The Perception & Action Podcast 557 – Turvey, Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective, Chapters 24-25 (JC57)
Jan 13, 2026
Join Andrew Wilson, a specialist in perception-action and ecological psychology, and Marianne Davies, a researcher focusing on perception-action topics, as they dive into compelling discussions on Turvey's ecological perspective. They explore the intricacies of affordances, their connection to intention, and the importance of lawful information for perception. Discover how optic flow influences action and the parallels between haptics and vision. The conversation also touches on the concept of dynamic touch, sensory integration, and the implications of educating attention versus intention.
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Perception Is For Action Not Models
- Turvey insists perception's job is to act on the world, not to build internal models.
- Laws in the environment create lawful information that organisms directly detect and use for action.
Laws Keep Ecological Psychology Distinct
- Turvey defends affordances as lawful environmental properties that create information.
- Abandoning laws risks collapsing ecological psychology into other non-lawful approaches.
Ambient Optics: Information Exists First
- Ecological optics treats ambient light distributions prior to receptors as lawful and informative.
- Information exists before an organism arrives and specifies environmental properties for action.
