Michael T. Turvey (February 14, 1942 - August 12, 2023) was the Board of Trustees' Distinguished Professor of

Experimental Psychology Experimental psychology is the work done by those who apply Experiment, experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ Research participant, human participants and Animal testing, anim ...

at the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university system with its main campus in Storrs, Connecticut, United States. It was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two benefactors. In 1893, ...

and a Senior Scientist at

Haskins Laboratories Haskins Laboratories, Inc. is an independent 501(c) non-profit corporation, founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1970. Haskins has formal affiliation agreements with both Yale University and the University of Connecticut; ...

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. With a population of 135,081 as determined by the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, New Haven is List ...

. He is best known for his pioneering work in

ecological psychology Ecological psychology is the scientific study of the relationship between perception and action, grounded in a direct realist approach. This school of thought is heavily influenced by the writings of Roger Barker and James J. Gibson and stands ...

and in applying the

dynamical systems In mathematics, a dynamical system is a system in which a Function (mathematics), function describes the time dependence of a Point (geometry), point in an ambient space, such as in a parametric curve. Examples include the mathematical models ...

approach to the study of motor behavior. He was the founder of the ''Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action''. His research spans a number of areas including: dynamic

touch The somatosensory system, or somatic sensory system is a subset of the sensory nervous system. The main functions of the somatosensory system are the perception of external stimuli, the perception of internal stimuli, and the regulation of bo ...

and haptics, interlimb coordination,

visual perception Visual perception is the ability to detect light and use it to form an image of the surrounding Biophysical environment, environment. Photodetection without image formation is classified as ''light sensing''. In most vertebrates, visual percept ...

and

optic flow Optical flow or optic flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in a visual scene caused by the relative motion between an observer and a scene. Optical flow can also be defined as the distribution of apparent velocit ...

, postural stability, visual word recognition and

speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and percept ...

. Along with William Mace and Robert Shaw, he was one of the leading explicators of the

of J. J. Gibson. His pioneering work with

J. A. Scott Kelso J. A. Scott Kelso (born 1947 in Derry, Northern Ireland) is an American neuroscientist, and Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences and Biomedical Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) ...

and Peter N. Kugler introduced the physical language of complex systems to the understanding of perception and action. He also helped introduce the ideas of the Russian motor control theorist

Nikolai Bernstein Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernstein (; 5 November 1896 – 16 January 1966) was a USSR, Soviet neurophysiology, neurophysiologist who has pioneered motion-tracking devices and formal processing of information obtained from the use of these devices. ...

and his colleagues to a larger audience. Working with Georgije Lukatela and other colleagues at

, he exploited the dual nature of the

Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian ( / ), also known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually i ...

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

to help understand word recognition. Turvey also won the 2004

Ig Nobel Prize The Ig Nobel Prize () is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to promote public engagement with scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a ...

in Physics along with Professor Ramesh Balasubramaniam of Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping. (''Reference'': "Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping," Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey, ''Biological Cybernetics'', vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176–90.) Turvey attended

Clapham College Clapham College was a Roman Catholic secondary school for boys in South London. Background It opened in 1897 and closed in 1989. Its history falls into three phases: for half a century it was a private school, for three decades it was a publicl ...

, a Jesuit school in South London, then graduated from

Loughborough University Loughborough University (abbreviated as ''Lough'' or ''Lboro'' for Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a public university, public research university in the market town of Loughborough, Leicestershire, England. It has been a university sinc ...

(then called ''Loughborough College'') in 1963 with a DLC (''Diploma of Loughborough College'') in Physical Education, with

First Class Honours The British undergraduate degree classification system is a grading structure used for undergraduate degrees or bachelor's degrees and integrated master's degrees in the United Kingdom. The system has been applied, sometimes with significant var ...

. He received an MA (1964) in Physical Education from the Ohio State University. He received a PhD (1967) in Experimental and Physiological Psychology from the Ohio State University under Delos Wickens, with thesis ''The nature of information loss in the visual preperceptual system''.

Representative publications

* Turvey, M. T. (1973). On peripheral and central processes in vision: Inferences from an information-processing analysis of masking with patterned stimuli. ''Psychological Review'', 80, 1–52. * Turvey, M. T. (1977). Contrasting orientations to the theory of visual information processing. ''Psychological Review'', 84, 67–88. * Kugler, N. P., Kelso, J. A. S., & Turvey, M. T. (1980). On the concept of coordinative structures as dissipative structures: I. Theoretical lines of convergence. ''Tutorials in Motor Behavior'', G. E. Stelmach and J. Requin, eds., North-Holland Publishing Company. * Fowler, C. A., Rubin, P. E., Remez, R. E., & Turvey, M. T. (1980). Implications for speech production of a general theory of action. In B. Butterworth (Ed.), ''Language Production, Vol. I: Speech and Talk'' (pp. 373–420). New York: Academic Press. * Turvey, M. T., & Carello, C. (1985). The equation of information and meaning from the perspectives of situation semantics and Gibson's ecological realism. ''Linguistics and Philosophy'', 8, 81–90. * Turvey, M. T. (1990). Coordination. ''American Psychologist'', 45(8), 938–953. * Turvey, M. T., Shockley, K., & Carello, C. (1999). Affordance, proper function, and the physical basis of perceived heaviness. ''Cognition'', 17, B17-B26. * Kunkler-Peck, A., & Turvey, M. T. (2000). Hearing shape. ''Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance'', 26, 279–294. * Lukatela, G., & Turvey, M. T. (2000). An evaluation of the two-cycles model of phonology assembly. ''Journal of Memory and Language'', 42, 183–207. * Kim, N-G., Fajen, B., & Turvey, M. T. (2000). Perceiving circular heading in noncanonical flow fields. ''Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance'', 26, 31–56. * Goodman, L., Riley, M., Mitra, S., & Turvey, M. T. (2000). Advantages of rhythmic movements at resonance: Minimal active degrees of freedom, minimal noise, and maximal predictability. ''Journal of Motor Behavior'', 32, 3–8. * Turvey, M. T., & Fonseca, S. (2009). Nature of motor control: perspectives and issues. ''Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology'', 629, 93–123.

References

External links

Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action

Haskins Laboratories

Turvey page at Uconn

University of Connecticut Psychology
{{DEFAULTSORT:Turvey, Michael 21st-century American psychologists Living people Haskins Laboratories scientists Speech perception researchers Ig Nobel laureates University of Connecticut faculty 1992 births

Representative publications

See also

References

External links