Bill Warren is Professor of Cognitive Science at Brown University, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Connecticut (1982) and did post-doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh. He has received a National Research Service Award from NIH (1982), a Fulbright Research Award to Utrecht University (1989), Brown's Elizabeth Leduc Award for Teaching Excellence in the Life Sciences (1995), and a Research Career Development Award from NIMH (1997-2002).

Prof. Warren studies visual perception and the control of action - how the visual system obtains information about the environment, how the action system is organized to perform a particular action, and how the former is used to regulate the latter so as to yield adaptive behavior. On three occasions, his work has introduced paradigms that opened up new territory in the field: in the perception of affordances for action (Warren, 1984), the perception of heading from optic flow (Warren, Morris, & Kalish, 1988; Warren & Hannon, 1990), and visual control of locomotion (Warren, Young, & Lee, 1986). Related work has studied the dynamics of human movement, on the hypothesis that action is organized around stable solutions defined by musculoskeletal components and environmental constraints (Goldfield, Kay, & Warren, 1993; Diedrich & Warren, 1995; Kay & Warren, 1998). His current research attempts direct tests of visually controlled locomotion using virtual reality techniques, recording posture and gait while manipulating optical information (Yilmaz & Warren, 1995; Warren, Kay, & Yilmaz, 1996). The ultimate aim of this line of research is to work out the control relations for balance and steering during human locomotion (Warren, 1998).

Diedrich, F., & Warren, W. H. (1995). Why change gaits? Dynamics of the walk-run transition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 183-202.

Goldfield, G., Kay, B., & Warren, W. H. (1993). Infant bouncing: The assembly and tuning of action systems. Child Development, 64, 1128-1142.

Kay, B. A. & Warren, W. H. (1998). A dynamical model of the coupling between posture and gait. In D. A. Rosenbaum & C. Collyer (Ed.), Timing of behavior: Neural, computational, and psychological perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 293-322.

Warren, W. H. (1984). Perceiving affordances: The visual guidance of stair climbing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 683-703.

Warren, W. H., Young, D. S., & Lee, D. N. (1986). Visual control of step length during running over irregular terrain. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 12, 259-266.

Warren, W. H., Morris, M., & Kalish, M. (1988). Perception of translational heading from optical flow. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 646-660.

Warren, W. H., & Hannon, D. (1990). Eye movements and optical flow. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 7, 160-169.

Warren, W., Blackwell, A., Kurtz, K., Hatsopoulos, N., & Kalish, M. (1991). On the sufficiency of the velocity field for perception of heading. Biological Cybernetics, 65, 311.

Warren, W. H. (1995). Self-motion: Visual perception and visual control. In W. Epstein & S. Rogers, Handbook of Perception and Cognition V.5: Perception of Space and Motion. Academic Press.

Warren, W. H., Kay, B. A., & Yilmaz, E. (1996). Visual control of posture during walking: Functional specificity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 818-838.

Warren, W. H. (1998). Visually controlled locomotion: 40 years later. Special issue of Ecological Psychology, 10, 177-219.

Yilmaz, E. & Warren, W. H. (1995). Visual control of braking: A test of the tau-dot hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 996-1014.