The Perception & Action Podcast 559 – Turvey, Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective, Chapter 26 (JC58)
Feb 3, 2026
Marianne Davies, a practitioner-researcher linking perception-action to sport and flow, and Andrew Wilson, an ecological perception researcher analyzing theory distinctions. They debate strong vs weak anticipation, how event structure and information guide action, connections to flow and animal behavior, deception and randomness in timing, and how affordances, coupling, and action shape anticipation.
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Definitions Create The Problems We Study
- Definitions shape problems: conflating phenomenon with mechanism creates pseudo-problems.
- Turvey shows many cognitive puzzles vanish when you redefine perception and intelligence.
Strong Anticipation Versus Prediction
- Sensation-based views force anticipation to be framed as prediction.
- Turvey argues anticipation can instead be an emergent property of coupled systems (strong anticipation).
Affordances Are Future-Directed
- Affordances inherently point to future action possibilities and so embed anticipation.
- Perceiving a cup as graspable is perceiving a future-directed relation, not a present-only snapshot.
