The Perception & Action Podcast 552 – Turvey, Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective, Chapters 17-19 (JC54)
Oct 14, 2025
Join cognitive scientist Andrew Wilson, who dives deep into perception and ecological theory, and researcher Marianne Davies, who connects these ideas to coaching and robotics. They explore why categorization often fails in understanding action and how optic flow offers better navigation cues than object recognition. The discussion reveals the limitations of symbolic AI, emphasizing embodied robotics. Furthermore, they challenge traditional views of language in perception, advocating for direct perception as a more viable approach.
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Limits Of Categorization
- Categorization models often fail because necessary-and-sufficient features are impossible to specify for real-world things.
- Turvey and guests argue perception requires a different framing than feature-based categorization.
Poor Skatepark By Checklist
- Marianne recounts a local council-built skate park that met checkboxes but failed affordances and usage.
- The design fulfilled a category but ignored situated needs, so kids didn't use it as intended.
Signal Description Matters
- Spectrograms and raw signals often don't show words because the measured signal isn't what ears use.
- Gibson's move is to re-describe the information rather than pile inference on noisy signals.
