A striking example, despite brains the size of a pinhead, are jumping spiders of the genus Portia [13]. Portia is araneophagic, preferring to dine on other spiders. Such dining can be dangerous; if the interface of the intended dinner detec…31. Ramachandran, V.S. (1990). Interactions between motion, depth, color and form: The utilitarian theory of perception, in Vision: Coding and efficiency, ed. C. Blakemore (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).
32. Roberts, M.E. and Gold…
Jakob von Uexküll
biologist · 3 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Jakob von Uexküll, an early 20th-century biologist, developed the concept of the *Umwelt*—the species-specific perceptual world that each organism inhabits based on its sensory and motor capacities—which grounds cybersemiotic theories of human-computer interaction in this seminar. The excerpts invoke his framework to argue that interfaces don't present a universal environment but rather a relational one, where user, information, and organism each carve out their own meaningful world (as exemplified by the hunting spider Portia navigating a perceptual interface of threats and prey). His work thus enables the course to think beyond anthropocentric design and toward how different agents—human and nonhuman, biological and computational—construct meaning through selective attention and embodied interaction.
Mentioned in 2 readings
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Roy Ascott 1Søren Brier 1Thomas Albert Sebeok 1A.C. Perdeck 1Bernard Campbell 1Brian Skyrms 1C.H. Schiller 1Colin Blakemore 1E. Sernland 1Larry Samuelson 1M.E. Roberts 1N.M.A. Holmgren 1Nikolaas Tinbergen 1O. Olsson 1Richard Dawkins 1Robert L. Goldstone 1Robert L. Trivers 1Shimon Ullman 1Vilayanur S. Ramachandran 1