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Publications (60)
People with visual impairments commonly rely on the use of a white cane to navigate and avoid obstacles. Although this analog tool is highly reliable and easy to use, its drawback is the impossibility to anticipate obstacles beyond reach and routes, as well as obstacles above waist level. Electronic travel aids (ETAs) and sensory substitution devic...
Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) facilitate the detection of environmental information through enhancement of touch and/or hearing capabilities. Research has demonstrated that several tasks can be successfully completed using acoustic, vibrotactile, and multimodal devices. The suitability of a substituting modality is also mediated by the type o...
People with a visual impairment often find it difficult to detect information about distant objects they may want to grasp. To overcome this difficulty, we developed a sensory substitution glove that facilitates non-visual grasping. The glove includes two vibration motors, one on the index finger and one on the thumb. The motors vibrate whenever th...
This study provides a systematic synthesis of empirical research on mental workload (MWL) in air traffic control (ATC). MWL is a key concept in research on innovative technologies, because the assessment of MWL is crucial to the evaluation of such technologies. Our specific focus was on physiological measures of MWL. The used search strategy identi...
The main purpose of this article is to show that enactivism and ecological psychology share more aspects than is often recognized. Rather than debating about differences, commonalities between the approaches are illustrated with the example of dynamic touch. Dynamic touch is a form of touch that implies muscles and tendons and that allows the perce...
The present research analyzes the relation between the height of penalty kicks in association football and (a) the probability that goalkeepers stop the ball, (b) the kinematics of the kicker, and (c) the movements of the goalkeeper. We re-analyzed movement registration data that were collected in an experiment (with professional and semi-professio...
In 2017, Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiarán proposed a list of criteria that post-cognitivist theories of learning should fulfill. In this article, we review the ecological theory of direct learning. We argue that this theory fulfills most of the criteria put forward by Di Paolo et al. and that its tools and concepts can be useful to other post-co...
The theory of affordances states that perception is of environmental properties that are relevant to action-capabilities of perceivers. The present study illustrates how concepts and methodological tools from the theory of affordances may help to advance research in the field of sensory substitution. The sensory substitution device (SSD) that was u...
Single-trial example of functioning of SSD and time-evolution of crucial variables.
(MOV)
The design of Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) often relies on the belief that the information supplied by the devices should allow the construction of spatial mental representations on the basis of which routes are planned. This study, in contrast, illustrates that navigation using an SSD can be conceived as an on-line, dynamic process, without...
Ecological Psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representational approach pioneered by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson. This theory aims to offer a third way beyond cognitivism and behaviorism for understanding cognition. The theory started with the rejection of the premise of the poverty of the stimulus, the physicalist conception of the sti...
This study investigates how active exploration helps users of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) to detect action-relevant information. A vibrotactile SSD was developed that generates stimulation that is contingent on the users’ movements. Target direction was specified by the location of the vibratory stimulation, and target distance by the size...
Walking to targets is a difficult task for visually-impaired people. A main challenge for improving the mobility of the blind is the development of electronic travel aids (ETAs) that improve mobility beyond the mobility allowed by the long cane. In this experiment we used a vibrotactile device that provides information related to the body-reference...
The anticipation of the direction of football penalty kicks was assessed using Point Light Displays (PLDs). To that end, Principal Component Analyses (PCAs) were applied on previously registered penalty kicks. The PCAs provided an accurate description of the kicks: an average of 98.7% of the variance was explained with the first 6 PCA modes. The re...
The research field on sensory substitution devices has strong implications for theoretical work on perceptual consciousness. One of these implications concerns the extent to which the devices allow distal attribution. The present study applies a classic empirical approach on the perception of affordances to the field of sensory substitution. The re...
This study addresses the utility of the kinematics of penalty takers for goalkeepers in association football. Twelve professional and semi-professional players shot to one side of the goal with (deceptive condition) or without (non-deceptive condition) simulating a shot to the opposite side. The body kinematics of the penalty takers were registered...
Practice is essential for an adapted use of sensory substitution devices. Understanding the learning process is therefore a fundamental issue in this field of research. This study presents a novel sensory substitution device worn on the lower leg and uses the device to study learning. The device includes 32 vibrotactile actuators that each vibrate...
Philosophers and cognitive scientists reassess systematicity in the post-connectionist era, offering perspectives from ecological psychology, embodied and distributed cognition, enactivism, and other methodologies.
In 1988, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn challenged connectionist theorists to explain the systematicity of cognition. In a highly influ...
When creating a real-time character animation (e.g. for video games), fine grain details such as cloth wrinkles are very often omitted due to the limitation of available resources. However, we believe that they are crucial to increase realism, hence user immersion. In this paper, we present a perceptual study of dynamic wrinkles on clothes to show...
Sensory substitution is a research field of increasing interest with regard to technical, applied and theoretical issues. Among the latter, it is of central interest to understand the form in which humans perceive the environment. Ecological psychology, among other approaches, proposes that we can detect higher-order informational variables (in the...
This research considers a sensory substitution device that allows the exploration of the environment through normal walking, leaning and standing. The device includes an array of 24 coin motors placed vertically on the torso, with the intensity of vibration of each motor being a function of the distance to the first-encountered object. Thresholds w...
The “systematicity argument” has been used to argue for a classical cognitive architecture (Fodor in The Language of Thought. Harvester Press, London, 1975, Why there still has to be a language of thought? In Psychosemantics, appendix. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 135–154, 1987; Fodor and Pylyshyn in Cognition 28:3–71, 1988; Aizawa in The systematicity...
One of the most surprising capacities of the haptic system is the ability to estimate different properties of objects, like weight or length, through invariants of rotational mechanics that are accessible via the proprioceptive system. This field of research is called Dynamic Touch. In its classical experimental paradigm, the participant firmly gra...
Learning can be portrayed as a movement in a state space. Potential-based explanations of such movements hold that learners use a gradient-descent process to minimize a potential function. Direct explanations hold that learning is specific to information for learning. This study contrasts specific hypotheses derived from these general approaches. P...
Previous research on the properties of haptic space has shown systematic deviations from Euclidean parallelity in haptic parallelity tasks. The mainstream explanation for these deviations is that, in order to perform the task, participants generate a spatial representation with a frame of reference that integrates egocentric and allocentric compone...
En general, el investigador actual en percepción sigue manteniendo una idea realista y relativamente representacionalista de la percepción, a pesar de que algunos autores sustituyen el énfasis de la representación por el de la percepción para la acción. Sin embargo, hay que tener en cuenta que representacionalismo y los modelos percepción para la a...
The neogibsonian approach holds that the processes of perceptual and perceptual-motor learning consist of improving the detection and use of the abundant information that exists in task environments. This claim is the starting point for a conceptual and methodological framework used for the analysis of learning. The conceptual framework includes th...
Desde la Antigüedad existían dos explicaciones de la percepción visual
enfrentadas: las basadas en la idea de la “intra-misión” y las que defendían la
idea de la “extra-misión” (Lindberg, 1976). Las primeras consideraban que la
percepción visual ocurría gracias a una “efluencia” de carácter material, emitida
por el objeto, que entraba en contacto c...
Is it useful to apply ecological principles, developed to understand perception and action, in research areas such as social psychology? Charles (Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Sciences 43(1) 53-66 2009) warns ecological psychologists interested in this question that much time and effort can be saved through a backwards extension to or redi...
To assess subclinical impairments in tactual hand function produced by diabetes mellitus in late-blind adults with diabetic retinopathy.
The survey compares diabetic blind with nondiabetic blind and blindfolded sighted controls in terms of their performance on a battery of tests that assess tactual hand function.
Subjects were evaluated at their re...
The theory of touch as one of our perceptual systems for accessing the environment has traditionally been split both in reference to its component subsystems and its phenomenology. The structural definition of touch considers that it consists of two subsystems: cutaneous and proprioceptive. At the same time, tactile perceptual experience has been d...
A general shortcoming of the localist, decompositional, approach to neuroscientific explanation that the target article exemplifies, is that it is incomplete unless supplemented with an account of how the hypothesized subsystems integrate in the normal case. Besides, a number of studies that show that object recognition is proprioception dependent...
El concepto de mediación es sin duda una de las herramientas más potentes en el análisis de lo que en psicología se denominan las funciones psicológicas superiores. Siendo uno de sus resultados más reveladores el análisis mediacional de la actividad científica, como uno de los ámbitos de actividad humana difícilmente comprensibles sin esta dimensió...
Aunque la accesibilidad es un concepto clave en la adaptación de edificios públicos para las personas discapacitadas, la iluminación es raramente considerada pese a ser claramente importante para los discapacitados visuales. A través de una serie de experimentos que controlan los niveles de iluminación y la temperatura de color, se evaluó si las co...
Este artículo examina los fundamentos de la percepción de la simultaneidad y la sucesión, del movimiento y del cambio, considerándolos como las bases sobre las que se construye la noción de tiempo. El tiempo no se percibe de forma directa, sino que su presencia es consecuencia de la constitución mutua de las nociones de permanencia y cambio. Sin la...
En este artículo se revisan parte de los desarrollos ocurridos en los últimos años en la Psicología del tacto. Específicamente, se discute cómo estos desarrollos han revolucionado una disciplina cuya investigación, debido a las concepciones clásicas de tipo sensorial y pasivo, han tenido un desarrollo menor que otros sistemas perceptivos. Así, el e...
La evaluación de la percepción táctil es un aspecto esencial en la rehabilitación de personas con discapacidad visual. El tacto se concibe como un sistema que integra dinámicamente la actividad natural de los subsistemas cutáneo y cinestésico. En este informe se presenta una batería de pruebas para la evaluación integral del tacto, recogidas y desa...
Several theoretical proposals have been put forth to explain Vertical-Horizontal illusion and Müller-Lyer illusion (VHI and MLI). A first set of explanations assumes that these two illusory effects are produced on the same operational level, whereas a second set proposes independent mechanisms. If the assumption of a single mechanism were true, the...
Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en 1999 en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Psicología Departamento de Psicología Biológica y de la Salud
The German logician and mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) is an outstanding figure in the history of Logic. His contributions, since the last quarter of XIX century, until the second decade of XX century, constitute the bases of modern Symbolic Logic. In this article, we would like to highlight his main work: an attempt for a logical foundati...
Este artículo trata de describir el que consideramos es el periodo crítico en el proceso de institucionalización de la Psicología en Madrid, el que va desde la creación de estudios universitarios de psicología hasta la creación del Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos. Primero se resumen los avatares de la Psicología en la post-guerra con el desarrollo de...
