The Longer--but Still Short--Story

The below is an excerpt from "The first ten years of trying to catch a milkshake acting like a computer: A response to readers, students, and colleagues" none of which is probably worth reading but all of which is gratuitously available in full at https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/ztgyr .

The science that I do: How movement constructs meaning

Perceptual and cognitive performance thrives on cross-scale interactivity. This interactivity knits together all of an organisms experiences extending across space and time. We can apply known, mathematical estimates to fluctuations in human movement--exploratory or unwitting and unintended. Why would you ever do that? Well, those known estimates of cross-scale interactivity predict perceptual and cognitive performance. What that means is, more or less, that movement constructs meaning--in a way that is creative and accidental and distributed across, well, more than just the human brain. That's what keeps me up at night, that's what keeps my passions for science burning.

Wait a second, what the heck is "cross-scale interactivity?"

Cross-scale interactivity

Sometimes big stuff changes how little stuff acts. Sometimes little stuff changes how big stuff acts. That second sentence there is more comfortable: it seems most intuitive that all of the cause and effect of science happens at the fine grain (e.g., with atoms and quarks etc.). The atoms and quarks are wonderfully important, but they are not everything, and they do not have the lock of cause and effect. I could cite some stuff here because the idea isn't mine, but if you find that idea upsetting, then you may have just stopped reading anyway (buh-bye!). Zooming up a few orders of magnitude, we can say the same thing about neurons and action potentials. It seems most intuitive that the mind is a brain and so that minds do what brains do, and that brains do what their smallest unit the neuron does.

Neurons do some impressive stuff, but knowing about neurons is not the same thing as knowing about all the causes moving the mind.

Neurons make up remarkably little of our bodily tissues, and they follow all the same physics and chemistry governing all of the other tissues. So, maybe they're taking their cues from something other than all of the neurons. Certainly, we know and love the calcium and potassium and sodium ions, those smaller parts, running the show of the action potential, but we don't often talk as much about the taut medium of connective tissue wrapping around many/all of the neurons helping them do their thing.

Cross-scale interactivity is that potential that big things might contain small things that make the big things go (which is scientific old news) but that also big things can change how the small things act/look/take shape (which is still old news but maybe less old and certainly less popular). The notion of a "building block" at all, whether it's an atom or a neuron, is somewhat misleading because all of these things are a lot more squishy/ephemeral than in shorthand. Stuff is plastic and moldable, and usually most things are remodeling other things contained by and containing them. It's honestly a mess for anyone hoping to make a nice short list of possible factors and possible outcomes.

This was not my idea, and I am just a lucky heir trying to connect smarter people's dots

Luckily, smarter people than me have spent the past century or so trying to come up with mathematical models of cross-scale interactivity--which is neat for theory--and with statistical methods for estimating interactions across scale--which is neat for empirical science. I am looking here only to get to the point on my own terms. The jargon and the literature review is nice for a kind of specificity with a specific audience, but not here.

One more time, with feeling: How movement constructs meaning

When applied to fluctuations in human movement--exploratory or unwitting and unintended, known estimates of cross-scale interactivity predict perceptual and cognitive performance. What that means is, more or less, that movement constructs meaning--in a way that is creative and accidental and distributed across, well, more than just the human brain. That's what keeps me up at night, that's what keeps my passions for science burning.

I use models of cross-scale interactivity to understand, explain, and predict how movement gives rise to perceptual and cognitive performance. I might hedge here and say that, at minimum, cross-scale interactivity addresses the context-sensitive aspects of perception and cognition. That said, I do believe that perceptual and cognitive performance is, by definition, context-sensitive. Perceptual and cognitive performance is not always "right" or "correct" or "rational" or even "good." But I think we only call perceptual and cognitive performance different things from anything else under the Sun because they are context-sensitive in ways that we don't expect other behaviors to be. What looks stable, what looks like a bias, what looks innate only looks that way relative to a very short time scale. I could be wrong about this and would love nothing better but to be corrected, but very much of what seems stable and rigid and reliable eventually wiggles, wobbles, and falls down if you watch it long enough. Far from wanting to catch the so-called stable stuff out as a fraud, I think that the cross-scale interactivity is the eventual relationship between short-term, small-scale wobble and large-scale upheaval. I think it's also how new structure emerges and how behavior is not just a regurgitation of genetic inheritance.

Coevolution: Embodied cognition and then some

I am not saying that only movement contributes to the mind, but a lot of things that you may not call "movement" show similar statistical signatures, and I do very much suspect that these similar statistical signatures outside the body are far from coincidental. We are co-evolving with a context rich in other organisms building and rebuilding available constraints. Heterogeneity follows quickly from any sort of cross-scale interactivity. The only trick is finding the most appropriate way to quantify the cross-scale interactivity. But at bottom, I think that cross-scale interactivity provides a geometry that makes it easy for us to see where all that lovely texture in perception, cognition, and behavior comes from.

Sometimes people ask: "(How) is what you do still psychology?"

Well, let me take a crack at saying what my work is not. Before we get through all of that, though, I hope that psychology has room for any attempt to explain how new structure emerges in perceptual and cognitive performance and in behavior. I don't believe that psychology is a commitment to a set of preferred explanatory variables, and I do believe that psychology is a commitment to studying goal-directed behavior scientifically. If you have ever hoped that psychology would explain new behavior, new perception, or new cognition, or at least how any of perception/cognition/behavior changes, then I think that what I do is still psychology. Then again, you are free to set me straight--but I kind of feel like you might have better things to do with your day. But, now, on to what I'll agree my work is not...

What my work is not: Anatomical

There are many anatomical approaches to psychology that involve identifying independent parts, independent mechanisms usually latent. These accounts vary in how much they align individual mechanisms of the mind with individual mechanisms or individual regions of the brain. These accounts even spend most of their time/effort explaining how minds depend on the interactions of those parts/mechanisms. What I do is not that. There may be nothing wrong with that approach, and very many people pursue that approach--so many in fact that I feel confident that my reluctance to join in is not causing any great harm. I actually just find this anatomical approach contributes to my own anxiety, which may be entirely on me and my problem.

The challenge to anatomical approaches to psychology: Finite imagination and so far not-finite development

Listing out the many independent parts/mechanisms that play a role may fail either to include everything that ever will play a role OR to explain everything that could happen with a full set of the parts/mechanisms. To the first point: I can barely remember where I left my keys some days, let alone remember all of the different places I could have left them, and so I certainly don't trust myself to imagine and to remember all of the parts/mechanisms that could be under the psychological hood. More than that, new stuff might happen one day.

To the second point: I confess to being romantic enough about the mind being "different from the sum of its parts." I think I am far from alone here, but I do what I do because I do not think that simply believing in the old Gestalt adage is sufficient to balance out doing strictly linear modeling. If we only do linear modeling of our perceptual and cognitive performance, we will only ever have results that allow interpretation as a sum of parts.

Strictly linear modeling vs. modeling cross-scale interactivity

I still run linear models like ANOVAs and t-tests to identify specific effects predicting to perceptual and cognitive performance. That is, to test the usefulness of cross-scale interactivity, I run linear regression models just like ANOVA and t-test to meet the same general standards for statistical significance. I do that because I want to be clear that cross-scale interactivity is not actually better explained (away) by any of the more traditional, usual-suspect variables that I know are more popular.

"Well, okay, but why do your papers go all over the map?"

Well, I'm still learning how to write, and so I am sure I have not been clear. But even if I were to write well, I want to build the argument on many fronts because what I want to say has to borrow from physics and had better make sense to that audience. Then again, because I still think I'm a psychologist, I want to see how well this argument holds up against many different tasks/domains/abilities where psychologists have introduced their computational metaphor to explain what minds do. I regret the disorganization.

"What's with that 'human' stuff above?"

Oh yeah, I am on a mission against human exceptionalism: we are nifty organisms, and I'm happy to be a human, but I don't think my being human is itself a guarantee of my special status in the world. I want to understand perception, cognition, and behavior in a way that does not need my reaching in and saying that my ability to do X or Y is attributable to my genome. There are a lot of reasons that would not answer my curiosities. There is a whole world beyond our genomes and our nervous systems, and it is a creative, destructive, and altogether amazing thing.