The Ecological Revolution: The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 50 Years Later

In 1997, the journal Ecological Psychology published two issues in tribute to James Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, which was published in 1966. I am creating this page as a landing pad for my posts regarding the articles in those issues. I will also add links, as I find them, to other places on the internet where these issues are discussed (suggestions in the comments are strongly encouraged). I reviewed a few of the articles when they first came out, but recently found the issues again and realized how negligent I have been in covering more of them. One special treat about those issues is that they feature articles by several of my favorite contributors to the field, and the quality of the articles is very high.

How we got to the muddle of "The Hard Problem" in psychology

Once upon a time we knew almost nothing about how vision worked, then, at just about the same time, all of the following happened:

1. Artists figured out perspectival drawing, and people went nuts over it.
2. It was discovered that they eye of a bull could act like a “camera obscura.” Camera obscuras were small dark rooms in the middle of a garden, built so that they cast an inverted view of the garden in one wall, by virtue of a pinhole in the opposite wall. Those were all the rage, because rich creepers could jerk off in them while spying on the ladies walking the garden. At that point, everyone assumed that vision was this passive thing that started with a still image in the back of the eye, and involved the opposite of whatever intellectual activity artists engaged in when creating a flat picture.

Perceiving sociocultural phenomena

This is the third in a series of posts examining the Special Issues of the journal “Ecological Psychology” commemorating the 50^th anniversary of “The Senses Considered As Perceptual Systems.”

Harry Heft brings his unique insights regarding the history of psychology to bear, with a focus on the relatively-understudied implications of Gibson’s work for understanding culture. Recall that part of Gibson’s challenge to the field (see Shaw 2002) was to see how much could be covered by perceptual processes, and avoid the temptation to start hand waving at higher-level processes whenever the going got tough. One aspect of Gibson’s work, comparatively neglected by both his proponents and his critics, is his attempt to see how far he could push perceptual theory towards explaining the interaction of people in situations where cultural practice plays a strong role in determining what the world affords. As usual, Heft’s writing is clear and keen. If you haven’t read any of his work before, I suspect you will find this article deeply insightful, and that it will lead you to seek out more of his work.

Modularity and the study of visual perception - Marr and Gibson

Gibson’s 1966 book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems recently turned 50. Two issues of the journal Ecological Psychology commemorated that event (here, and here). This is the second in a series of posts reviewing those contributions.

Vision research was impacted tremendously by the short career of David Marr. Marr was tremendously impacted by James J. Gibson, though mostly by Gibson's earlier work on optic flow, and not by his later works that birthed Ecological Psychology. Marr was incredibly influential in the move towards thinking of vision (and neuroscience in general) as "modular", while most of Gibson's work would lead one away from modular thinking. It is this tension that motivates Sedgwick and Gillam's article "A Non-Modular Approach to Visual Space Perception."

The senses re-considered as perceptual systems - Introduction to the Special Isuses

Gibson’s 1966 book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems recently turned 50. Two issues of the journal Ecological Psychology commemorated that event (here, and here). This is the first in a series of posts reviewing those contributions.

These special issues were organized by Covarrubias, Jiménez, and Cabrera, from the University of Guadalajara, and Costall from the University of Porsmouth, and they provided an introduction to both issues. Putting together these issues is a tremendous service to the field, and I hope that the articles contained therein will help shape the field’s future. It is worth starting with some highlights from the intros themselves, and the next post will start with the looking at the contributed articles. 

E.C. Tolman's Biography, and the end of PsychCritques

I recently completed what will be my last review for PsycCritiques, the online journal that succeeded the print Contemporary Psychology, which itself ran from 1956-2004 (founded by Edwin Boring). The book was a good one:

Bead Theory and the Problem of Consciousness - Continued

Continuing to unravel the problem of contrasting consciousness and behavior discussed in the prior post, Holt (1915). The influence on people like J.J. Gibson and Skinner continues to be evident, in the search for functional relations. This also connects to my assertion that the goal of William James's later work - and hence Holt's work - was to try to layout the foundational conditions for a science of psychology:

An exact definition of behavior will reveal this. Let us go about this definition. Behavior is, firstly, a process of release. The energy with which plants and animals move ('behave')  is not derived from the stimulus, but is physiologically stored energy previously accumulated by processes of assimilation. The stimulus simply touches off this energy.

Secondly, behavior is not a function of the immediate stimulus. There are cases, it is true, in which behavior is a function, though even here not a very simple function, of the stimulus. These are cases of behavior in its lower stages of development, where it is just emerging from the direct reflex process. They demonstrate the continuity of evolution at this point—a most important fact. But as behavior evolves, any correlation between it and the stimuli which are immediately affecting the organism becomes increasingly remote, so that even in fairly simple cases it can no longer be demonstrated.

Bead Theory and the Problem of Consciousness - Highlights for Holt's writing

E.B. Holt 1915 book continues to be central to my scholarship. Appended to the book are two articles Holt had published the prior year, on "Response and Cognition." There is much overlap between the works, but in a few places I think the articles add significantly. One is in discussion of explanations that Holt disparagingly calls "Bead Theories", characterized by description of a series of events with no reference to the fact that a larger thing is happening. He begins by describing the how other sciences used to be in the same "unstable" state as psychology, and 100 years later, psychology seems to me not to have improved. Remember that a book published in 1915 must have been started quite a bit before Watson's Manifesto, and that this book was influential in the professional development of J.J. Gibson, B.F. Skinner, and J. Jastrow, along with most others who trained at Harvard in the teens or Princeton in the '30s. Indeed many core aspects of Gibson's Ecological Psychology, and Skinner's attempt to separate of "Psychological" questions from "Neurological" questions can be seen here decades earlier:

Before proceeding … we shall probably find useful an illustration from another science, which was once in the same unstable state of transition as psychology is now. In physics a theory of causation once prevailed, which tried to describe causal process in terms of successive ‘states,’ the ‘state’ of a body at one moment being the cause of its ‘state’ and position at the next. Thus the course of a falling body was described as a series of states (a, b, c, d, etc.), each one of which was the effect of the state preceding, and cause of the one next following. This may be designated as the ‘bead theory ' of causation. In asmuch, however, … [the states] gave no clue toward explaining the course or even the continuance of the process, an unobservable impetus (vis viva, Anstoss, ‘force') was postulated. This hidden impetus was said to be the ultimate secret of physical causation. But, alas, a secret! For it remained, just as the ‘consciousness’ of one's fellow-man remains today in psychology, utterly refractory to further investigation.

The problem with alternatives to cognitive psychology

In the last post, I pointed out the problem with cognitive psychology: While often hopelessly ambiguous, it creates a practical and useful sense of solidity, making it easy to use for normal professional activities. But what about alternative approaches?

Alas, the situation is almost the complete opposite for most attempts to get “beyond cognitivism”: They are not, or at least do not seem, useful in the above sense. They are not flexible, in that they are picky about which theoretical constructs are plugged into a given hole; they are not utilitarian, in that it is often unclear how to implement a program of research based on the theories, even if you agree with them completely; and they are non-conformist, in that they involve rejecting the way lay westerners think of the world. Further (or perhaps as a result), though the terms used might be quite concrete, they provide a firm illusion of being hopelessly ambiguous. The combination of little flexibility, little usefulness, unintuitiveness and seeming ambiguity, make it difficult for aspiring psychologists to understand, and further, once the neophytes become convinced, it will be difficult for them to go about standard professional activities. (p. 195)

The Probelm with Cognitive Psychology

Martin Dege and I shared an office for a year at Clark University. He was a grad student studying cultural psychology, I a post doc studying parent-infant interaction from an evolutionary and ecological perspective. Our work was not very similar, but we got along well, including collaborating on a paper. It was, technically, a comment on a target article, but we did our best to make it stand alone. The focus was on explaining why "alternative approaches" to psychology - alternatives to the cognitive paradigm - struggled so much. To make this more clear, I started the paper with as blunt a statement as I could about the bar set by the current paradigm. Here are the first 2 paragraphs, with a link to full manuscript at the bottom:

Radical Empiricism and treating experiences as they are

A few years ago, the "Kitchen Group" at Clark University (now based at Aalborg University in Denmark) put together a book on "Recursivity" in psychology, edited by Zach Beckstead (who recently got hired on at BYU Hawaii, congrats!). I contributed a chapter on William James's Radical Empiricism, including his confounding notion of "pure experience". In it, I illustrate how this "radical" approach to psychology is largely just a dog headed application and reapplication of first-principles reasoning (i.e., the logic just keeps being applied recursively onto the output of any analysis). I'm going to start putting bits of that paper here and expounding on them. Radical Empiricism is relevant to many issues discussed here as, in my read, James intended it to fill in the much-lamented gaps in his earlier work, and to serve as the NECESSSARY foundation for psychological science. That is, it is not a part of the science of psychology properly speaking, it is the thing that has to be true if psychology can be a science at all. That will probably become more clear in future chunks, but I it was this passage (invoked in another discussion) that brought the paper to mind. .  

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........I will start with a quick episode, presented as a standard, first-person narrative. Next I will analyze the story from both a traditional perspective and a radical empiricist perspective. The traditional perspective will take dualism for granted, as well as the rightness or wrongness of any judgment about the world. The radical empiricist perspective will simply examine the experiences themselves.

The Episode

It is dark, but I slowly become able to make out a form. It is a man. I call out, but get no reply. I approach, and squint. It is not a man, it is statue, a very good statue, maybe wax. I thought I saw a man, but I was wrong, it was only a man in my mind, the statue is real. Wait, now my eyes are opening again. It was all a dream. There was never anything there at all.

Traditional Dualistic Translation

            This story is about a person doubly tricked. At first they think they are seeing a man, then that is replaced by thinking they are seeing a statue. In fact, there never was any such form anywhere. Everything that supposedly ‘happened’ was merely in their head. Mid-dream, they were correct in asserting there was no man, but wrong in asserting there was a statue. They are correct only at the end, when they judge both objects to have never existed.

Radical Empiricist Translation

This story is about a person’s transforming experiences. The form is experienced first as not having a clear shape, but then quickly comes to be distinguished as a man. Then the form is experienced as a statue. After the form is experienced as a statue, the original experience is re-experienced as wrong. After it is experienced as wrong, it is also experienced as having been mental. Then the person experiences all of those happenings as ‘mental’ and the room he finds himself in as real. More specifically, the prior things are re-experienced as having been ‘dreamt’ and as having been ‘mental’, whereas the current surroundings are experienced as physical.

Elaboration of Radical Empiricist Translation

There are crucial differences between the radical empiricist translation and the traditional translation that are easy to miss. To highlight but a few: 1) In the traditional translation, the original experience of the man is declared to have been purely mental. In the radical empiricist translation, it is emphasized that no such distinction originally existed – there was nothing about the original experience to suggest that it was ‘wrong’ or ‘mental.’ Those are aspects of new experiences, not the original experiences. 2) In the traditional translation, there is no thing being experienced. Part of what the dualist asserts by declaring something to be ‘mental’ is that it is ‘not real.’ Even were we to somehow force the dualist to accept the dreamt form as “a thing”, they would still insist that the experienced man was distinct from the experienced statue, i.e., that there was one some-thing originally and a different some-thing later. The radical empiricist, on the other hand accepts both the experienced form as a thing, and as the same thing despite the transformation. It is necessary to refer to the form as a stable thing, because a stable ‘sameness’ was part of the dreamer’s experience. 3) In the traditional translation, once everything is revealed to be a dream, this retroactively dictates our treatment of the original experiences as composed of ‘dream stuff’ (be it ideas, misfiring neurons, illusion, or some other substance). In the radical empiricist translation, we stay true to the obvious fact that such is a post hoc judgment. Unless the original experience was somehow ‘dreamy’ as, for example in the case of a lucid dream, it is a gross violation to treat the original experience as somehow having been of ‘dream stuff’. The last experience is of the previous experiences as dreams, i.e., the last experience only.

To focus on the final point: If we want to understand the difference between ‘dream’ and ‘real’ we need to look at the difference between the original experience (of the statue as ‘real statue’) and the last experience (of the statue as ‘dream statue’). Whatever is different between those two concrete experiences is the meaning of ‘dream’. It does no good to simply declare that the first experience was of ‘dream statue’; in fact, to do so completely undercuts our ability to investigate the phenomenon of interest.

The radical empiricist stays true to experiences in ways that the traditional approach does not. The original experience was not of a ‘real statue’ nor of a ‘dream statue,’ but merely of ‘statue.’ In this sense, the original experience was neutral with respect to that distinction (see Dewey, 1917). As we found in our multi-philosopher discussion above, we again find that all categories are post hoc, in that they are part of a later re-experience. However, and here is the recursion, those later re-experiences are also themselves experiences. Thus, the re-experience must be subjected to the same analysis as the original experience. The categories revealed in our re-experience are themselves first-order members of the particular experience in which they are found. No amount of compounding experiences can escape this. It is not that we are getting nowhere with our thinking, re-thinking, or meta-thinking, it is only that wherever we get, we are still within the realm of pure experience.

Deep Thoughts: The Stomach in a Jar Problem

Many throughout history have wondered about the relationship between mind and stomach. Imagine, if you will, that your body had been almost completely destroyed. Imagine still, that whatever destroyed your body left your stomach remarkably unscathed, and that we put your stomach in a vat. But this vat is a very special kind of vat: It can give you stomach all the physical and chemical signals it would have had if the stomach had stayed in your body, and when your stomach does something, the vat reacts just as your body would. Your stomach could be kept alive like that for quite a long time, perhaps indefinitely. 

What is going on in philosophy: Searle's goals

There are some philosophers I really disagree with, but whom I also really like. In general, this is because we share similar views as the overarching goal of our efforts. This common ground is sometimes found in articles specifically about doing philosophy,  but it is also found in the introductions to works I otherwise might not like. A great example of this is found in Searle’s “Freedom and Neurobiology”. While I don’t like his solution to the Big Questions that the book deals with, I love the way he sets up the problem:

How to Explain Behaviorism: We are Reflections of our World

This is the second in my ongoing series of articles trying to provide basic lead ins to behaviorist theory. The first is here.

How to Explain Behaviorism, version 2: 

We are Reflections of our World

A friend of mine asked for advice online. She is a teacher, working with a 9 year old girl who is "Bossy, has to be right, have things her own way. Failing is not an option, so she lies about failing at anything." The inquiry generated many suggestions, all good. Someone suggested that maybe the daughter is afraid of admitting failure, because she covets approval. Another suggested that maybe sibling dynamics might be at play, especially if there is an older sibling who is very successful. Had the daughter been taught that everyone makes mistakes and that it is ok to admit them? When it was mentioned that the girl is choleric, someone suggested that spending times with other cholerics might help. (By the way, fascinating that the Waldorf Schools still uses those terms!) Maybe playing sports would help if, she could find a coach who rewards efforts and teamwork. Etc., etc., etc. So many suggestions were offered, but... not a single person proposed either a more detailed study of the behavior in question or a systematic study of the child's environment.

What would I like to know, before I began an intervention? Things like: Which particular types of situations is she bossy in? To whom is she bossy? What, exactly, does that "bossiness" look like? How do those around her respond? In particular, how often does she get what she wants? Is the thing she wants --- the thing that stops an instance of bossiness --- what she is ostensibly asking for or is it something else? 

Even if I thought like my friend's other advisers, I would still want to know these things, because I like to have a good understanding of the problem I am trying to solve before I try to solve it. But I don't think like the other respondents, I think like a behaviorist. In this context, one important implication of being a behaviorist is that I think my types of investigations might well tell us everything we need to know. That is, we might well learn everything we need to know about the daughter's "bossiness" if we know what the behaviors looks like (its "topology") and the circumstances under which they occur (the aspects of the world that the behavior is a function of).

This is because, behaviorists view behavior as a reflection of the world. If you live in a world where being obstinate works, you will be obstinate. If you live in a world where being unobtrusive works, you will be unobtrusive. If you sometimes live in a world where it works to be obstinate and you sometimes live in a world where it works to unobtrusive, and there is a way to tell which world you are in at any given time, then you will adaptively switch between being obstinate and unobtrusive. Etc., etc., etc. Of course, you cannot make these adjustments instantly, so there is a heavy developmental component. So what I really mean is that at any given time you are changing to better fit the world you exist in, and if your world stays stable long enough, you will come to reflect it very well. 

Sometimes you can see this most clearly when things go wrong. For example, my wife and I became quite frustrated at our children's inability to be quite when instructed to do so. This is the type of skill that some kids (by dint of past experience) are good at, and other kids (by dint of past experience) are bad at, and our kids were showing no improvement towards the right behavior. After sitting back and observing for a bit, I pointed out that sometimes when we said "be quite" we meant "talk more quietly", but other times we meant "stop talking." Because the same signal was used in both cases, it was no wonder our kids were not matching their behavior to the situation! So we made a new rule, and we now distinguished between "be quiet" and "be silent." Once there was a reliable signal in the world that told our kids what to do, they began to reflect it almost instantly. They are still not perfect, but neither is our use of the terms. 

When you start to think this way, you get reflexive answers to many common questions (many of which you probably shouldn't say out loud).  "Why don't children pay better attention in class?" Because class is boring. "Why does Bobby keep kicking Linda?" Because good things happen when he does. "Why do my kids act so differently when I raised them the same?" Because you didn't. "Why does Jane act so confident, but Bob doesn't?" Probably because good things happen when Jane acts confident and bad things happen when Bob acts confident (or at least that has been the case in the past). 

But what about when people don't seem to reflect their environment well? There are several things that could be going on. I can't list them all, but a top 4 would probably be: 1) Their world might not contain any signals that their behavioral system can latch onto, or the signals are so weak they will need special training to attune to them. This often occurs when a novice enters a world full of experts, which is part of the natural state of childhood. 2) They could still be adjusting to the world. Adjustment may be very slow if the person used to be well attuned to life in a different world. Also, if the world changes faster than a person can adjust, that person might never attune very well. This could happen for example, if you have a job where the boss rapidly changes, and the bosses have wildly different styles. 3) The person could have a damaged adjustment system. Such effects could be transient (e.g., during a blood sugar crash), or relatively permanent (e.g., the fate of most professional boxers). If so, the person could be stuck in a state of partial attunement, where their behavior still reflects the environment, but never quite as well as you think it should. 4) The person could be attuned to aspects of the environment that you do not appreciate. Never neglect this possibility. This last part is so important, I will end with three examples, one young kid example, one teenage example, one adult example. 

Unexpected Attunement - Young Kid Example
Most kids like to play "birthday". This usually involves asserting, seemingly out of no where, that it is your birthday, or someone else's birthday, and then proceeding to do a rough reproduction of certain aspects of birthday activities. "How creative," the parents think, "what an imagination!" This is a great example of a situation in which people think that the behaviorist approach will fall apart. But the behaviorist begs you to examine the world of the child. From that perspective, the child is doing exactly what adults do. The way birthdays work is that someone walks into the room and says "Today is Grandma's birthday, lets give her a call" or "It is Merryn's birthday on Sunday, so we should invite people over." That is the initiation of the "birthday" game, from the perspective of the young child, who does not live in a world where there were any preceding steps. Thus randomly stating that it is someone's birthday is simply a part of a larger pattern of adult imitation, and should be displayed by kids who live in a world where imitating adults tends to create good outcomes. We need not hypothesize anything else behind the behavior.

"But," you object, "the child thinks it is his birthday." I'm really not sure what that objection means. Absent further evidence, I suspect the child is simply playing a game that involves the world birthday. Does the child really believe that today is the anniversary of the day of his birth on the Gregorian Calendar. Really? I don't know many 2 or 3 year olds who think that. "Well, no, I don't mean that he understands what a birthday is, I just mean that he thinks it is his birthday." Alright, I guess, but I think that just gets us back to my assertion that, for the child, "birthday" is a thing you get to say at fairly arbitrary times. and that if others agree with you then it initiates a particular type of game. 

Unexpected Attunement - Teenage Example
A frequent complaint from my friends with teenagers: "Why does he think the world revolves around him?" My most common response "He isn't wrong." The parent objects "Oh yes he is, he's gonna have a rude awakening one day." And the parent is right in a broad sense; the adult world does not revolve around their particular child. But the teenager is also right; the world the teen is in does revolve around them. Their school is focused on them, their friends are focused on them, their home life is focused on them, their TV and other media experiences are focused on them. Back in the day (a few hundred years ago) parents tried to move kids as quickly as possible to be part of the adult world, but now we have designed a world in which there is a buffer time, during which our teenagers and young adults are in a world that is revolving around them. Why does a kid who has more than enough complain when they don't have more? It is not because they "think" they don't have enough, in any grand sense, it is because in their world complaining works, and they are correctly attuned to that world.

Unexpected Attunement - Adult Example
My wife is fidgity, but not always fidgity. She has been for as long as she could remember: lots moving around, not much standing still. It was "just who she was", and there was no obvious cause of it, or the variation in it. She recently did a "tilt table test" where they strap you to a board an then repeatedly transition the board from standing you straight up and down, to lying you flat, to holding you almost completely upside down. It turns out she has postural orthostatic hypotension. Basically, her blood pressure drops dramatically when her orientation changes, and it also happens if she stays still for too long in a vertical position. When she has higher blood pressure (e.g. she has been drinking more water and eating more salt) it is not as bad, but if she has had even minor diuretics (e.g., coffee) it is worse. Her fidgiting, the behavior, was attuned to an aspect of the world that was very hard to observe, but it was attuned nonetheless. If you live in a world where being still makes you nauseous and dizzy, and moving makes you feel better, then you move.

Animal Drives: Some notes on Word Magic

Here I am, flipping through Holt's Animal Drives and the Learning Process: An Essay Towards Radical Empiricism (1931). The book is not at all perfect. Some parts are long-winded, overly concerned with then-emerging-arguments which might now seem dated, and the volume as a whole exudes Holt's frustration with his contemporaries and the direction in which they were moving psychology and philosophy. That said, the good parts still exude penetrating insight. The first chapter is about "Physiology Versus Verbal Magic" and the final chapter about "The Organism as a Whole." Here are some passages from the first chapter which, though antiquated in vocabulary, are still worth critiques of contemporary psychology:

Fixing Psychology, 100 Posts at a time!

So, there I was, pre-tenure at a schizophrenic part-research-university, part-liberal-arts-college, part-trade-school, with a disabled wife and two young girls... and I figured I had enough time on my hands to start a blog. Probably not the smartest move, but it has gone pretty well so far.

FixingPsychology is just over two-years old, and this is the 100th post. With some feverish periods and a few dry spells, that means I have kept surprisingly close to a post a week, on average. Even better, I think very few of them sucked. In honor achieving this arbitrary, but culturally-significant, number, I have cleaned things up a bit (making sure every post had labels, adding a word cloud to the right side bar, etc.) and decided that a short retrospective was in order....

Who is reading the blog? What are they reading? Are there any bigger picture or themes? What might a reasonable reader expect in the next hundred posts?

Why research professors? Part 1

I'm in a bit of a reactive mood. Over on my more public-oriented blog, I recently posted about one of the big reason we should be suspicious about US allegations against Syria. Here, though, I want to react to an article from Inside Higher Ed, that suggested adjuncts teach better than tenure-line faculty. (The article was passed on by my collaborator, Nicholas Rowland, through the organizational theory blog he is part of, and the original can be found here.) Alright, enough of a lead-in...

Some adjuncts certainly teach better than most tenure-line faculty members, but any research into who is better overall needs to be viewed with suspicion due to two potentially big sources of confusion. The first source of confusion is caused by the way adjuncting has shifted from a part-time job that is a totally legitimate, but tiny, part of most colleges' teaching rosters, to a full-time job that is a possibly illegitimate, and large, part of many colleges' teaching rosters. That is an issue for later discussion. The second source of confusion is that few people seem to understand why we might want to have researchers in teaching roles. This is the confusion I want to talk about, though it is too big to tackle in a single post, so I will only talk about it in the context of the recent article.

APA Convention - Society for General Psychology

As I mentioned in a prior post, while I'm not a big fan of the main APA convention, I am a big fan of the APA Shadow Convention (© Charles 2012). This year I am in charge of the hospitality suite run by The Society for General Psychology (APA Division 1). We are co-hosting a number of events with The Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24) and The Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26). It is a pretty fun program, with some experiments thrown in (Post-symposium discussions, a Speed Scholars Event, etc.) as well as a lot of social activities. There is also the two-hour "Unifying Psychology" Lunch I mentioned in the last post, featuring several authors from this month's special issue. I'll do my best to get the program cut and pasted below. Hope to see some of you in Hawaii!

Unifying Psychology - RGP and APA

This month's issue of the Review of General Psychology is a special issue on Unifying Approaches to Psychology. I highly recommend it! The issue features 19 brief statements that move us towards a more unified field. Most importantly, the articles are not speculative pipe dreams; they are introductions to already existing and already productive interdisciplinary approaches also, later this week at the APA convention in Hawaii several of the authors, and anyone else who is interested, will be getting together in the Division 1 Hospitality Suite for a two-hour luncheon to discuss next-steps now that the issue is out (Friday August 2nd, from noon to 2). The ever-brilliant Daniel Hutto has generously offered to serve as host. The table of contents is:

Psychological Realism and Poker

During my post-doctoral years I played poker very seriously. For a while, my poker library grew much faster than my psychology library, and I became a profitable mid-level player. I have played very little since my post-doc ended, but I think the experience was valuable. For one thing, the mathematics of poker is fascinating, and I still nurture a hope of one day teaching a "Statistics of Poker" seminar. For another thing, I think poker provides an excellent context for thinking through theories of psychology. On the surface, poker seems like it is a game about cards, and on the surface it is. However, you don't need to get much below surface-level to see that poker is primarily a game about the behavior of the other players. The player on your right just put in a big bet: Does he have a big hand? Is he bluffing? What does he think you have, and how does he think you will respond? Given what he might have and what he thinks you might have, if you put in a huge re-reraise, how will he respond? The layers of analysis that can be applied to these situations is fun, but not really on topic for this post (though I talked a little about it here). Instead, I want to delve into a very typical poker situation from the point of view of a psychological realist vs. a dualist.

Note that this is a preliminary analysis that I hope to develop further, and I would love any feedback.