Michael T. Turvey (February 14, 1942 [1] - August 12, 2023) was the Board of Trustees' Distinguished Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Connecticut and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. He is best known for his pioneering work in ecological psychology and in applying the dynamical systems approach to the study of motor behavior. He was the founder of the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action. His research spans a number of areas including: dynamic touch and haptics, interlimb coordination, visual perception and optic flow, postural stability, visual word recognition and speech perception. Along with William Mace and Robert Shaw, he was one of the leading explicators of the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson. His pioneering work with J. A. Scott Kelso and Peter N. Kugler introduced the physical language of complex systems to the understanding of perception and action. He also helped introduce the ideas of the Russian motor control theorist Nikolai Bernstein and his colleagues to a larger audience. Working with Georgije Lukatela and other colleagues at Haskins Laboratories, he exploited the dual nature of the Serbo-Croatian orthography to help understand word recognition.
Turvey also won the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics along with Professor Ramesh Balasubramaniam of Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping. (Reference: "Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping," Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey, Biological Cybernetics, vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176–90.)
Turvey attended Clapham College, a Jesuit school in South London, [2] then graduated from Loughborough University (then called Loughborough College) in 1963 with a DLC (Diploma of Loughborough College) [3] in Physical Education, with First Class Honours. He received an MA (1964) in Physical Education from the Ohio State University. He received a PhD (1967) in Experimental and Physiological Psychology from the Ohio State University under Delos Wickens, with thesis The nature of information loss in the visual preperceptual system. [1] [4] [5] [6]
In philosophy of perception and epistemology, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. When referred to as direct realism, naïve realism is often contrasted with indirect realism.
Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.
Ecological psychology is the scientific study of perception-action from a direct realist approach. Ecological psychology is a school of psychology that follows much of the writings of Roger Barker and James J. Gibson. Those in the field of Ecological Psychology reject the mainstream explanations of perception laid out by cognitive psychology. The ecological psychology can be broken into a few sub categories: perception, action, and dynamical systems. As a clarification, many in this field would reject the separation of perception and action, stating that perception and action are inseparable. These perceptions are shaped by an individual's ability to engage with their emotional experiences in relation to the environment and reflect on and process these. This capacity for emotional engagement leads to action, collective processing, social capital, and pro environmental behaviour.
A sensory cue is a statistic or signal that can be extracted from the sensory input by a perceiver, that indicates the state of some property of the world that the perceiver is interested in perceiving.
Haskins Laboratories, Inc. is an independent 501(c) non-profit corporation, founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1970. Haskins has formal affiliation agreements with both Yale University and the University of Connecticut; it remains fully independent, administratively and financially, of both Yale and UConn. Haskins is a multidisciplinary and international community of researchers that conducts basic research on spoken and written language. A guiding perspective of their research is to view speech and language as emerging from biological processes, including those of adaptation, response to stimuli, and conspecific interaction. Haskins Laboratories has a long history of technological and theoretical innovation, from creating systems of rules for speech synthesis and development of an early working prototype of a reading machine for the blind to developing the landmark concept of phonemic awareness as the critical preparation for learning to read an alphabetic writing system.
Embodied cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of research, the aim of which is to explain the mechanisms underlying intelligent behavior. It comprises three main methodologies: the modeling of psychological and biological systems in a holistic manner that considers the mind and body as a single entity; the formation of a common set of general principles of intelligent behavior; and the experimental use of robotic agents in controlled environments.
Philip E. Rubin is an American cognitive scientist, technologist, and science administrator known for raising the visibility of behavioral and cognitive science, neuroscience, and ethical issues related to science, technology, and medicine, at a national level. His research career is noted for his theoretical contributions and pioneering technological developments, starting in the 1970s, related to speech synthesis and speech production, including articulatory synthesis and sinewave synthesis, and their use in studying complex temporal events, particularly understanding the biological bases of speech and language.
Alvin Meyer Liberman was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception.
Carol Ann Fowler is an American experimental psychologist. She was president and director of research at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut from 1992 to 2008. She is also a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and adjunct professor of linguistics and psychology at Yale University. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1971, her M.A University of Connecticut in 1973 and her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1977.
The pattern playback is an early talking device that was built by Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues, including John M. Borst and Caryl Haskins, at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s and completed in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device. Only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman, Frank Cooper, and Pierre Delattre were able to discover acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments. This research was fundamental to the development of modern techniques of speech synthesis, reading machines for the blind, the study of speech perception and speech recognition, and the development of the motor theory of speech perception.
Robert Remez is an American experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist, and is Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University and Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Language & Cognition. His teaching focuses on the relationships between cognition, perception and language. He is best known for his theoretical and experimental work on perceptual organization and speech perception.
Louis M. Goldstein is an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He was previously a professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics and a professor of psychology at Yale University and is now a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. He is a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut, and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. Notable students of Goldstein include Douglas Whalen and Elizabeth Zsiga.
Elliot SaltzmanArchived 2006-09-06 at the Wayback Machine is an American psychologist and speech scientist. He is a professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at Boston University and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. He is best known for his development, with J. A. Scott Kelso of "task dynamics ." He is also known for his contributions to the development of a gestural-computational model Archived 2006-12-08 at the Wayback Machine at Haskins Laboratories that combines task dynamics with articulatory phonology and articulatory synthesis. His research interests include application of theories and methods of nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory to understanding the dynamical and biological bases of sensorimotor coordination and control. He is the co-founder, with Philip Rubin, of the IS group.
Donald P. ShankweilerArchived 2006-06-26 at the Wayback Machine is an eminent psychologist and cognitive scientist who has done pioneering work on the representation and processing of language in the brain. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Board of Directors Archived 2021-01-26 at the Wayback Machine at Haskins. He is married to well-known American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language Ruth Millikan.
Common coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations and motor representations are linked. The theory claims that there is a shared representation for both perception and action. More important, seeing an event activates the action associated with that event, and performing an action activates the associated perceptual event.
The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates. It originally claimed that speech perception is done through a specialized module that is innate and human-specific. Though the idea of a module has been qualified in more recent versions of the theory, the idea remains that the role of the speech motor system is not only to produce speech articulations but also to detect them.
Action-specific perception, or perception-action, is a psychological theory that people perceive their environment and events within it in terms of their ability to act. This theory hence suggests that a person's capability to carry out a particular task affects how they perceive the different aspects and methods involved in that task. For example, softball players who are hitting better see the ball as bigger. Tennis players see the ball as moving slower when they successfully return the ball. In the field of human-computer interaction, alterations in accuracy impact both the perception of size and time, while adjustments in movement speed impact the perception of distance. Furthermore, the perceiver's intention to act is also critical; while the perceiver's ability to perform the intended action influences perception, the perceiver's abilities for unintended actions have little or no effect on perception. Finally, the objective difficulty of the task appears to modulate size, distance, and time perception.
During every moment of an organism's life, sensory information is being taken in by sensory receptors and processed by the nervous system. Sensory information is stored in sensory memory just long enough to be transferred to short-term memory. Humans have five traditional senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Sensory memory (SM) allows individuals to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. A common demonstration of SM is a child's ability to write letters and make circles by twirling a sparkler at night. When the sparkler is spun fast enough, it appears to leave a trail which forms a continuous image. This "light trail" is the image that is represented in the visual sensory store known as iconic memory. The other two types of SM that have been most extensively studied are echoic memory, and haptic memory; however, it is reasonable to assume that each physiological sense has a corresponding memory store. For example, children have been shown to remember specific "sweet" tastes during incidental learning trials but the nature of this gustatory store is still unclear. However, sensory memories might be related to a region of the thalamus, which serves as a source of signals encoding past experiences in the neocortex.
Farley Norman is a professor of psychological sciences at Western Kentucky University. He is a co-director of the Gustav Fechner Perception Laboratory at Western Kentucky University, along with his wife, Hideko Norman.