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).
References
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.
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