Michael T. Turvey is the Board of Trustees' Distinguished Professor of

Experimental Psychology Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, in ...

at the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut, a village in the town of Mansfield. The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km2) campus is in Storrs, approximately a half hour's drive from Hart ...

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 in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,02 ...

. He is best known for his pioneering work in

ecological psychology Ecological psychology is the scientific study of perception-action from a direct realist approach. Ecological psychology is a school of psychology that follows much of the writings of Roger Barker and James J. Gibson. Those in the field of Ecolo ...

and in applying

dynamic systems In mathematics, a dynamical system is a system in which a function describes the time dependence of a point in an ambient space. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a clock pendulum, the flow of water in a p ...

approach for the study of motor behavior. He is the founder of the ''Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action

His research spans a number of areas including: dynamic

touch In physiology, the somatosensory system is the network of neural structures in the brain and body that produce the perception of touch (haptic perception), as well as temperature (thermoception), body position (proprioception), and pain. It is ...

and haptics, interlimb coordination,

visual perception Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum reflecte ...

and optic flow, postural stability, visual word recognition and

speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by wh ...

. Along with William Mac

and Robert Sha

he has been one of the leading explicators of the

of James J. Gibson, 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 (FA ...

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

and his colleagues to a larger audience. Working with Georgije Lukatel

and other colleagues at

, he has exploited the dual nature of the Serbo croatian, Serbo-Croatian

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...

to help understand word recognition. Turvey is also the winner of the IgNobel Prize

in Physics along with Professor Ramesh Balasubramaniam of Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merce

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.)

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. * Carol Fowler, 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.

External links

Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action

Haskins Laboratories

Turvey page at Uconn

University of Connecticut Psychology
{{DEFAULTSORT:Turvey, Michael American psychologists Living people Haskins Laboratories scientists Speech perception researchers University of Connecticut faculty Year of birth missing (living people)

Representative publications

See also

External links