BI 223 Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology Motifs in Neuroscience

Vicente Raja on how concepts from Gibson's ecological psychology can inform modern neuroscience

Show notes: https://braininspired.co/podcast/223/

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Vicente Raja is a research fellow at University of Murcia in Spain, where he is also part of the Minimal Intelligence Lab run by Paco Cavo, where they study plant behavior, and he is external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. He is a philosopher, and he is a cognitive scientist, and he specializes in applying concepts from ecological psychology to understand how brains, and organisms, including plants, get about in the world.

We talk about many facets of his research, both philosophical and scientific, and maybe the best way to describe the conversation is a tour among many of the concepts in ecological psychology - like affordances, ecological information, direct perception, and resonance, and how those concepts do and don't, and should or shouldn’t, contribute to our understanding of brains and minds.

We also discuss Vicente's use of the term motif to describe scientific concepts that allow different researches to study roughly the same things even though they have different definitions for those things, and toward the end we touch on his work studying plant behavior. It's all related, as you'll see.


0:00 - Intro
4:55 - Affordances and neuroscience
13:46 - Motifs
39:41- Reconciling neuroscience and ecological psychology
1:07:55 - Predictive processing
1:15:32 - Resonance
1:23:00 - Biggest holes in ecological psychology
1:29:50 - Plant cognition