BJMB
Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior
Special issue:
“In memory of Michael Turvey”
!
Amazeen
2023
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N.6
320 of 323
More than science: A systems approach inspired by Michael T. Turvey
POLEMNIA G. AMAZEEN
1
1
Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
Correspondence to:!Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287 United States
email: amazeen@asu.edu
https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.v17i6.411
HIGHLIGHTS
• M. T. Turvey impacted our study of perception and
action significantly.
• Ecological psychology is nested under a broader
systems perspective.
• Context dependence inherent to systems facilitates
understanding of any phenomenon.
• Systems necessarily include contemporaneous
multiscale and historical influences.
• Systems thinking extends beyond academic study to
teaching and mentoring.
ABBREVIATIONS
ASU Arizona State University
CESPA Center for the Ecological Study of
Perception and Action
DPAC Dynamics of Perception, Action, and
Cognition
EEG Electroencephalography
UConn University of Connecticut
PUBLICATION DATA
Received 10 12 2023
Accepted 20 12 2023
Published 22 12 2023
ABSTRACT
This year, we lost a giant in the field of perception and action, Michael T. Turvey. This special
issue is dedicated to the impact that he made on his students and the field. I learned about
ecological psychology just as I was headed to graduate school in 1990. Through Michael's
teachings and my own academic career that followed, I recognized that the inseparability of
organism and environment that was fundamental to ecological psychology was part of the
larger story of a systems perspective that itself helped to frame questions of causality from
Aristotle and the problematic division of subject and object inherited from Descartes. In this
mini-review, I identify fundamental concepts in systems science from an academic
perspective, but I extend that same reasoning to life beyond science. Together with his wife,
Claudia Carello, who was also the director of the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception
and Action (CESPA) at the University of Connecticut, Michael taught, mentored, and cared for
his students within the same systems framework. It is that broader lesson for how to teach
and mentor students that I offer to honor his memory today.
KEYWORDS: Turvey | Ecological psychology | Dynamical systems | Systems approach |
Perception-action
A theme will no doubt emerge in the collection of articles submitted for this special issue, that Michael T. Turvey was a giant in
the field, someone who influenced the trends and general approach to the study of perception and action over the past 50 years and who
will, through his writings and his students, continue to influence the field long past his time here with us. The contributors to this special
issue were charged with the monumental task of discussing Michael's influence on our scientific careers. I chose to write about Michael's
ultimate gift to me as being a systems approach, the belief that everything is connected, not simply in the academic sense but also as
foundational to teaching and mentoring. As I write about the importance of preserving the integrity of the system in seeking causal
explanation, I have to acknowledge not only Michael, but Claudia Carello and other faculty, fellow students and other alumni from the
Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) at the University of Connecticut (UConn), and as well as CESPA's
constant flow of visitors over the years, that all helped to shape my scientific career. In this article, I will identify other lines of thinking
from across the sciences and philosophy that reflect Michael's mentorship in multidisciplinary thinking and contribute to my broader
understanding of a systems perspective.
I believe that a reasonable approach to reading the articles in this volume will be to take them in chronological order from the
earliest students to the most recent. I was a student at CESPA somewhere in the middle of that timeline, during the early 1990s and
shortly after the introduction of dynamical systems to psychological questions, starting with motor coordination. Kugler and Turvey
1
had
just introduced the hand-held pendulums paradigm, and Schmidt, Carello, and Turvey
2
had just demonstrated that the same dynamics
held both within and across people. The principle of dynamical similitude—that the same behavior could be observed in very different
looking systems–captivated me, and I was lucky enough to build on that social coordination research
3,4
and to contribute to the first book
on Dynamical Systems in Social Psychology
5,6
. Dynamics became the central focus of my own scientific career. I named my lab at
Arizona State University (ASU) the Dynamics of Perception, Action, and Cognition (DPAC) lab and have conducted a multidisciplinary
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graduate seminar by the same name for over 23 years.
A SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE: EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
It may surprise the reader, then, to hear that I am not going to focus on dynamics itself as Michael's central influence on my
career. Instead, I think that his greatest influence was the adoption of a systems perspective. In the search for an explanation for
behavior, a systems perspective considers everything—both contemporaneous and historical influences—that might influence the
phenomenon of interest. I explain it to students as drawing a circle around everything that might possibly play a role in producing that
phenomenon. Ecological psychology's emphasis on the organism embedded in its environment is necessarily a systems perspective.
Let us first consider contemporaneous influences. Whenever I teach dynamical systems to graduate or undergraduate
students, I start with a lecture entitled Everything is Connected. As you sit in your chair reading this, lift the leg that sits on the same side
as your writing hand and draw circles in a clockwise direction as if you were tracing them in sand on the ground. Now draw a big number
6 in the air with your preferred hand. What happens? Your leg reverses direction and starts to move counter-clockwise. Despite being
distally related, located at different ends of our bodies, our limbs are connected; they influence each other and cannot move at will in
opposite directions without sufficient practice. This was Bernstein's context conditioned variability
7
. Every movement occurs in—and its
outcome is dependent upon—context. Bernstein goes on to explain in his explanation of the degrees of freedom problem the impossibility
and unnecessary computational burden of considering the control of movements in isolation, apart from context
8
. Behavior, after all,
never occurs in isolation.
Bernstein
9
emphasized the role of given forces in the control of bodily movements: we can either consider commands that work
in a vacuum, building an intended movement from scratch, or supplement given dynamics, for example, gravity and springlike properties
of muscles, to solve a much easier problem. If we harness the given dynamics, molding them to our will, then we are working with the
natural dynamics of a system and do not have to build it up from scratch - which, because the given forces will still be there - won't work.
Thelen and colleagues
10,11
induced stepping and walking behavior in babies by providing the context in which those behaviors could
emerge. They induced stepping behavior in infants as young as three months old by submerging their lower bodies in water to lessen the
impact of baby fat. They encouraged slightly older babies who could not yet walk on their own to demonstrate walking behavior on a
treadmill where the springlike forces in the muscles produce the leg swing that is characteristic of walking. In the spirit of this research, I
ask my own students whether they are walkers or crawlers... and then I show them a picture of a steep slope that they might be asked to
climb. In context, even grown adults capable of walking necessarily become crawlers. To quote Alicia Juarrero
12
in her latest book,
Context Changes Everything: How constraints create coherence.
We acknowledge the importance of context in ecological psychology when we take as foundational the inseparability of
organism and environment. Classically, from Gibson
13
, we know that direct perception is facilitated by the preservation of the organism-
environment relationship. Meaning exists in the relation between organism and environment, with no primacy given to either the organism
or environment alone. As we all learned in Michael's Perception class, preserved for posterity in Turvey's
14
Lectures on Perception: An
Ecological Perspective, if we separate the organism from the environment by considering the retinal image as the point of division, then
we face the insurmountable task of adding meaning back into that impoverished point of contact. This is not a new idea: Our scientific
tradition inherits from Descartes a division not just of mind and body but of subject and object
15
. If we as subjects are separate from the
objects that we wish to consider in our surrounding world, then we face the tremendous task of explaining how to stitch the two back
together.
Scientists who dichotomize nature and nurture face similar battles. In his book, The Dependent Gene, Moore
16
addresses
causality using memorable examples of the inseparability of gene and environment. One of my favorites is the example of chicks with
teeth. Wait, you say, chicks don't have teeth... but they do in context! A chick's beak develops out of a particular layer of embryonic
tissue; Moore conveniently labels it Layer 1. If mouse cells are transplanted into the layer behind that beak-developing layer, into what
might be labeled Layer 2, then the cells in Layer 1, still the chick cells, develop into teeth. It isn't those Layer 1 cells that contain the
information about the structure that emerges but the cells in Layer 1 plus the environment of Layer 2 that constrain what emerges. One
does not take primacy over the other.
The previous examples are limited to contemporaneous context, but behavior similarly occurs in historical context. As
scientists, we have inherited a tendency to look for (Aristotle's) efficient cause
17
, a type of causality that has been likened to a "billiard
ball" effect, where we look for some event that immediately preceded the behavior that we are trying to explain. That is a limited view of
history. In fact, most behaviors are multiply-caused by events both proximal and distal to the observed behavior. What caused you to
start reading this article? Was it that you saw it in your email? Was it a future-oriented goal, that you hoped to learn something? Was it
oriented further in the past, that you hoped to read something that reminded you of your own interactions with Michael Turvey? We know
from the immense literature on long-range correlations
18
that it is not just the immediately preceding event that is correlated with the
present. Autocorrelations of a value greater than one are the more likely case, with events correlated across both proximal and distal
points in time.
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Inseparable from this issue of causality is the idea that there are always multiscale explanations of "why"
19
: Did you start
reading because your eyes started moving over the words or because you are interested in the topic? Both answers are correct, but they
exist at different levels of analysis. One of my favorite examples comes from the study of postural control
20
: Across short time windows,
postural deviations from vertical are positively correlated; because that would cause us to topple over the long term, postural deviations
from vertical are negatively correlated at larger window sizes. Both regions are integral to the control of upright posture.
When we sever those multiscale contemporaneous and historical connecting bonds through the practice of reductionism, we
lose information both at the macroscopic level and at the microscopic level. An understanding of team behavior, for example, requires
that we understand the team dynamic, not just the members of the team, and not just their interactions, but the dynamic that emerges
through the interaction of all of those team members
21,22
. That team dynamic is broken when we consider each individual in isolation.
Similarly, and this is not something we usually consider, when we study the individual, we necessarily lose information about the impact
on individual behavior of the team of which they are a part. This circular causality is what makes explanations centered around efficient
cause both inaccurate and hopeless
23
.
It sounds like an insurmountable problem - how else are we to conduct our science? - until we realize that we can take
advantage of that vastly interconnected system to understand phenomena beyond what we are measuring. One of my favorite findings
was that we could build up an understanding of team-level experience through analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) signals
recorded from individual team members
24
. Such an understanding is only possible with the understanding that Everything is Connected.
SYSTEMS IN LIFE
I could keep talking about the systems perspective in science alone, but that would be only half of the story. For the science
that we conduct in a lab and that we record in papers is only part of a broader system of science education and lifestyle. Michael and
Claudia exemplified the systems perspective when they took care of the entire student: academically, financially, and socially. It is
beyond the scope of this scientific journal to identify all of the personal stories and ways in which they enriched the lives of their students.
However, I feel that it is appropriate to tell a few stories to illustrate this point.
Those of us who remained in academia recognize how hard it is to secure funding for our labs and for our students. Michael
and Claudia would go into intensive writing mode before grant deadlines to secure the funding that allowed us, as students, to dedicate
ourselves fully to our research, to be as productive as we could be during our graduate career so that we could secure jobs of our choice
afterwards. Claudia would ask me about the cost of everything—my rent, my electric bill, how much I paid for food—so that she could
make sure that I had just enough to live on. Even at that time, but particularly after years of worrying about funding for my own graduate
students, I recognize that this particular dedication to the financial lives of their students was special.
Part of taking care of us financially was taking care of our social life. We didn't have extra funds to go out and socialize, so
Michael and Claudia hosted us... all of the time. They hosted speakers and guests and invited us all over to eat and to socialize with
people who were so very important in our field. That practice was fun for us socially, but it also helped us to build our network of
professional contacts and, in some cases, including my own, find researchers that would serve as postdoctoral supervisors or references
for job hunts and promotions. Michael and Claudia hosted us for every holiday: Fourth of July? You knew to be prepared for a quiz on the
Constitution and its amendments. Christmas shopping? Expect to help Michael fulfill Claudia's list and to help Claudia buy gifts for all of
the front office staff. New Year's Eve? Borrow a gown, put on some makeup, and expect to dance to Glenn Miller. And Friday nights?
Every Friday night, expect to be invited into Sweet William's Pub, the Irish pub that they built in their basement, to unwind from the week,
to bond, and to get a little push on the plan for what you should accomplish before Monday morning. Decades have passed since my
graduation, and yet I still remember the words to all of the Irish pub songs; I still remember the sausages, Coleman's mustard, and
perhaps some Hungarian brandy that made their appearance after midnight. Decades after graduation, I knew that I could still turn to
Michael and Claudia for support.
Like an approach to science, this consideration of the entire student in teaching and mentorship is central to a systems
perspective. You cannot divide out the students' academic progress from their financial concerns, their need for a social outlet and long-
term support. Michael, Claudia, and the entire CESPA system provided that to all of us.
DON’T MIMIC BUT FOLLOW THE SPIRIT OF THE LESSON
Finally, part of a systems approach is recognizing that behavior emerges from the particulars of its components. Most of my
early mistakes in teaching came from trying to mimic Michael's teaching style a little too closely. I recall putting together my very first
graduate class on dynamical systems as an assistant professor. The material imitated Michael's format and style a little too closely, to the
extent that I found myself explaining, in a lecture on Rayleigh-Bénard convection, "the salsa [that's what saucer sounded like to me when
Michael said it in his British accent] is heated from below". It was clear that I had to find my own voice, quite literally. I know now that what
my students like most about my teaching style is that it reflects who I am, just as Michael's style truly reflected him.
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There are far more stories that I could share that were eliminated from earlier drafts. Admittedly, this was an overly emotional
paper to write. But all good things must come to an end, and so I only wish to say Thank You, Michael. I honestly would not be where I
am today—or be who I am today—without you.
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17. Juarrero A. Dynamics in action: Intentional behavior as a complex system. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 1999. 300 p.
18. Beran J. Statistics for long-memory processes. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC; 1994. 315 p.
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20. Collins JJ, De Luca CJ. Open-loop and closed-loop control of posture: A random-walk analysis of center-of-pressure trajectories. Exp Brain Res.
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21. Gorman JC, Amazeen PG, Cooke NJ. Team coordination dynamics. Nonlin Dyn, Psy, Life Sci. 2010;14:265-289.
22. Gorman JC, Cooke NJ, Amazeen PG. Training adaptive teams. Hum Factors. 2010;52:295-307. doi: 10.1177/0018720810371689
23. Haken H. Principles of brain functioning: A synergetic approach to brain activity, behavior and cognition. Berlin: Springer; 1996. 350 p.
24. Likens AD, Amazeen PG, Stevens R, Galloway T, Gorman J. Neural signatures of team coordination are revealed by multifractal analysis. Soc
Neuro. 2014;9:219-234. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2014.882861
Citation: Amazeen PG. (2023).!More than science: A systems approach inspired by Michael T. Turvey. Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior, 17(6):320-323.
Editor-in-chief: Dr Fabio Augusto Barbieri - São Paulo State University (UNESP), Bauru, SP, Brazil. !
Associate editors: Dr José Angelo Barela - São Paulo State University (UNESP), Rio Claro, SP, Brazil; Dr Natalia Madalena Rinaldi - Federal University of Espírito Santo
(UFES), Vitória, ES, Brazil; Dr Renato de Moraes – University of São Paulo (USP), Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil.
Guest editor: Dr Vitor Leandro da Silva Profeta - University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil.!
Copyright:© 2023 Amazeen and BJMB. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives
4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: Nothing to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
DOI:!https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.v17i6.411