David Farrokh
davidfarrokh.bsky.social
David Farrokh
@davidfarrokh.bsky.social
PhD student studying multiscale dynamics of flow states and anticipation in co-adaptive contexts.
Pinned
Hi all, just migrated here from Twitter and still figuring out the platform.

I'm interested in ecological psychology, multiscale dynamics, complexity, anticipation, flow states, and sport.
I'm pleased to share a preprint of a chapter I wrote for an upcoming book on embodied cognition. I try to tackle some thorny questions surrounding unit and scale as they relate to symbols and dynamics in cognitive science.

www.researchgate.net/publication/...
(PDF) Experience, scale, and co-adaptation
PDF | While the ontological and epistemological issues surrounding the status of the mind and its relation to the body are often considered abstract... | Find, read and cite all the research you need ...
www.researchgate.net
April 24, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Madhur poses some excellent questions to predictive processing approaches in cognitive science here. I'd be curious how proponents would respond!

www.researchgate.net/publication/...
(PDF) The myth of the Bayesian brain
PDF | The Bayesian brain hypothesis—the idea that neural systems implement or approximate Bayesian inference—has become a dominant framework in... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Re...
www.researchgate.net
April 24, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Damian has arrived! Also, really enjoyed co-authoring this chapter with this group. Check it out here 👇
April 12, 2025 at 12:07 PM
Great new piece from Madhur Mangalam's lab. Some clear reasoning around the concept of optimality with empirical examples to back it up.

www.researchgate.net/publication/...
(PDF) The myth of optimality in human movement science
PDF | The concept of optimality dominates contemporary human movement science, with researchers across biomechanics, motor control, and neuroscience... | Find, read and cite all the research you need ...
www.researchgate.net
April 3, 2025 at 6:29 PM
A rather puzzling statement from Hubert Ripoll here (perspectives on cognition and action in sport, Araujo, Ripoll, Raab eds.)

First of all, what is a "conventional playing system" if not an evolved form of interaction??

Second, if not from repeated interactions where the heck does it come from?
March 28, 2025 at 4:25 PM
Transfer of calibration between hand and foot: Functional
equivalence and fractal fluctuations (Stephen & Hajnal, 2011)

link.springer.com/content/pdf/...
link.springer.com
March 24, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Question for academics: I often see academics speak about journal-specific readership. I'm curious how common it is for academics to follow journals.

Personally, I don't think "hmm let me see what's out in journal x".
March 23, 2025 at 11:01 PM
Reposted by David Farrokh
it is grimly hilarious that, given the immense, decades-long fetishization of "leadership" and "leadership skills" in business-oriented academia and politics, even unto the formation of leadership institutes, there should turn out to be no leaders in any positions of power
March 14, 2025 at 11:25 AM
Reposted by David Farrokh
What is cognition? www.wiringthebrain.com/2025/03/what... - some weekend musings on this tricky concept, with lots of help from all you Blueys!
What is cognition?
“Cognition” is one of those terms that we use a lot, but which is actually rather hard to define. The question of what constitutes cognition...
www.wiringthebrain.com
March 8, 2025 at 12:55 PM
The problem is that cognitive science wants it both ways when it comes to the "hard core" of computation over representation.

Strong empirical programs have been scoffed at and quickly dismissed because they didn't explain in these terms (see below)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
February 13, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Question for academic bluesky:

A lot of my work is on co-adaptation. Co-adaptive couplings include both competitive and cooperative couplings. I've used De Poel's taxonomy of couplings quite a bit but I'm trying to decide how to refer to the nature

www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...
Frontiers | Anisotropy and Antagonism in the Coupling of Two Oscillators: Concepts and Applications for Between-Person Coordination
Coupled oscillators provide a pertinent model approach to study between-person movement dynamics. While ample literature in this respect has considered the i...
www.frontiersin.org
February 10, 2025 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by David Farrokh
The open access version of A Drive to Survive is now available to download for free!

direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

(If you've already read the preprint, I'd really appreciate a download of the official version... for the *metrics*)

- also it has way less typos.
February 5, 2025 at 7:40 PM
February 3, 2025 at 1:16 PM
I'm very pleased to share the latest work from my PhD. I would like to thank all of my fantastic co-authors as well as the anonymous peer reviewers.

doi.org/10.1016/j.ac...
Redirecting
doi.org
January 31, 2025 at 5:01 AM
Cognitive science moved away from the difficult questions without ever answering them.

"Unfortunately, difficulties that are not faced do not simply go away" - Benoit Mandelbrot

Turvey and Kugler (1984) pinpointing them here👇
#complex
January 30, 2025 at 4:08 PM
"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ...
January 29, 2025 at 11:54 PM
The second paper from my PhD should be out in acta psychologica in a few days! Also just finished a book chapter on the role of unit and scale in cognitive science.
January 29, 2025 at 11:48 PM
I get more from this talk every time I listen to it

www.youtube.com/live/Xb0sLm5...
YouTube
Share your videos with friends, family, and the world
www.youtube.com
January 29, 2025 at 4:26 AM
The whole field of pan-computationalist AI is typically both boring and frustrating to read. It can be hard not to pre-judge stuff coming out of that vicinity.

So this recent paper by Lehman et al was a pleasant surprise!

The authors explore some fundamental

arxiv.org/abs/2501.13075
Evolution and The Knightian Blindspot of Machine Learning
This paper claims that machine learning (ML) largely overlooks an important facet of general intelligence: robustness to a qualitatively unknown future in an open world. Such robustness relates to Kni...
arxiv.org
January 27, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Reposted by David Farrokh
Starting a new thread to avoid unwittingly dragging people into my rant.

This paper articulates 3 criteria for being an affordance and I think they are wildly wrong. It's high citations give me pause, but I really struggle to see where I'm wrong.

academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...
Explicating Affordances: a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research
Abstract. This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affordances terminology is used in empirical research
academic.oup.com
January 25, 2025 at 10:29 PM
“Psychology... is a second rate discipline. The main reason is that it does not stand in awe of its subject matter. Psychologists have too little respect for psychology.”

-J. J. Gibson
“There is no theory crisis in psychological science”

Few quotes…🧵
January 26, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Is embodied cognition just a fondness for dynamical systems theory and a distaste for representations?

I often see opinions to this effect so I thought I would add a little historical context.

A lot of critical issues were discussed much more clearly and explicitly in the 70s and 80s, imo
January 24, 2025 at 2:38 PM
One thing I'm starting to recognize with discussions around evidence for ecological approaches in sport is that there are huge differences in how much of a "special science" people see sport as.

E.g., how willing are you to consider more general findings about

pure.au.dk/ws/portalfil...
January 21, 2025 at 3:11 PM