One of the most exciting issues in psychology is what are the psychological mechanisms underlying human tool use? The computational approach assumes that the use of a tool (e.g., a hammer) requires the extraction of sensory information about object properties (heavy, rigid), which can then be translated into appropriate motor outputs (grasping, hammering). The ecological approach suggests that we do not perceive the properties of tools per se but what they afford (a heavy, rigid object affords pounding). This is the theory of affordances. In this article, we examine the potential of the computational view and the ecological view to account for human tool use. To anticipate our conclusions, neither of these approaches is likely to be satisfactory, notably because of their incapacity to resolve the issue of why humans spontaneously use tools. In response, we offer an original theoretical framework based on the idea that affordance perception and technical reasoning work together in a dialectical way. The thesis we defend here is that humans have the ability to view body action as a problem to be solved. And it is precisely at this point that technical reasoning occurs. But, even if the ability to do technical reasoning gives humans the illusion of constantly doing less (e.g., TV remote control), they are still forced to use body action - and to perceive affordances - to operate the product of the reasoning (pushing buttons with the fingers). This is the principle of dialectic.

/pdf/grasping-the-affordances-understanding-the-reasoning-toward-xrgs7l91r1.pdf

Grasping the affordances, understanding the reasoning: toward a dialectical theory of human tool use.

Expert decision-making can be directly assessed, if sport action is understood as an expression of embedded and embodied cognition. Here, we discuss evidence for this claim, starting with a critica...

/pdf/ecological-cognition-expert-decision-making-behaviour-in-52lgf29kb1.pdf

Ecological cognition: expert decision-making behaviour in sport

This latest volume in the celebrated Cambridge History of Literary Criticism surveys literary criticism of the Romantic period, chiefly in Europe. Its seventeen chapters are by internationally respected academics and explore a range of key topics and themes. The book is designed to help readers locate essential information and to develop approaches and viewpoints for a deeper understanding of issues discussed by Romantic critics or those that were fundamental to their works. Primary and secondary bibliographies provide a guide for further research.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism

Body work: Objects of desire in modern narrative

This paper explores experiences that remained salient in the memories of former participants in three nature-based programs in Colorado, five to forty years after childhood involvement. Interviews with program founders and staff, archival research, and observations of current activities provided an understanding of each program’s history, mission and educational approach. In this context, 18 former participants were interviewed about program experiences that they remembered and program impacts on their environmental identities and academic or career choices. Results were analyzed through the lens of social practice theory, which has significant implications for the design and evaluation of environmental education programs. Results showed that social practice theory is a useful framework for interpreting the development of a social environmental identity, but an ecological identity that forms through direct contact with the natural world is an important complementary concept.

Environmental identity formation in nonformal environmental education programs

Table of Contents for The Gothic Text Preface A Note on Sources 1. Three Theses on Gothic Fiction 2. Fantasia: Kant and the Demons of the Night PART I: ORIGINS: WALPOLE 3. The Birth of The Castle of Otranto 4. Excursus: Notes on the History of Psycho-Narration 5. Ghosts in the Flesh PART II: KANT AND THE GOTHIC 6. At the Limits of Kantian Philosophy 7. Kant's Disciples 8. Kant and the Doctors 9. Meditative Interlude PART III: PHILSOPHY OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL 10. The Wild Ass's Skin 11. The Devil's Elixirs 12. Melmoth the Wanderer 13. Caleb Williams PART IV: CONSEQUENCES 14. In Defense of ClichA(c): Radcliffe's Landscapes 15. Frankenstein: A Child's Tale 16. Postscript: Faust and the Gothic Notes Works Cited Index

The Gothic Text

David Damrosch’s writings on world literature envision readers “making themselves at home abroad.” This essay argues against his Thoreauvian optimism, given a world that is too large to grasp or to become a home. World literature cannot be naturalized. Drawing on examples from Leibniz, Achebe, Walcott, and Petrarch, the essay proposes that world literature is best identified in terms not of the value of authors and works, nor of the situations portrayed through the characters and plots, but of the nature of the readerly experience. It examines the style of representation in world literature, which Brian Lennon’s book In Babel’s Shadow productively characterizes as a kind of kitsch reflecting a struggle to communicate. World literature is not, as Damrosch says, “writing that gains in translation,” but writing that retains its alienness even in the original.

Encountering the world

The Urbane Sublime

The shape of German romanticism

Mary Shelley must have been very lucky at cards. It's not as if she was unhappy at love: she was full of passions, and they were often stormily requited. But she was certainly unlucky, from the moment of her birth. There is something irremediably capricious about her fate, as there is about the composition and destiny of her most famous novel and about its wildly excited contents. Young as she was, its author, after all, had led a profoundly disrupted life. Perhaps that is why Frankenstein will not settle into any composed pattern of either individual or group meanings. It is written with head and heart inseparably, and its turbulent energies overwhelm any ideology we may discern in it. Critics have found it a more or less direct representation of Shelley's biography, a reckoning with the ideas of her parents, a fable of the role of women, or of the unconscious, or of family or social structures, or of political turmoil, of scientific discovery, of colonialism, economic theory, capitalist enterprise, or literary production.1 Their accounts succeed, for Frankenstein's monster spells trouble, in almost any imaginable sphere of life. But they do not satisfy.2 The present essay begins by confronting the novel's unruliness head on and continues by linking its form not to the author's beliefs but to her situation. Expression more than representation, Frankenstein like its monster grips by virtue of its ungraspability. The novel was a piece of luck called out by the unhappy yearnings of an author who was barely more than a girl when she conceived it. One surmises that it embodies the only form she knew-the unformed, inchoate existence of childhood. I undertake to demonstrate the prescient if unthematized intuition of early experience that Shelley's adolescent masterpiece bequeathed to its readers.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1346124.pdf

Marshall Brown

Papers

The Gothic Text

Encountering the world

The Urbane Sublime

The shape of German romanticism

Frankenstein: A Child’s Tale