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David Farrokh

@davidfarrokh.bsky.social
137 followers 128 following 179 posts

Cognitive scientist with research interests in multiscale dynamics/cascade modeling, attention, anticipation, flow states, skill acquisition, and competitive coordination.

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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Of course it's trivial to create a machine with superhuman strength or speed but there's a reason it's just shooting a free throw here. If you put this thing in actual competition with multiple agents it will become a glorified mannequin.
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
Here is the accepted version of my thesis. A huge thanks to my supervisory team and everyone who supported me. A few chapters are already published some are still in review, so this is a sneak peek for anyone interested in the empirical findings. www.researchgate.net/publication/...
researchgate.net
(PDF) An Ecological Dynamics Perspective on Flow in Sport
PDF | This thesis utilises an ecological dynamics perspective to investigate the concept of flow experiences in the domain of sport. The study of flow... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...
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santiago salinas @ssalinas.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
1/12 Really proud of this paper! We borrowed tools from biology to ask a simple question: does who you play with actually matter in football? (Spoiler: it does, a lot.) 🧬 🤝 ⚽ Paper here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUusArnpe...
Photo of 3-versus-3 football game
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
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/...
researchgate.net
(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 ...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
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/...
researchgate.net
(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...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
Damian has arrived! Also, really enjoyed co-authoring this chapter with this group. Check it out here 👇
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy... @jcassidysport.bsky.social thoughts?
frontiersin.org
Frontiers | The influence of linear and nonlinear pedagogy on motor skill performance: the moderating role of adaptability
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
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/...
researchgate.net
(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 ...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
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?
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
Transfer of calibration between hand and foot: Functional equivalence and fractal fluctuations (Stephen & Hajnal, 2011) link.springer.com/content/pdf/...
link.springer.com
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
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".
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
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
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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
What is cognition? www.wiringthebrain.com/2025/03/what... - some weekend musings on this tricky concept, with lots of help from all you Blueys!
wiringthebrain.com
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...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
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....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Searching for General Principles in Cognitive Performance: Reply to Commentators
The commentators expressed concerns regarding the relevance and value of non-computational non-symbolic explanations of cognitive performance. But what counts as an “explanation” depends on the pre-t...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
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...
frontiersin.org
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...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Some excellent reflections on the different claims made by the FEP. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
Is the brain an organ for free energy minimisation? - Philosophical Studies
Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle (FEP) in cognitive science and philosophy: (i) that it identifies a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organisin...
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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 05/02/2025
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.
direct.mit.edu
A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life
How the purposive behavior of living systems outstrips the constraints of the free energy principle.Since 2005, Karl Friston's proposal that the principle
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
perspicacityll.wpengine.com/2025/01/14/t...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
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...
doi.org
Redirecting
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
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
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
"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. ...
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
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.
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
I get more from this talk every time I listen to it www.youtube.com/live/Xb0sLm5...
youtube.com
YouTube
Share your videos with friends, family, and the world
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
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
arxiv.org
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...
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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
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...
academic.oup.com
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
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
“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
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
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
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
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...
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Rob Sheridan @rob-sheridan.com · 15/01/2025
I don’t want to make a fuckin account to use my toaster. I don’t want to fuckin subscribe to software. I don’t want to create a fuckin profile to watch TV. I don’t want to fuckin register my whatever to unlock whatever. I don’t want to download a fuckin app to access anything. Death to new logins
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Dio D. Vicen @diovicen.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
I've always seen a tension between two poles when "cognition" is defined in neuro/psych/phil: General Pole - Cognition is all things providing knowledge/meaning of the world. Shopping-List Pole - Cognition is reasoning, decision-making, planning... I prefer the first one. They might be compatible.
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
I feel seen
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Ok, just had a regrettable peek back at the other place and saw the prominent critic of ecological dynamics refer to uncontrolled manifold hypothesis as the "intake manifold hypothesis". A good summary of the state of things😂 @adw.bsky.social
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Haven't said anything about this yet so thought I'd chime in/add a few thoughts to Andrew's nice overview of the Collins et al piece.
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
Anyone else remember when iTunes cooked with this gem in the free songs that came with it? www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rgp...
youtube.com
Din Din Wo - Habib Koite
YouTube video by stylistrokey
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WRONG or METAPHYSICAL IN NATURE @jsthrill.modphi.com · 20/12/2024
If ChatGPT’s performance appears PhD worthy to you, you should not be supervising phds
"Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic"
By Justin Weinberg.
December 18, 2024 at 10:18 am
"If you do it right, talking with Gpt is like talking with someone who's seriously studied and thought hard about philosophy. Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic. More than that, l've had many philosophical discussions with professional philosophers that were much less philosophical than my recent chats with Gpt."
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Can confirm this was a good book
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
The high percentage of foreign players in NCAA soccer is commonly framed as a failure of the American youth system. In reality it has much more to do with the nature of the global talent pool in soccer compared to other sports.
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Jon Mackey @jonmackey-irl.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Episode 7 of The Adaptive Coach Podcast- David Farrokh on Ecological Dynamics, a theory of human motor learning. open.spotify.com/episode/0JNA...
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Steven Strogatz @stevenstrogatz.com · 09/12/2024
In today's lecture in my nonlinear dynamics and chaos course, I tried to give intuition for where chaos comes from. It's caused by repeated stretching and folding of phase space.
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Andrew Perfors @perfors.net · 09/12/2024
There are few better feelings than when former students go off and do great things, and then write to you and let you know about them. Students: never wonder if you should get in touch with a former teacher or supervisor to share this kind of thing. It is one of the purest rewards there is. /1
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The People Geek @thepeoplegeek.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
How heavy is the colour yellow? How bright is 20kg? 🤔 📖Johnston & Turvey in 1980 introduced a meta theory of learning. A highly generalisable meta theory that positioned learning as the ability to adapt to an ever changing environment. Nothing new right?
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
I'm not a meme-maker but there's one that needs to be made. IQ truthers will often say "IQ is the most robust finding in all of psychology, if you don't believe in it you shouldn't believe in any of it." We need that followed by some badass character responding "exactly, burn it all down."
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David Priess @davidpriess.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
“Too many people don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to them.” —William Howard Taft
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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
We totally did not see this coming 🙄 www.businessinsider.com/agi-predicti...
businessinsider.com
Those bold AGI predictions are suddenly looking stretched
Recent signs suggest that the main approach to improving AI models has begun to slow down.
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
“The root of the matter is that the greatest stimulus of scientific discovery are its practical applications.” - Lewis Fry Richardson
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Mr. Spock 🖖 @spockresists.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Eating too much cake is the sin of gluttony. However, eating too much pie is okay because the sin of pi is always zero. 🖖
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
A few reflections on coaching and culture. bigpicturesoccer.substack.com/p/local-cons...
bigpicturesoccer.substack.com
Local Constraints on a Global Game
After playing college soccer in New York, I began my career coaching in nearby Northern New Jersey.
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David Farrokh @davidfarrokh.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
Cognitive science will always be a contested field with diverse perspectives. Chemero does a great job recounting one of the major empirical clashes of 20th century cognitive science and offering some implications for abduction and deduction in science. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Abduction and Deduction in Dynamical Cognitive Science
This paper reviews the recent history of a subset of research in dynamical cognitive science as progressing from abduction to deduction to induction. To do so, I examine the development of a controve...
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Sooz Kempner @soozuk.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
11-year-old me: "FIFA 98 is like I'm actually PLAYING as Beckham in the World Cup!" FIFA 98:
beckham in fifa 98
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