The Muddle of Anticipation

Abstract

In J. J. Gibson's classic paper “The Problem of Temporal Order in Stimulation and Perception” (1966a), he referred to the difficulties encountered when attempting a sharp distinction between memory and perception as “the muddle of memory.” Resolution of the muddle by J. J. Gibson proceeded by blurring the distinction itself. We develop the conjugate “muddle of anticipation” similarly by blurring the sharp distinction traditionally drawn between anticipation and perception. The subsequent redefinition of the problem is grounded in strong anticipation equated with anticipating synchronization—that which arises from a system itself via lawful regularities embedded in the system's ordinary mode of function. We identify the fit of strong anticipation's properties to J. J. Gibson's ecological approach and in so doing introduce the possibility of a potentially deep connection between them, namely, that the coordination of perception with surroundings (direct perception) is a special case of strong anticipation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We thank Heather Brewer for illustrations in Figures 1a and 3.

Notes

¹ J. J. Gibson's assertion (1966b) that “information for length of a line … is not length of a line” (p. 313) can be generalized to “information about x is not x” (e.g., Turvey & Fonseca, 2014). Figure 1c is an expression of “information about a contour is not a contour.”

² The focus on perception in this article is in respect to its function more than its content. Its universal function is to coordinate the individual organism (specifically, its activity) with its surroundings. The content of perception, the specific varieties of an organism's awareness of body and environment (see J. J. Gibson, 1979/1986), will vary with the organism-niche specifics.

³ Generally, the ecological approach is oriented toward perceiver-relative explanations. Favoring objective over subjective time may seem to be in conflict with this orientation. On closer inspection, however, objective prior-subsequent relations support the valuable concept of ecological nesting, whereas past-present-future evokes a need for more euclidean metrics (e.g., the origin). Objective and subjective refer to the ontology, not the organism-environment system.

⁴ NP is nondeterministic polynomial and names the class of problems only solvable in polynomial time on a nondeterministic Turing Machine. A problem is termed NP-hard if it is at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP and NP-complete if it is also in NP.

⁵ In The Mind Doesn't Work That Way, Fodor (2000) asserts that “Abduction really is a terrible problem for cognitive science, one that is unlikely to be solved by any kind of theory we have heard so far” (p. 41).

⁶ Shaw, Kadar, Sim, and Repperger (1992) applied the idea of conjugates (or adjoints) to a direct perceptual theory of intentional learning. Their so-called Intentional Spring might be said to exemplify strong anticipation. Their mathematical analyses suggest that intentional dynamics is a lawful system characteristic, where anticipation and direct perception/action are not only just of the same kind but, more exactly, are duals (i.e., adjoints or conjugates).

⁷ The lawfulness of perceiving that which can be grasped with one hand versus that which requires grasping with two hands is underscored by systematic demonstrations of conventional positive hysteresis and unconventional negative hysteresis in the nonlinear dynamics of the affordance “graspable” (Lopresti-Goodman, Turvey, & Frank, 2011, 2013).

⁸ Consonant with J. J. Gibson's concerns is Elsasser's (1987) admonishment that “memory must be subjected to the same type of epistemological scrutiny that physicists have for a long time applied to space, time, and causality” (p. 6).

⁹ It is, in truth, not much of a further radicalization. It is no more than a rejection of substance ontology (where substance, in approximate terms, is something that makes a thing what it is, that gives a thing its essential nature; Einstein & Infeld, 1938/1966).

Additional information

Funding

Nigel Stepp was supported in part by DARPA Physical Intelligence subcontract HRL 000708-DS. Michael T. Turvey was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-1344725 (INSPIRE Track 1).