(05:13):
doing a lot of work lately and you know, unsurprisingly
it's about affordances and information and it's it's about what's
present in the training environment needs to be there, and
so I've been I've been engaging with those questions at
a pretty basic science kind of level, but always just
kind of with one eye on other things. So yeah,
so that's one interest I'm also I've also become really

(05:36):
interested recently in connecting a fudance based control and so
thinking about how fudance is actually feature in the coordination
and control of our actions, connecting that up to sort
of what are known as motor abundance methods. So a
lot of your listeners, I think will be familiar with
names like Bernstein maybe, and they will have heard of

(05:58):
the degrees of freedom problem or motor abundance solution to
bliss of motor abundance, the idea that we have more
movement elements available to us than we ever need at
any given one moment. So the question is how do
we use that flexibility, how do we control it and
make it manageable, but how do we keep the flexibility
and creativity that it retails. And so my big push

(06:20):
right now is I'm connecting a lot or trying to
connect all the research methods that get thrown at those
kinds of questions. Connecting that out to affordance space to control,
because I think it's affordances that make it all work.
That's the pitch anyway. So that's some new stuff, and
some colleagues of mine and I have been having discussions
over the last twelve eighteen months trying to trying to

(06:41):
really figure out how to put all that together. And
I've just submitted an article summarizing all my thoughts recently
on that. So that's kind of the science stuff that
I get up to that I've been up to recently.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
What else, Well, it's some good jumping off points there,
because I've got a couple of areas you've piqued my
interest in. But the starting point was I remember in
our previous conversations you talked about this sort of there's
a few hard problems in ecological psychology. It seems they

(07:14):
talk about the hard, hard problem of consciousness, and I
think ecological psychology has got.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
A number of these.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
One of them, though, one of the hard problems that
you've talked about is this notion of transfer and transfer
of learning. And I remember being slightly crestfallen when we
spoke previously, because you know, you sort of I was
looking for some you know, sort of fairly concrete responses
to sort of say, you know, well, the ecological approach
has got some real clarity as to that it provides

(07:42):
a greater transfer of learning. It turns out that, you know,
it's a little bit more of a nuanced question than that.
So I'm wondering, though, given that there's been a bit
of time since we last spoke, and given that you've
been working in the area, like what you've learned, what
you've learned, and whether there is any more clarity as
to because obviously the big debate that happens within the

(08:03):
sports space, because this is what tends to happen in
the sports space. And if you've seen any of the
stuff that's happened in the world to say, grappling and BJJ,
which seems to have grabbed hold or at least got
a toe hold or a heel hook maybe into the
ecological space, and a lot of practitioners quite intrigued and
excited and utilizing this thing and debating utility and debating

(08:27):
effectiveness as a training modality. And the question always comes
back to this idea of transfer. Does the practice does
use utilizing an ecological approach and utilizing ecological ideas in
practice lead to greater transfer. So I'd be interested just
to sort of riff on that subject for a bit
and see what you know, where you are in your
thinking as far as that's concerned. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Sure, So there's just thinking. So right, Okay, there's a
few things going on. Let me start at the beginning.
Me And so, the one thing that everybody agrees is
probably true is that you will see transfer between a
training context and a performance context. You'll see transfer to
the extent that those contexts overlap in some meaningful way, right,

(09:10):
so that they contain something important that is the same.
So that's why we think learning transfers. Every other disagreement
is about what that overlap should look like.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
So, and.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
One of the interesting little secrets, So I had a
PhD student several years ago now who was doing his
work sort of lad based work on learning and transfer
of learning. And one of the things that he did
at the time was that he did a, you know,
as part of his PhD, quite a deep dive on
the literature and had started to have a look at
what people thought that overlap needed to look like. And

(09:49):
it's turned out to be a topic that's really just
it's it's been a real boom and bust kind of topic.
So people you know, talked about trying to identify, you know,
well you need if you want if you want learning
to transfer, then you're learning has to conclude part of
the whole. And then the question was will walk parts
And then people tried that for a little while. It
didn't really work, and so people got bored and they

(10:10):
went and did other things, and then everybody forgot that
they got bored, and they started coming back to it
because it's still a really interesting question, and they'd come
back and try and figure out something else about what
was overlapping, And effectively, everybody was trying to find overlap
kind of they were looking in the wrong place, it seemed,
and they were all fundamentally kind of doing the same

(10:31):
thing where they were trying to find something. Crudely, they
were trying to find something in the verbal description of
the two tasks that the two tasks had in common. Right,
So my favorite example is a research paper where the
researchers were looking at they trained people to either balance
on a tightrope or balance on a beam, and they

(10:54):
did learning, and then they did transfer and what they
found was almost no transfer, right, even though there was
tons of good learning. And the idea that this is
surprising comes from the fact that, well, both of those
tasks have the word balance in them, and so surely
there's an overlook, right, they both involve balancing, So obviously

(11:15):
that's not working. Right. The way we verbally describe these
tasks isn't capturing the underlying reality but the person's actually interacting.
So the pitch for me has always been what's the
point of the ecological approach? Right to practitioners, Well, it's
a scientific framework that provides a vocabulary of real parts,

(11:37):
things like affordance's, perceptual information, all that stuff. It provides
a vocabulary of things that we think people organisms actually
interact with. And you can use that vocabulary now to
describe your task in a way that's closer to what's
actually going on. That's the pitch, right, and that's the
pitch of any good theory really, But that's always the
pitch that I've made when people ask me, you know,

(11:58):
why should coaches care about science? Well, it gives you
a way to talk about what you're doing in a
way that we think winds up quite nicely. So my
pitch lately has been to use the tools of ecological
psychology as the thing as the vocabulary that structures the
way I talk about tasks. And so, for example, one
of the things that the ecological approaches that would never

(12:20):
occur to us to say that balance occurred in both
of those One is balance on a slack line or hyphenated,
one is balance on a beam, all hyphenated. Why would
we say that, Well, because the ecological understanding is that
there's no such thing as a behavior. There's only ever
behaviors in context, and the behavior is what happens when
people and their environment come together. So if you want

(12:41):
to describe the behavior, you've got to describe the people,
and you've got to describe the environment that's where behavior lives.
That's a key just way of thinking about these things.
So using that vocabulary to try and talk about transfer,
can we get better? So there were two kinds of
things for me that I've been playing with as a
way of developing that. One was Danny's thesis work using

(13:02):
a very simple lad kind of task when we were
looking at learning and transfer in the bounds of that task,
and what we found was some slightly surprising patterns of transfer.
But we did actually manage to get transfer for the
first time in this task. And the reason we were
able to get transfer was that we were studying the
task in a very ecological kind of way. We were

(13:25):
providing people with very representative feedback. Right. So, traditionally in
this field the feedback has been transformed and turned into
something else to make the task easier. But we understand
it doing that messes with everything, right, So years ago
my PhD I developed a method of providing real time
feedback in this task that didn't mess with the ecological
information Danny's thesis. Then, for the first time, using this

(13:47):
feedback showed not only good learning, but learning and interesting
patterns of transfer that we were able to clearly connect
to the kinds of information that people were using in
the task. We were able to identify what people were doing.
And so, what's the overlap between the training context and
the transfer context. The overlap is information. Why, Well, that's

(14:11):
what the organism always interacts with. So if the information
that you learn is useful in the task that you're
now trying to work in, then you're off to the races.
If the information you learn isn't, then you're no good
and so that's part of the story. So there was
some cool stuff coming out of that, and we were
looking at age related changes and learning things like that.

(14:33):
The other context and where it's shown up was a
project that came out of a collaboration with Southampton, a
PhD student looking at the use of virtual reality tools
for training in sports. And of course the huge question
there is can I get you to do something in
a virtual environment that then shows up in the game environment, right,
And there were two interesting things. We're still working on

(14:55):
the data analysis and just finishing all that off to
see exactly what happened in our study, but we did
a literature review and we published a review just the
last couple of months looking at people training, decision making,
and Gay's behavior using VR. And we found two really
worrying things, well, one interesting thing, one worrying thing. The
interesting thing is that there are some hints that virtual

(15:17):
training and virtual environments can show up in the real world.
But the worrying thing was that hardly anybody studying virtual
reality was studying transfer because they were just training people
in VR and showing people getting back. And the thing
that we learned when we tried to study transfer properly,
was the reason is studying transfer and game behaviors? Yeah right,

(15:38):
It's very difficult to do carefully and to really kind
of illustrate, but it's really important. So the thing that's
come out the big the ecological story for me is
you get transfer when you're training and your performance context overlap.
Information is the overlap. It has to be because that's

(15:59):
where all that's what behavior begins, but it's not where
everything begins. So information about what more information about afformances. Right,
So this then it connects up to the whole logic
of representative design and the whole ecological rationale for designing
training context the way that you train them. And then
the final piece there is that we've got the logic,

(16:20):
we've got the vocabulary, we've got some hints in the literature,
but there is still a huge amount of work to
be done by people like me in collaboration with coaches
and practitioners to really kind of there are demonstrations that
this works, but we haven't nailed it yet. There's a
ton to do, and it's still a fascinating really and

(16:42):
it's as far as I can tell, it's the central
question for coaching how do I make learning move from
one context to another context? And all the arguments that
we have with anybody are all about disagreements about how
to facilitate that transfer, and so you know, really, I
think there's some real opportunities there, but I think there
is still quite a lot of work to be done.

(17:02):
So it's an interesting time, right, there's reason for optimism,
but there's also a boat load of activity that still
has still occurrent.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
So why brilliant, thank you? That was what I what
I was what I heard there was just flicking back
to something you said there that the overlap is in
the information and the information. The affordances are where the
information lies and.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
The information come from effective where it comes from.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, And so in for example, a team sport that
I'm involved with, a lot of the information is in
the interaction or the interactions, say between teammates and opponents,
and all of those sorts of things. Those sorts of
things is where you know, so for example, space is

(17:58):
completely defined by team opponent. An awareness of space for
me is probably one of the most central features of
skilled performance in a team sport like minefield hockey, because
it's at a premium, and in certainly and at the
area where you most want to be able to score,

(18:18):
it's at the height, it's at the greatest premium because
it's the most condensed, and it's the defenders are desperately
trying to stop you from gaining it, or they're minimizing
your opportunities for hab it momentarily, so that those those
those are the affordances that are very dynamic, that are
constantly changing all the time, and in order to attune

(18:39):
in order to gain, you know, in order to experience
that and therefore to be able to then do something
in practice which might then.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
Help when in competition. Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (18:55):
The more of the you need the information and to
interact with. So the interactions create create the information, and
it's the information where the overlap is going to be.
So the more of the relevant information. But specifying is
the language, isn't it specifying information? The more the relevant

(19:16):
information that's there, the more chance you've got of an
individual taking something from that practice environment into a competitive
in bug.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yes, because it and it has to be that where
because information is how organisms come into contact with their environment, right,
So affordances are really are the thing we're trying to
come into contact with right there, we're trying to engage
with the opportunities for action and use those opportunities to control, coordinate,

(19:45):
and control we're up to. But it's really important to
remember that affordances are in some in many senses, they're
literally over there, right So, you know, there's my sofa,
it's over there at affords sitting, but it's literally over there.
So the question is how does that come into contact
with me? Well, that's what information is for. That could
be visual information if it's just making sounds. There is

(20:05):
acoustic information once I'm sitting on it. There is haptic information,
and so on and so on. So we have access
to lots of different sources of information and some of
them are useful at varying times, et cetera. But it's
information that's the point where we come into contact and
the other way to think about it. So, now that
the ecological community is starting to think about neuroscience and
starting to think about what the brain is up to,

(20:26):
which has been quite an interesting development. The key kind
of intuition there is that what the brain is actually,
what the main thing the brain is doing is resonating
to information that's the primary kind of thing that we
think the brain is up to. There may be more
than may be other internal dynamics going on. That's questern
for later. Our basic initial hypothesis is that what brains

(20:49):
primarily do is resonate to information. That's a Gibson metaphor.
So you're not bringing information in and processing it and
constructing things with it, but you are resonating to it
like a radio resonates to radio waves. Right, That dynamic
achievement kind of notion. And so and again it's information
that is the first thing that brains interact with, and

(21:13):
it's the first thing that we resonate to. And what
happens to that next is another question. But you see,
you know, you see evidence of this where you can
track the information coming in and you can track the
information coming out. If you look at the shape and
the form of the behavior, you can see the signature
of the information in the spatial temporal details of that movement. Right,
So what the brain is doing is almost passing that along, right.

(21:36):
It's passive. Its job is to get light into the muscles,
and that's what the nervous it's a big thing that
the nervous system's for so you know, there's so many
reasons within the ecological approach to be focused on informational
overlap as the behaviorally relevant thing. The second thing that
I was thinking about if you were talking about awareness
of space, for example, as a key sort of thing,

(21:57):
so that's a good place to start. But that's one
of those verbal discriptions of the task that in and
of itself might not be up to the scope. So
the question is, can we within that question of awareness
of space, what's actually going on ecologically in terms of affordances.
So then you started to do the right thing of Okay,
within that space, there's affordances swinging in and out of existence. Right,

(22:17):
there's a gap that's there that's not there, that comes
back you move, so it as to create the gap.
Someone moves to try and close it off. That works
to the extent that they stopped that space affording something
for you, and so on and so on. So the trick,
so the big trick for us is to turn that
description of what you want your athletes to do awareness
of space, turn that into a description of the affordances

(22:38):
that are present and therefore the information that's present. And
once you've got that vocabulary, once you've got your just
once you're thinking and describing things in those terms, then
you're much closer to having a vocabulary. If we're talking
about what that critical overlap has to be. So how
do you make you how do you get the right
kind of information in Well, unless you're one of program

(23:00):
up a virtual environment and have complete controller over everything,
which you don't because it's a massive pain. The best
way to get the right kind of information and is
to put the right kind of affordances into your training space,
because then the affordances will interact with the light and
they'll produce the information for you. That's what they're for, right,
and so if you so and again this just feeds back.
This is what representative design is. If you get the

(23:21):
right affordances into the space, they'll produce information about themselves.
People will interact with that information. What do they learn?
They will learn how to use that information to coordinate
and control their behavior. And if those affordances do, in
fact ever show up in your game, and they will
by definition produce the same information and you've learned how

(23:41):
to interact with them. That's the whole point. So the
ecological argument is that the overlappor is in affordances but
critically and information.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
So one of the I guess one of the questions
I can hear tacticianers yep. And these might be curious
practitioners that are very interested in this way of thinking

(24:10):
about human learning in in this movement context, but they
are obviously steeped in, you know, a kind of a
more traditional learning paradigm that is hard to let go
of sometimes or they're they're you know, they're they're just skeptical,

(24:34):
you know, so curious but steeped inner an alternative paradigm
that's hard to sort of break free from or skeptical
and therefore lots of questions. And so I'm sort of
going to play their roles lightly. And one of the
things is, so I'm quite comfortable when you talk about
the foot, when you're talking about sort of putting you

(24:54):
affordances in. Well, it's not a question that it's like
a lego block. I'm going to put this affordance in.
I'm to put this affordance in. What you're doing is
you're trying to create an environment that equates to the
like the likely competitive environment as much as is possible
given various constraints and parameters so that affordances will naturally

(25:18):
occur in the way that they would occur in a
competitive environment. But the problem a lot of practitioners have
and I have to admit I have suffered with this
in the past, and now get used to this and
I'm more understanding, so I understand that those affordances are
going to materialize in different ways. And what a lot

(25:39):
of coaches who are used to controlling learning environments and
wanting to have control is the answer they want is
show me how to put the lego blocks in, show
me how to have control that the right affordances are
going to be put into place so that I can
get the right outcomes. Now, it's a very very manipulative

(26:01):
type of mentality slightly because they want control. And I
think this maybe takes us towards this affordance based control
idea that you were presented you were talking about earlier on.
Perhaps I don't know, but it's an interesting It's an
area that I hear a lot around and I can
I can sense the tension because a lot of practitioners
feel deeply uncomfortable just designing an environment and kind of

(26:24):
allowing those affordance to emerge and then being skillful with
constraints in order to sort of maybe you know, draw
attention in different ways, shine a light on different aspects.
You know, you can become more you can become more
skilled at that. But it is an ever changing dance.
It's a proper dance with the participants that you're continuously
flowing with and if you get more and more comfortable

(26:46):
with that becomes quite a joyous experience. Actually, plut I
can understand how a lot of people would feel very fearful,
particularly at the elite end, where results matter and you've
got to have a bit more like focus of control.
So this is where I think a lot of the
discussions around that it depends comes from. I think some
people suggest, oh, I'll do that when it doesn't matter

(27:06):
and I've got the opportunity to explore and learn. But
when I get into the coal face, I'm going to
be much more directive. I'm going to tell people what
to do in this, that and the other. Sorry that
was a bit of a meandering space, but I just
wanted to give you that sort of problem to play that.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
So it's funny the way I think, so, right, I
hear their problem a lot, and I hear it framed
that way, and I was just thinking while you were
talking that there's a there's a slightly different way to
frame the problem where I actually think everybody then agrees
on the shape of the problem, namely that learning doesn't
happen like that. Learning takes time. So and one of

(27:43):
the concerns is making sure that you take advantage of
your limited amount of training time to give people to
have people spend as much of that time having the
opportunity to learn what you want them to learn in
that session. And there is a perfectly legitimate concern. So

(28:03):
I can fill that hour with drills and I know
that they have got however many repetitions or exposures, right,
I can. It's really easy to look and see how
many times they did the thing right, and obviously right,
that's you know, there's complications around that, but I get
the urge, right, because you want to make sure that

(28:25):
you want you're trying to optimize your training time and
making sure that you're actually filling it with opportunities, right,
And there is a very real concern. But if you
if you're trying to get affordances to emerge over the
course of a representative training design constrained training environment. Over

(28:45):
the course of that hour, you might successfully get the
affordance to show up ten times maybe, and people may
or may not have seen it when it showed up,
And so there is that loss of control. And there
is therefore that concern that you haven't given your learners
enough time to learn what you want them to learn.

(29:07):
So even if you want them to learn to perceive
and interact with affordances, there's a real concern there. So
there's a couple of things that are credibly so.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
One.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
So, for example, when I bring people into the lab
and make them learn stuff, I give them plenty of
exposure and plenty of opportunities to interact with whatever it
is i'mdoing. And I can do that because the tasks
I'm using are simple and straightforward, and I've got quite
a lot of control over whether the information is present
or not. That's the whole reason I use those tasks

(29:34):
in the lab, right And as soon as you start
doing something more complicated and something more interesting, then that
control goes away again. This is one of the arguments,
for example, about using some technologies like vr SO. One
of the nice things about virtual reality potentially is that
you could put people into a training environment where they

(29:54):
where you give them an interactive, immersive experience in where
which information and configurations of players and gaps emerging. You
can have all of that happening, but you can guarantee
it's going to show up because you've programmed it in
in a certain way, for example. And again that's one
of the one of the motivations for trying to use
these technologies, and there's some reason to think that's not

(30:16):
a crazy idea. And Rob Gray talks about using VR
to try and train people to how to cope with
things that are just genuinely rare in your game. Right, So,
I think I think the issue then is that I
think we're all I think everybody across the board is
concerned about making sure that they fill their training time

(30:36):
with opportunities to learn. I then do think that there
is an element where there's a there is a little
bit of you do have to suck up a little
bit that loss of control, the loss of I'm going
to present you with an opportunity to learn by making
you run in this particular direction or do the thing,

(30:56):
and you accept that because you're trying to train is
something different, and that I think is the big gap.
You have to make that commitment and that understanding that
what you're trying to train your learner is actually something
different in the two cases. But then I think you're right.
I think once you can, once you've made that switch,

(31:17):
then the kinds of activities where you're trying to create
environments and opportunities where you produce these things are interesting
and fun and it can be really interactive, and it's
really there's a co creation element to it. You try things,
it works, or it doesn't work, or it doesn't work reliably,
you co create with your learner about how to try
and do this. The thing is one of the things

(31:40):
is that if you're present. One of the reasons why
learning can look quite slow is that if you're giving something,
if you're giving, if you're fighting against the way the
system likes to learn, and that's going to slow you up.
So I can run you through one hundred drills, but
the reason I have to run you through one hundred
drills might be that what you're learning in that case
is not you're not working with the way the system

(32:01):
likes to work. So there's a discussion to be had.
I think around the fact that if you give people
the opportunity to interact with things in the way that
the system is designed to work, namely, interacting with information
while trying to use that information to coordinate with respects
to the affordances of the environment, having that closed loop
up and running so on. Right, let me give you

(32:24):
a very simple example from my research. I can teach
you to do these coordinated rhythmic movements. Very simple, not
very exciting, but I can teach you to do them
in two ways. I can teach you by showing you
displays of how these things move and giving your feedback
as you make judgments picking them out, you know, picking
them out of lineup, and it works and it's great,
and it shows up and it's useful. Takes ages, like

(32:47):
hundreds of trials. Right, you give me ten minutes and
a joystick and me actually making you move closing that loop,
I can get equivalent performance and a third of the
time at the time. So one of the suggestions is
and so it was interesting that I could train you
the other way, but it was also interesting that it
was a real flight to train you that way, and

(33:10):
that as soon as I closed the loop and simply
had you use that information to coordinate and control your actions.
The learning really just happens pretty fast and is stable
and robust and last forever song. So it's about what
it's It's about what you think counts as a good
use of your athlete's time when your learner's time, and

(33:33):
you're going to use that time differently. But the suggestion
is again, look, I front up, I think we still
need a lot more data on this, and I think
we actually need a lot more work to really demonstrate
this more and more convincingly than has been done so
other I think there is plenty of reasons to think
this will work, but I think there's a lot to
do yet. But the basic argument is that, yeah, sure
you might, only you might get fewer exposures. Those fewer

(33:56):
exposures are working with the system, and so they're going
to you're going to get much more bang for your back.
So yeah, it doesn't solve It doesn't solve the fundamental
problem though, there's and you have to have a whole
I don't I don't think you'll ever talk a nervous coach.
I'm being a bit club there, but I don't think
you'll ever talk a nervous coach into the ecological approach

(34:19):
by telling them it will pay off in the end, right,
even if it will, I don't think that's I don't.
I don't think you can quite because I think it requires,
it requires a rethink of what you think counts as
a valuable spending of their time. And I think that's
a separate iss.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
Yeah, and so I understand that correctly. When you talked
about the joysticks and trials, trial and error to a
certain extent versus you take control, that my mind went
that that means that you're basically showing them what to

(35:00):
do and telling them what to do, and it gets
there a lot quicker. Is that sort of what you're
proposing or not?

Speaker 2 (35:04):
I'm kind of So the structure of those experiments are
either I get you to make perceptual judgments about these
things and I give you feedback that make those judgments
better and better, or I simply teach you how to
do the how to do the movement with some feedback
that guides you in. And like I say, it does
work because both cases present the relevant visual information that

(35:27):
you need to learn, and that once you learn and
actually you get transfer across those tasks, which is nice.
That shows that people are using the information and the
information works in both cases. That's kind of a nice
demonstration of it. But the critical thing is that when
I'm just presenting you passively with some information and having
you make a judgment about it, you can learn to
make that visual discrimination and it does eventually help, but

(35:49):
it takes forever and it's really not exciting. Whereas using
the information to control the action that is itself, then
reducing the information, closing that loop and actually making it
so that what you're doing is what we're always actually
doing when we're learning out in the wild, which is
moving so as to generate information which we then use

(36:13):
to control the next thing that we do, which then
produces information that perception action loop. As soon as you
close that loop, learning just it kicks out right. And
so that tells me as a researcher. When I ask
someone to do something and it's difficult, and I ask
them to do something and it's easy, that tells me
that one of those things is working with the system

(36:35):
and one of them is working against the system, and
that tells me about how the system is organized. You know,
This is a This is a fundamental bit of the
way scientists go about doing stuff, especially in psychology. We
give you something to do, and if it's hard, then
we've tripped something up. If it's easy, we haven't tripped
something up. And both of those things tell us about
how it's worked together and the critical thing that's closing

(36:57):
the gap right, closing the loop about though, the inherent
struggle associated and inherent failure that's associated with you know,
when you work ecologically where there isn't necessarily a pre
so two us a sporting metaphor, Right, I can get

(37:19):
somebody to move in a certain way, carry a ball
in a certain way, hit the ball in a certain way,
get loads of success. It'll feel easy and it'll feel
joyers until the moments of competition when somebody else is
there and all of a sudden it will go pair shaped.
Or I can give them trials with somebody else there,

(37:41):
which equates more to the likely experience they're going to
have in the game, which is going to have more
struggle and failure. It won't feel as easy, but the
goal will be that when they're presented with that problem,
which will be closer to the problem that they'll be
presented with in the game, because there's not going to
be people just waving them by like matadors saying I

(38:03):
have a crack, right, So it's going to serve them better,
but it will feel more struggly.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
So how do you square that off?

Speaker 2 (38:13):
So the couple of things again, pretty much anybody academically
conclined you studies learning, we'll all basically agree that there's
one thing we know about movement learning is that variable
practice beats non variable practice every time. So, right, it's
a truism of motional learning that variable practice produces better
outcomes than say, blocked practice. But one of the other

(38:34):
key things about that pattern of research, that's one of
the most robust things, is that variable practice doesn't pay
off until later, so blocked practice. If you say, if
you do a learning study where we do a little
baseline assessment, a bunch of training, and then we do
a post training assessment. In that first post training assessment,
blocked training will usually be doing great, and it might

(38:56):
even be doing probably doing better than variable practice. But
if I'm bringing a week later to do a retention
task when you had no further training, what happens, Well,
the blocked practice effect kind of tops out and sometimes
dips back down, whereas the variable practice continues to provide improvement.
And so that basic effect everybody's like, nobody has any

(39:18):
problems with the fact that exists. The question is why,
and that's where the stories get different. But fundamentally, blocked
practice traps you in one region of the learning space, right,
and so what you and whereas variable practice pulls you
around that learning space and so you just get exposure
to more of it. Right now, one of the things

(39:41):
that comes out of us is the motivation issue, right.
Variable practice is harder, So there's a motivational issue for
the athlete, right, and so that's where you you know,
you have to be committed, you have to be a team,
you have to be working together, and you have to
feel like this is a valuable activity. You know, it
doesn't pay off instantly, et cetera. And that's a huge issue,
right like this, you know, that's that's a whole extra

(40:02):
layer of something that you get to do. But it's
funny I look at I think one of my favorite
sort of examples of this out in the world is
just looking at little kids who've learned how to ride
scooters right. You get the little scooters that did just
did kick push right, And none of them were ever
formally taught how to do this, and it was probably

(40:23):
pretty difficult at the beginning because these things are hard
work until you really start to get the rhythm of
them right. And I've seen kids produce the most skilled adaptive,
flexible behavior on the face of curbs, jumps, you name it,
and they're having a great time because it feels good
to win. It feels good to beat that variability right. So,

(40:44):
I mean, you know, there's a lot of discussions to
be headed about exactly how to engage that, but I
think part of it was that how did they learn
how to do this? Well, they just rode them around,
and they rode them over rough terrain like you know,
bumpy cracked pavements, and they had to cope with curbs
and bumps and things. So it slows them in, it
makes it takes it longer to learn that because they're

(41:05):
doing the right kind of exploration. They're you know, they're
learning to coordinate their activity with respect to information about
the dynamics of the scooter. And so even though it
takes longer, it takes a while, and the thing was
they clearly stuck with it. So even if the work
is harder, right, there was clearly something intrinsically motivating about
riding this scooter for the kids that got them through

(41:25):
the fact that it was difficult.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
Right.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
So that's the other thing is, you know, just because
it's difficult doesn't mean it's not fun, you know, but
there's a lot of there's a lot of moving paths there.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
So there's something interesting that we'll take us in to
the next conversation. But what'd I be right in saying?
So I have a slide basically by the way, which
quotes you. It's something you said on the podcast in
one of the things I think the first time we
overspoke where you said variability is a noise, it's signal.
And I think that's a beautiful encapsulation of what we're
trying to talk about. But just talking about that point

(41:58):
about so you know, variable practice is better than non
variable practice, but the payoff is later.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (42:07):
Would that then mean then that would the sort of
rollery of that be that non variable practice gives you
earlier payoff, but it might not last you very long.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yes, it's because that non variable practice has very quickly
taken you to one particular place. So you've very quickly
got to the point where you can do that one thing.
Variable practice very slowly gets you to a place where
you do lots of things. That's the basic rule of
thumb that shows up on the data over and over again,
right and again. It's just about exposure, and it's about

(42:43):
robustness in the face of slight variation as well. So, right,
why is variability signal not noise? Well, I'm sure it's
sometimes noise, but mostly it's signal. Why because variability is
a feature of all of this, Right, it's the classic
was the classic Burnstein repetition without repetition. You know blacksmith's hammers, right,
you name that. I could ask you to do the

(43:03):
same thing twenty times thousand times in a row, and
you'll do the same thing, right, successfully reach and grasp
the object or hit the swing the hammer or whatever.
You'll do the same thing. There's your repetition, but you'll
never do it exactly the same way twice. And so
that's the without repetition. And that only shows up if
you pay attention to not if I just measure did

(43:23):
I successfully swing the hammer? And hit the nail, then yes,
every time, or I'm getting better at hitting the nail
and now i can hit the nail all the time
without repetition. Bit only shows up if you look at
exactly what's going on in order to make that outcome happen.
And this is where all the interesting stuff happens. How
the joints unfold over the space, how you organize your

(43:44):
limbs as your arm gets tired, you have to do
different things. As you know, you start, every swing starts
in a slightly different place. Every swing You've got your
grip slightly different on the hammer, right, So you have
to be able to cope with that variability because it's
a feature, not a bug of the problem of motor control, right,

(44:05):
It's just this is just the way it is. And
so if you can't ride that variability somehow, if you're
fighting against it all the time, then frankly you're doomed.
And so you know, I mentioned sort of the affordance
space control stuff and connecting up to these motor abundance ideas.
This has become another interest of mine, is just getting ecological,

(44:26):
bringing an ecological vocabulary to talking really engaging with this
problem because it's it's a we have to you know,
if we're going to study this and we're going to
try and figure out how to do skill acquisition better,
for example, we have to know how it works. If
you want to know how it works, you have to
front up to the realities of the problem the system
is trying to solve, and the reality is that it's

(44:47):
trying to produce repetition, stable outcome without repetition variable performance.
It's all that it's always trying to do that. It
has no choice. That's simply the way it is. And
part of that comes from the fact that you have
a lot of moving pieces as an organism, and some
of that comes from the fact that the world is

(45:08):
a pretty stable and reliable place, but you're never coming
at it in exactly the same way twice. Right that
gap that affords kicking the ball through, Sometimes it will
be right in front of you, sometimes will be off
to the right, Sometimes it'll be you'll have to try
and create it, and so on and so on. When
the gap emerges, the information about that gap affordance is
the same. Because it's the gap affordance. The information can

(45:28):
You can interact with it, but you never encounter it
in exactly the same way twice, because that's just not
how things work, right, So if you can't, you have
to engage with that variability because it's at the core
of everything, and some of that variability is just it's great.
In fact, it's fantastic for that variability exists, because then
if you build a system that works with that variability,

(45:52):
then you get flexibility, adaptation, adaptability, and creativity. And your
job is to live in the zone. You know, the
fundamental solution to motor control is not to shut variability out,
but to live in the zone where the variability is
about freedom and creativity and not about noise. And there's look,
there is noise, right there is. There's always some annoying
things trying to pertribute in the universe. But your job

(46:14):
is to live in a region where the variability is
not about noise, but the variability is coming from the
flexibility and then the adaptability that the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Here's with that, right, Yeah, yeah, you may you made
me think of I was trying to thinking about that
variability because the variability is where the affordances live.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
A little bit.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
Sure, are just thinking like you know, they're almost like
or it's like, you know, the kind of the the
oxygen for the affordance is probably the wrong metaphor.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
But all I mean affordances are let me, I'm actually no,
I'm going to come back to that. I'm going to
push back a little bit on that. And so that
affordances are so right in the in the framework that
I'm thinking of at the moment and being developing, right,
affordances can be variable when we bring them and study
them into the lab. We tend to study the affordances
of objects, right, the affordance of this thing to be grasped, right,

(47:14):
And we don't randomly change it unless you're doing work
yourself and br We don't do that because that's what
affordances are. We do that because that makes it's a
group of affordances that are relatively easy to do science
on right. Actually, affordances, of course, opportunities for action swing
in and out of existence as you go past them.
As they you know, the gap is formed and then
gets closed by you know, so that these things are

(47:38):
ebbing and flowing in a way that's dynamic but still
robust and reliable. The argument that I'm making actually these
days is that it's the affordance structure that's one of
the key constraints on all of this movement variability. So
movement variability, we have access to all this redundancy, right,
I've got lots of moving parts, but I don't need
all of them all the time. So I have to
I have to constrain that variable. I have to constrain

(48:01):
myself somehow to live in a space where all that
variability that is just a feature is showing up in
terms of creativity and not showing up in terms of
noise so symptoms. You know, like the movement system can
constrain themselves to a certain extent, but we also need

(48:24):
some additional constraint. And my argument is that actually what
affordances are. Affordances are the environment's way of providing a
meaningful constraint that can be placed on movement variability. Affordances
define what counts as a successful functional adaptive movement. If
you successfully interact and complement the environment, are the affordance
of the environment, then you have produced a functional adaptive behavior.

(48:47):
That's what and that's why we experience the world in
those terms. So the affordance provides a key constraint and
it doesn't lock the body down to a single movement,
because that would be a terrible idea. What it does
that lots of affordances provide a constraint on a provides
you with a range of movements and define it's the
thing that defines the range that's good rather than bad.

(49:11):
That defines the range that is creative, inflexible, and adaptive,
and it defines the range that is noise. And then
air job is to perceive that affordance and use information
about their affordance to live in the part of the
space that we want to live. There we go. There's
a whole bunch of words that I just made up,
but that's kind of what's going on at the moment, right,

(49:32):
That's what affordances are for.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
Yeah, I kind of I'm curious about this because that's
just like distinction as to my understanding, And it may
be because my context makes me think of affordances differently.
So in a scenario where the functional movement solution is

(49:56):
more redetermined or clear, yeah, right, then I think that
would be true. But in my world, the functional movement
solution is defined moments and moments and moments and moments

(50:17):
because of a range of parameters.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Now I've been thinking about this as well, and I
think I think this was the way that I'm talking
about affordances is quite heapily accommodates your way of talking
about affordances. It sounds like I don't because partly in
order to describe it, what I end up describing as
a fairly static affordance, what's the current force? And it's
hard with language. I've been thinking about how to articulate this.

(50:42):
So at any given moment, the environment is affording me
some things are not other things. At the next given moment,
that field of affordances might have changed, and in the
next given moment the feel of affordance will have changed again.

(51:02):
I think that I still think that it's the affordance
structure that's one of the key constraints on movement variability.
I think it has to be, and I think that
it's okay if the affordance structure is constantly changing, because well,
here's the one key thing about affordances. Even though they're
ebbing and flowing, and those gaps are emerging and going away,
they're not disappearing on a dime. They're ebbing and flowing.

(51:25):
There's time, there's inertia. Right, These things are not random. Right,
things are unfolding according to the laws of physics because
they have to. Right, there's stability and structure there. So
even though there is a dynamic there, things are ebbing
and flowing, they're not changing randomly, they're not changing abruptly,
and they're not changing unpredictably. And so because those things

(51:48):
are changing, even if they are changing, that means that
the constraints on your movement are constantly changing, which means
that what counts as a functional movement is in fact
constantly changing. And frankly, this is one of the things
that makes it something like football really hard. Right, It's
difficult to produce a movement to a constantly changing field
of affordances. You have to put yourself into kind of

(52:09):
a zone where you are allowing the affordances to constrain you.
But as you know, as your kick is developing, right,
you're constantly When you began the kick, the gap was there.
When you are about to finish the kick, the gap isn't.
So what do you do. Well, Sometimes you accidentally continue
to do the kick, and that's bad. But sometimes if
you're really good and really skilled, you can take you

(52:31):
can use the new affordance, namely the absence of the
gap that affordance for ill right. You can now use
that to produce a different action, not kick or you
pass or you do something else right. And So I
think skill is about being able to learn how to
interact with this dynamic range of affordances, of this dynamic

(52:52):
field of affordances, and sports is a particular context where
that ability has really pushed to the limit because the
field of affordances can change really fast and in really
annoying ways, and there's full of attempts and deciption someone
and so on. So I think that my analysis, the
basic framework and the thing that I'm trying to articulate

(53:13):
it all holds. It just becomes very difficult to talk
about as things get more complicated. But this is good.
Actually this has been. It's been I've needed to sit
down and practice talking about this. So does the so
does my first attempt to talk about my approach in
a way that map sounds the way you're thinking about
the things? Does that did it land? Did any of

(53:33):
it land? Or was it not working here?

Speaker 1 (53:35):
Yes? I think, because I think I now understand that
what you mean is and I was reflecting on this
actually as we were talking, because we use a lot
of language artifacts I think as shorthand even things even
with like when you said motor control, like it's not

(53:55):
it's not really what we're describing. It's not a control,
it's more of a and motor abundance is probably a
better description, but people don't know what that means. So
we refer back to motor control. And we really shouldn't
be talking about skill acquisition because it's not something you acquire.
It's something that you and Teeth likes to talk Keith
Davis likes to talk about skill attunement, but again that's

(54:15):
not a commonly used language. So we refer back to
skill acquisition because people know what we're talking about, even
though it doesn't describe what we're talking about. And so
we're in this constant circle of having to try and
reinvent the language to help us describe what it is
we're talking about. I think what you were talking about
was you were describing the moment in time. Yes, absolutely,
Now some of those moments of time lasts longer than others,

(54:37):
but there's still moments in time, and the fact that
those moments in time might be, you know, like a
like a film shutter going at you know, it might
be that the scene changes continuously. In some context, the
scene change is hardly at all. In some contexts is
changing all the time. But it still means that there
is a frame, there's a momentary frame where that affordance exists,

(54:58):
however fleetingly.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Or however's durably right. So, yes, there's a whole field
and EcoCyc and adjacent fields are called event perception, all right.
And one of the things you know about what you know,
what constitutes the now right Well, actually there isn't a now.
There's a window that ebbs and flows depending on what
you're currently up to. So right now, I'm sitting in

(55:21):
my office in my home. Everything's pretty well behaved, and
the only thing I'm doing is looking at the screen
and looking to you. Nothing's changing very much. So what
constitutes an instant is actually a pretty wide window right now,
because nothing's changing that much. But as soon as I
go for a walk, or as soon as I you know,
if I go to totball training tonight, right all of
a sudden, the pace picks up and so event and

(55:43):
but that event structure, there's information for that event structure
as well. And there's a lot of evidence around the
fact that we perceive events actually in the same way
that we perceive affordances. Why, because events produce information too,
and so event structure that ebb and flow of the
of what counts as the window. It's not just that
the frames are the same size and they whizz by
a different speeds. It's that the frames are different sizes

(56:06):
depending on what you're up to, right, And so a
lot of the things that makes you know, an interception
sport like football, for example, what makes it really complicated
and really difficult to do well is the fact that
that window is First of all, that window is ebbing
and flowing all the time. Do you ever watch a
game of football. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes it's fast, Sometimes
it's slow, sometimes it's fast. Right, So the window is

(56:26):
constantly changing, and then the window can get real small. Right,
That's what makes it difficult. That's what makes it interesting.
That's why it's under watch, right, because if you're watching
skilled athletes interact with that complex environment, and when they
do it in a way that shows that they are
attuned to that all of that event, it's remarkable, Right.
You know, all our favorite athletes who play any kind

(56:47):
of sports are the ones who are attuned to the dynamic.
But I think that the story of affordances that I'm telling,
where affordances are the primary source of constraint on motor
abundance in terms of the organization of the bits of
the body, I think that story holds out across all
of this. It just becomes harder to talk about. You know.

(57:09):
I just run into problems where I try to draw
graphs to demonstrate this, and I'm limited by the fact
that a two D graph was really easy, but what
I really need is probably a four or five degrephs sometimes,
and it's like I can't do that, you know, And
so but you know, what I try to do is
when I'm trying to tell this story is I have
to start somewhere, And actually I think the whole thing

(57:31):
has to start somewhere, and I think the right place
to start, as affordance is for everybody. So I start
with the fwordances and then talk about interacting with thefordances
and talk about that using to coordinate and control behavior.
But then, of course it's a loop that then has
to run.

Speaker 1 (57:47):
So interestingly, when we were talking whenever we talk about affordances.
I've been playing around with an idea that I keep
sort of positing in different places, and sometimes I get
blank stairs. So it makes me think maybe I'm I'm
in the wrong I'm in the wrong space. But I'll
road test it with you because I'm in a safe
space whilst recording this, to go to recording this to
go out to the rest of the world. But I

(58:11):
you know how often so Newell obviously talked about the
constraints let approach, and you know, the articulation was that,
you know, we're going to utilize constraints as well, recognize
what the constraints exist, that there are various constraints exists,
and we utilize constraints in such a way so as
to help design an environment that will then pro due

(58:33):
or present various opportunities for action affordances, and then the
participants can then interact with that environment and the constraints.
That approach has existed for a long time. People talk
a lot about CLA A lot. Interestingly, people talk about
CLA separately from ecological approach, which I sometimes think is interesting.
I know, I know it's nested, but anyway, but what

(58:55):
I was thinking about, was with what you're talking about,
where the the affordance essential affordances actually act as the
sort of primary design kind of it's it's where you
can start your design from. And I wonder whether using

(59:19):
constraint lead approach gets people evoking this idea of ah,
so this is how I can control and to a
certain extent, manipulator space in order to get a particular outcome.
So a lot of people think that cla. They call
it old wine in new bottles. And the reason they
say that is because, well, we've been using condition games

(59:40):
and conditioned activities for ages. And the reason they were
doing that, though, was to get humans to move in
very very specific ways that they were predetermined as being
functionally relevant, not to get not to use conditions as
a mechanism to get people to interact with an environment
and assume to afford it's a very different way of

(01:00:01):
doing things. So I think it's a very different It's
not old wine in new bottles. It it's new wine
in new bottles. But anyway, but I was thinking that
maybe we would be better off to begin to talk
a little bit more about an affordance led approach, because
if we work backwards from the affordance in our design. Yes,

(01:00:21):
we're still going to use constraints, but I wonder if
that would be a better way to talk about it.
Maybe I'd have to think about that a little. So, right,
a couple of things. I'm a little nervous initially, and
I'm saying that theffordances are the primary constraint on moving
an organization, and I mean that, and I think it's true. However,

(01:00:44):
I'm worried that primary is the wrong word in the sense.
But I do think that affordances.

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Are kind of they're the thing that kind of define
the ground truth of whether or not your movement is
functional or not. So the way I go about describing
affordances is about in terms of the physical properties of
the environment and using that to define what's on offer
in terms of actions, and that that defines the ground
truth in the sense that that notion of affordances says, right,

(01:01:15):
here's what's on offer. So if you successfully affect this affordance, right,
what counts as a functional action? If you want to
hit that target when you throw it or something is like,
you have to do this. You've got a range of
options which can't do any old thing, And so if
you throw the ball and want to hit the target,
then that's what you've got, So that the affordance is

(01:01:36):
primary in the sense that it kind of defines the
ground truth. There are, of course, however, other interesting constraints.
So one of the other constraints on my ability, for example,
to throw a ball to head of target is whether
or not I'm strong enough to throw the ball the
distance that is required. I still think affordances play a

(01:01:57):
pretty central role in figuring that out. But one of
the ways that one of the constraints then becomes actually
my physical strength. And one of the ways I've gotten
better at throwing is I've gotten a bit stronger in
the relevant muscles because you know, when I went well,
whenever I'm playing softball, I get a little bit of
game fitness right, well, less than I used to. As
you know the gray Heros are saying, however, that's the idea, right,

(01:02:17):
But there's other things that I do as well. One
of the other reasons I can throw further than I
used to be able to is not just strength, but
I've gotten better at all the timing, right, So I've
gotten better at coordinating my arm to move the force
from the big muscles down my arm, and I lose
less of that the coordination of my throat is better.
So there are constraints at the on the organism side,

(01:02:38):
and they matter. I do think, however, that they still
the forordance still right. One of the other ways to
think about this, just another way to kind of go
at this problem is all of these motor abundance analysis methods,
things I can control manifold and all these kinds of things,
what do they do? All of them look at the

(01:03:01):
variability in movement and they decompose it with respect to
a task. Why because you want what counts as good
variability is movement that doesn't interfere with your ability to
perform the task. And my argument is, well, what's a
task from the point of view of an organism for
field of afformances that you're currently presented with? So I think,

(01:03:24):
in a long way round, I think what I'm currently
doing is talking myself into agreeing with you that the
constraints lead approach is the right thing to say in
general when you're talking about self organizing systems. In general,
self organization requires constraints because that structure happens at the boundaries.

(01:03:47):
But in the particular case of movement, the particular constraint
that leads is the affordance. So maybe affordance that approach
is the right way to do that. Yes, I think
you might have. I think I think he might have
allowed me to talk myself into this to do thanks. I've

(01:04:12):
thinking it's not a crazy thing to say, and then
to listen to what people think.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
Yeah, I mean again, I'm open to having challenge on it.
It's just a notion that occurred to me. Some of
it occurred were from you know, you're thinking around affordance
based control, and you know, I think you're right in
the sense that the affordance or the field of affordances

(01:04:39):
and opportunities for action within that field define movement. It
doesn't define And when you talk about functional movement, that
does not mean and just to be clear to people,
that does not mean that there is a singular functional movements.
It just defines the functional movement. There are. There are

(01:05:00):
an array of movements, some of some of which will
will be more or less efficacious in this given the
field affordances or the opportunity for action presented, and over
a period of time, you will begin to work out
which ones, which ones provide you with the opportunities to
interact with that fraudance in some certain ways. But it
felt to me I always thought that if I'm doing design,

(01:05:23):
that the affordances need to be the starting point and
then the constraints are used to then shape the interaction
in this space.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Yes, so it's funny actually just thinking as well about
the connection to affordance based control for the listeners who
might not know aforudenance based control as a framework developed
by Britt Page, is an ecological psychologist student of Bill Warrens.
And it's interesting as well that forudenance based control and
BRIT's work. Really it's funny. It's actually kind of a

(01:05:54):
stands in an opposition to a lot of Bill Warren's
approach to doing these kinds of things, and it's interesting.
There's lots of interesting things elements about it. And the
way that I'm talking about affordance is one hundred percent
aligns with Brett's analysis. When I first read that paper
two thousand and seven, it really resonated with me, and
it's taken me a few years to figure out exactly why,

(01:06:16):
but it really resonates with me because the way I'm
thinking about these things fully aligned. But it just occurred
to me that there's a final piece here in that
The underlying motivation for Brett to develop affordance based control
was a concern that the Warren style just information based approach,
that was, affordances select which actions you're trying to produce,

(01:06:39):
and then you use information that's not about affordances to
regulate and to coordinate and actually produce the activity. Bill
has many reasons for arguing that way. Brett's concern that
really resonated with me was that the control not just
the selection of which action is appropriate, but the actual
fine tuned coordination and control the production of a move

(01:07:00):
also has to be done with respect to affordances, because
it has to, because affordances define what counts and so effectively,
the argument based between Bell and Bread basically boils down
to our affordances for the selection of action modes. So
I am now throwing, but then the details of how

(01:07:22):
I throw will get controlled differently. That's action. So action
selection is I am throwing rather than sitting, or I
am sitting rather than running right, And then there's the
fine details of exactly what how fast are you running,
how big are other steps, how far are you throwing,
et cetera. So the argument boils down to our affordance
is just good for action selection or are they also

(01:07:44):
part of how we control the action? So not just
I'm currently throwing rather than sitting, but affordances are actually
why I'm throwing as fast as I am or with
the angle that I am, and I the thing that
resonated to me was that breats can was that if
you are controlling your movements with respect to affordances and

(01:08:05):
you're actually not control and producing your movements with respect
to the limits of what's possible. Right, So he studies breaking,
and you know, breaking a vehicle to bring it to
a stop, and breaking has to operate with respect to
the affordances because if it doesn't, then you might be
breaking and producing a perfectly sensible break. But if you

(01:08:26):
don't know if that breaking affords successful stopping, then you
don't know how to control them. So anyway, like I
resonate to Brett's aargum, I think he's one hundred percent correct,
and effectively everything I'm doing is what it's effectively one
way of implementing an affordmance based control approach. But the
key inside is exactly what you were just saying. And
this gets back to this point of should we maybe
be talking about affordance lad approach is that the whole production,

(01:08:52):
the coordination, the control of the selection and the implementation of
all our behaviors is primarily constrained by the ground truth
of what's on offer on affordances. Yeah, so that's interesting.
That's quite a that's an that that that links up
nicely then, and that has a kind of coherence to
it that makes me think that maybe once Yeah, well.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
I'm glad, I'm not completely mad. There's a kernel of
an idea there that I need. I need, maybe with
your help, to sort of expand upon a little bit more.
I have been writing about it quite a bit. I'm
not not in a way that's yet publishable, but it
is intended to be. So maybe I'll share with you
my cliff notes and you can tell me where where
my my understanding is lacking. So I am well, so

(01:09:36):
I've just I've just finished the draft, first draft. It's well,
that's says first submission of a paper where I'm articulating
this affordance and affordances are the primary constraint on mode
of abundance. And so I've just I've just drafted that
paper from that and and so that's under review at
the moment for a specially assured eCos, but I've preprinted
it and made it available and it's current. It's got

(01:09:58):
in my current best attempt to articulate all the things
that I've just said in it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
And while we've been chatting, I've been thinking about, you know,
once that paper is through review and is in good shape,
then there's potentially an interesting follow up making the case
for this affordance lead to approach articulation of what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is for about research and about it's
about structuring a research program. So the papers contains a

(01:10:26):
hypothesis that affordances are the primary constraint, and it contains
a research method here's how you go about starting affordances
to show that they primarily concern motor abundance. There might
also be another paper where we've got a hypothesis, a
research program and an application. In the application might be
here's how to talk about here's how to Because right,

(01:10:51):
one of my concerns over the years about applying ecosite
to sports coaching. And one of the things that I
think the credits bring up and do have a point,
is that we haven't quite we're not quite walking our
talk in some respects. I think I think there are

(01:11:15):
some gaps in exactly how things get done. I think
there's a lack of kind of coherence. And that's part
of the approach, right having you know, people trying lots
of different things and going at it in slightly different ways.
But I do think a little more coherence, a little
more structure, might not be a bad idea. And again,

(01:11:35):
the whole point of the whole point of all of
this being grounded in the ecological approach is not to
just nail yourself to a theory and write it till
you die. The whole point of committing and deriving this
from an ecological approach is to use that vocabulary that
had earned vocabulary about what we think actually is going
on to structure and inform and you to provide you

(01:11:57):
with a vocabulary to describe what you're doing. And Yeah,
I don't know, there's a lot of good work out
there that tries to do there, but something's still missing,
clearly because there's a lot of still a ton of
pushback about it. So I think that one of the
lessons maybe to know is that we haven't, as I feel,

(01:12:18):
quite figured out how to articulate it yet. Maybe there's
also the reciprocal as that you know, people need to
work a little harder at meeting us halfway.

Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
But that's you know, well yeah, but I mean again,
I think the pushback stems in my mind from I mean,
I've been come across Madame mangele M's writings of later.
I don't know if you've seen much of his stuff.
Fascinating and he's almost coming out. He's written a few

(01:12:47):
things sort of as a bit of a quite quite
strong rebuttal of things like active inference and Baysian Brain
and a number of others. But he's in particular from memory,
I think is at University of Nebraska, and it got
very very robust, and I made a note actually when
we were talking, because I think there's some really interesting

(01:13:08):
areas I'd like to talk to him. But he's been
really very very very strong and vocal about about why
some of this occurs, and part of it is because
and this is he's got a really nice turn of phrase.
One of the things he talks about a lot is
how how essentially cognitive psychology, you know, became captured with

(01:13:30):
the computational metaphor and then it just just just dominated
the narrative to a point where there was no space
for any alternative and anything else was seen as slightly
and we experienced this as ecological practitioners as being slightly heretical,
you know, and all over there. And he talks about
how and this is the language I really like, is

(01:13:54):
about how this metaphor now became a proxy for mechanism. Yeah,
and I think what we're struggling with is actually we
believe we I say we, but you know, the ecological
community is coming at this from the perspective of mechanism.
We believe there is something going on in the way

(01:14:15):
the brain operates that the actually the alternative explanation just
doesn't carry enough enough explanatory weight, but it has such
a dominance in the space. And this has happened throughout
scientific history, where there's been dominant paradigms that have sort
of taken root and found it been very difficult to
dislodge them. But he's actually come out with some really

(01:14:38):
very strong arguments to basically say it's it's the Emperor's
new clothes. It's it doesn't literally it doesn't deserve the
kind of the sort of strength the castle it's built upon,
it doesn't deserve it. It's based on very, very shaky foundations
that don't need a lot to shift it. And so
it's been really interesting just reading that stuff a sort

(01:15:00):
of passive observer.

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):
So yeah, I mean, look, I think if you go
back to the fifties, forties and fifties and sixties, I
do think that the embrace of the computational approach by
cognitive science was a good faith attempt to do cognitive

(01:15:24):
science in a way that made it rigorous, right in
the sense that if you go back and look at
Nuwell and some of these these early guys, you know,
the challenge of behaviorism, the challenge of Skinner and all
these people. The reason why things were you know, locked
in behaviors and for for a long time was it
was a good challenge. Namely, you want to talk about
the fact that there's all this internal stuff happening, but

(01:15:47):
you don't have a way of talking about it that
allows you to be precise make predictions. Do science do
anything other than come up with psychoanalysis, right. So that
was that was a strong challenge that had to be met.
And when the information theory and computer theory and all

(01:16:09):
the underlying mathematics and sort of structure features that when
they came about, the whole point of those things is
to provide a vocabulary and a mathematical framework for talking
very rigorously about what processing something means. Right. And so
I think the earlier that the people who were interested
in doing cognitive psychology and wanted that framework, I think

(01:16:33):
they were right to see that the computational framework gave
them a large number of very formal, a very appropriate
formal tools for doing the kinds of things that they
wanted to do. Now, sixty years later, seventy years later,
I'm inclined to think that we have a lot of

(01:16:55):
reason now to think that it was a perfectly sensible
way to go about answering the QUI questions as they
were opposed. I don't think it's holding up as well
as people think. I think we have a lot of
reason to be suspicious of it, and we have a
lot of reason to think that maybe it's not the
right way to frame the question. And also critically, thanks

(01:17:17):
to Gibson. We don't just say, well, I think that
one's a bit weird or I think that one's problematic.
We can actually point to and here's an alternative formulation.
Here's a different way to frame the problem. And that's
what makes Gibson such a radical on why it's so
important is he was, as far as I know, the
first person to propose to even try to propose a

(01:17:37):
theory of direct perception. Everybody for thousands of years has
been trying to solve perception as an indirect problem. Gibbson,
as far as I know, it was the first person
to propose a theory of direct perception. First of all,
to even think that could be a good idea, simply
a lot. He proposed a mechanism that allowed it to work,
mainly specifying information. Then he started talking. Then he got

(01:17:57):
to affordances about what that information was about. But that's
the thing that like, that's that's quite a nice e
than flow, is that you've got a strong, good faith
attempt to engage with the problem as everybody had articulator,
and you've got this new tool that is spot on
the right way to go about articulating all these things.
So the Baysian sort of framework is a really good
way to articulate problems if you think the problem is

(01:18:19):
one of inference based on in complete information. But if
you frame the problem differently, then the Bayesian stuff becomes
the wrong toolbox and you need a different toolbox. So
I think so I would broadly agree, right, And obviously
I agree, right, But I think even I obviously think
that the ecological approach is the better way to go
about doing it. But even if I didn't, I think
I would like to be able to say that there

(01:18:40):
is now two pretty coherent alternatives and one of them's
been going for a very long time and it's really
creaking out the SEMs. Yeah yeah, and we need to
take that creaking at the scenes quite seriously. But yeah, right,
I mean, as with anything, these changes generational, right, you

(01:19:01):
get you know, I'm never going to talk the old
grown ups into this, right, this is why we try
and train more graduate students than everybody else, right, you know, happens.
It takes time, and like, no one's going to talk
me into being an information processing psychologist, right, but if
they might talk a potential student into me, and that's okay,
that's part of the deal, right, But I'm you know,

(01:19:24):
I'm not the target, and the current generation of people
doing this are not the target. The target is can
you articulate the the difference and the reasons and motivations
for to the people who are coming out next.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
My desire to communicate this is more acute because you know,
I believe there is a generation of young people who
are being exposed to a sports experience that's radically impoverished
because of the because of the enduring specter of the
computational and representational approach which has rawn you know, a

(01:19:57):
generation of practitioners into saying line up, wake your turn.
We're going to be doing this movement pattern over and
over ad nausea, and because you're going to need it
sometime in the future. So obviously I feel a slightly
more acute need to try and redress this sort of
generational imbalance. That said, you know, I was in a
policy making role for quite a while and I wasn't

(01:20:17):
able to really shift a dial that much. So I
understand that these things are going to take quite a while.
But that's one of the reasons I use this platform
Because I know there are a lot of advocates and
adherents who want to learn more and they and they
actually want to champion, you know, and it's gathering some
steam and gathering some momentum. Now I've really enjoyed that absolutely.

(01:20:37):
Why do we leave it so long? We need to
you know, this needs to be a frequent thing. Now
we need to talk about your forthcoming conference because there's
there might be some people out there who don't know
about it, and there's an opportunity to have conversations just
like the one we've had, but face to face over

(01:20:57):
a period of three days in the sprawling withropolis of
Leeds in the north of England, which is one of
the most amazing cities that you can ever go to.
When is it?

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
When is it?

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
What's it all about? And then we can talk a
little bit about how listeners to the talent equation may
be able to get a bit of a bit of
a sneak preview deal to get in there a little
bit for a slightly less than it would otherwise cost
them excellence.

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
So the conference is the sixteenth European Workshop on Ecological Psychology,
or EWHIP as we call it. So in the research
academic community, we've got three conferences. We've got the international one,
which bounces around all over the place. It was Norway
last year, and then on every alternate year we have
the two regional ones, so there's a North American meeting

(01:21:41):
and a European meeting, and the European meeting hasn't happened
since pre COVID, right, So in twenty nineteen I was
in the Netherlands at the international conference and got ported
into hosting ewhip and leads for twenty twenty, and something happened.
I don't know, Twenty twenty went by in a blur,
lost track of what was going on. Anyway, didn't happen,
but it's taken us this long to get us back

(01:22:02):
on the schedule. So we're back, and it's exciting because
there's a really strong community of ecological researchers in Europe,
some of the UK, a lot on the continent. There's
big concentrations in the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, France, lots of
places all over the place, lots of really interesting people
doing lots of really interesting things. So it's really exciting
that we're back on the calendar and it's back, and

(01:22:23):
I'm excited to be able to host it here in Leeds,
which you know Astu said, is a lovely town. I'm
from New Zealand originally, but I always say, like, of
all the places I could have randomly ended up by
following jobs, I'm super thrilled it's Leads because it's a
great town and the sun shining today, so that always helps.
So move. The event is on July fifteenth to the

(01:22:43):
eighteenth of this year, so that's Tuesday through to the Friday.
So the Tuesday evening is just for arriving and having
drinks in the evening and just sort of catching up.
The conference itself starts proper on the Wednesday, and we've
got the Wednesday, the Thursday, and Friday morning with events
and we have a roster. We have some speakers already
lined up. A couple of symposiums, so we have a

(01:23:07):
symposium on notions of affordances and effectivities and thinking about
how to talk about what affordances are and effectivities are
what we call the movement component side of things. We've
got a symposium centered around motor abundance and thinking about
you know, so I'll be giving a talk in that
it's a friends of mine, but I'll be giving a
talk talking about exactly what I've just been talking about today,

(01:23:28):
thinking about how affordances serve as this form of constraint
on movement, coordination and control. And we've got speakers coming talking.
We'll hear sort of new things about ecological neuroscience, you know,
some applications to sports, some applications to rehabilitation as well.
So some colleagues in the Netherlands have just finished a
large scale EU grant applying ecological approaches to scale acquisition

(01:23:50):
to the context of rehabilitation after stroke and injury, sort
of not in the sports context, but in the more
general context. So yeah, a ton of very interesting stuff.
So yeah, So the structure of the conference is that
we all come together into a single location and the
conference costs include accommodation, all the food, all the drinks,

(01:24:14):
all the conference costs, etc. And the idea. Normally what
happens with an academic conference is that you go and
you go to the talk, so then you have to
go find somewhere to have dinner and that takes four
hours and that's very complicated. So what we do for
this event, it's a smaller scale event, and the idea
is to be a real community building kind of event,
so everything's included and the trade off, the payoff there

(01:24:36):
is that we all hang out and we talk to
each other and we have dinner together. And there's plenty
of opportunities in nice spaces in the venue, the double
Tree Hills and leeds down by the canals, lovely spaces
to set talk, interact, network, have chats, and just generally
do some community building form those connections. And that's nice
as well, because we haven't had a web for a while.

(01:24:57):
It's going to be nice to put some of those
connections back together there again and reconnect with people we
haven't seen for a while. So it's a really fun
evand it's really low key, it's really friendly, and there'll
be a ton of ecological psychologists there, ranging from you know,
you know, people with gray hair like me, all the
way down to students coming up doing new interesting work.

(01:25:19):
And yeah, the goal is just to have those have
those conversations. So yeah, there's a real opportunity if anybody
would like to come. We have We still have space
in the in the agenda, in the space in the
conference proceedings too, for talks or presentations or some kind
of symposium where there's a group of you come together
and tell us something, and I think I think it

(01:25:40):
would be really nice. Actually, I think the ecological community,
I think is in the ecology, the ecological research community
and the ecological dynamics slash CLA community are connected, but
not kind of fully I think. And so for the
first time last year in the conference in Norway, I
think was probably the first time there was a symposium

(01:26:01):
around research on skill acquisition and affordances and things in
sporting context and it was really rare to see people
were really interested in it and it was really nice.
And you know, we come to these events to learn
what's new and what's going on and what you know,
what we can feed into. So there's a real opportunity.
I'd love to have people come and talk and represent
the community, you know, the sporting community, and represent the

(01:26:23):
fact that you exist and you are out there and
you are doing cool things and you were doing interesting
things that maybe we can help with or maybe you
can help us. You know, we can start to have
those he talks in which we find out what we're
all doing so that we can start having conversations about
what we can do together to do a better.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
Amazing and we did have a little conversation before we
recorded Start Press Record about like the creation of a
sport practitioner symposium, because I know there's quite a lot
of people out there doing some interesting things, you know,
kind of sort of more practice lead studies field notes
to a certain extent. I know, I'm in the process

(01:27:03):
of writing a chapter on some of my experiences around
field hockey that i'd love to I'd love to road
test and get some people's views and just hear some
different experiences and ideas. And yeah, there's some other people
out there, so that'd be quite an exciting thing to
do now. So I know we talked this about before,
about this before as well, is that the best way

(01:27:25):
for someone to if they wanted to get in touch
and they're a Talent Equation member and they wanted to
sort of just is to reach out directly to you
and say, I'm interested in coming, I'm a Talent Quation listener,
can I can I join? And I think you even
prepared to say, actually, if somebody can only come for
late maybe one or two days, then that's that's also
a possibility for some people as well. You haven't got
a specific pricing for that on the website, but that

(01:27:48):
is something that you'd be able to put together for
somebody if that was there, if they were sut of
limited by funds or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:27:53):
Yeah. So right, so I described the basic design of
the conference, and it is a key kind of design
principle of the conference. We all come together and hang
out and all that sort of stuff. However, it's much
more important that people are there than not there, frankly,
and so basically, like I said, so there's a website
that's hosted on the leeds back at university side. If

(01:28:14):
you search for the Ecological Workshop, sorry, the European Workshop
on Ecological Psychology, and if you put my name in,
then you should find the website and nice and easy
and it's got all the information on it. So yeah,
as Stu mentioned, the current pricing and organization around it
is premised on the idea that we're bringing everybody together.
And I think if people are up for that, and

(01:28:35):
if there's a group of you would like to come
and present as imposing or even come and present individual talks,
or we'll just come and hang out and chat, I
think that would be fantastic. But like I say, yes, absolutely,
I'm fully on board with I think I would much
rather have people come if they can, so I'm more
than heavy basically happy to try and find a way
to get you to come reach out to me, drop
me an email and just put eweb or something similar

(01:28:58):
in the subject line so that I know what it's
about out and I'm happy to have a conversation and
try to find a way. And if they're you know,
if you want to present, or if you if there's
a group of you or whatever, you know, there's plenty
of opportunities to interact and contribute. And if you want
to just come and enjoy the talks and and hang
out and chat too, that's fun as well. But yeah,
i'd really like to I think I'd really like to

(01:29:18):
see some representation of the sporting world and the fact
that we have a whole domain that's really kind of
excited and interested in the kinds of things that we
get up to academically, and that there's you know, forming
those connections and finding ways to work together. There'll be
some opportunities in the conference actually to talk about how

(01:29:40):
to apply for large scale research funding and what constitutes
collaborations and how can we go and investigate that. There's
a lot of interest in really building a more larger
scale collaborations between all the European contributors. Right, there's loads
of us around, and we all know each other and
we hang out and we meet that we don't always
work together all at the same time as a really
interesting really starting to take advantage of the fact that

(01:30:03):
there's a ton of us around, I mean a lot
of really cool things. So there'll be lots of opportunities
and lots of interest in talking about finding ways to
work together to solve problems that we're all collectively interested in.

Speaker 1 (01:30:16):
Cool. Well, I'm definitely going to be there, and I'm
definitely going to encourage as many of my listeners to attend. Also,
my learning community, the Guild of each Ecological Explorers, I
know many of them are kind of interested in getting along,
and many of them are actually actively involved in producing
some some written materials for forthcoming book that we're all

(01:30:38):
collaborating on. So I'm sure they've got stuff to talk
about and it would be great for us to be
able to get together and do all that. And also
the skybar at the Double Tree is really something for
a place to have a nice drink and overlook the
skyline of Leeds. It's actually quite a place to be
so also a highlight.

Speaker 2 (01:30:55):
First want to check it out. I have to say
I was impressed. I thought it was a pretty cool.
I've looked at it for long time and I was like,
that was that what we looked like from a long
way out?

Speaker 1 (01:31:02):
That was fun?

Speaker 2 (01:31:04):
It was really nice. And yeah, and like I said,
hopefully it's a community building opportunity, right and you know, yeah,
it's it's it's time to connect and and and start
just chatting to each other again. You know, we've got
all these opportunities. We'll cast some things like that, but
you know, nothing big sitting down with the beverage of
your choice and just chatting face to face and nutting
some things out the way to go cool.

Speaker 1 (01:31:26):
Andrew, it's been great having you on. Really enjoyed the
conversation and I'm looking forward to the next one, which
won't be as long a gap between this one and
the next one.

Speaker 3 (01:31:40):
Thanks for listening to the Talent Equation podcast. If you
like the show, then please consider supporting it by leaving
a review on your favorite podcast player, telling your friends
about it, or even becoming a hero and show your
appreciation by becoming a patron Just head over to the
Talent Equation

Speaker 4 (01:31:55):
Dot co dot uk and click on the becoming a
Patron budget at the top of the pitching

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"Transfer is in the overlap between the human and the information" - a conversation with Dr Andrew Wilson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"Transfer is in the overlap between the human and the information" - a conversation with Dr Andrew Wilson