The Perception-Action Model of empathy (PAM) is both sufficiently broad and sufficiently detailed to be able to describe and accommodate a wide range of phenomena – including the apparent “cold-heartedness” or lack of empathy of psychopaths. We show how the physiological, cognitive, and emotional elements of the PAM map onto known and hypothesized attributes of the psychopathic personality.

Context: The dominant approach to the study of perception is representational/computational, with an emphasis on the achievements of the brain and the nervous system, which are taken to construct internal models of the world. Alternatives include ecological, embedded, embodied, and enactivist approaches, all of which emphasize the centrality of action in understanding perception. Problem: Despite sharing many theoretical commitments that lead to a rejection of the classical approach, the alternatives are characterized by important contrasts and points of (...) divergence. Here we focus on the enactive and ecological approaches, in particular, on how they construe the status of the environment and the content of perception. Method: We begin with a review of James Gibson’s ecological psychology, highlighting it as a psychology for all organisms not just humans. Against this backdrop, we consider enactivist arguments against direct perception - a central assertion of the ecological approach - and in favor of interpreting the activity of perceptual agents as a kind of construction of a perceptually meaningful world. Results: We assess the merits of this interpretation and we conclude that it cannot be grounded on fundamental principles such as thermodynamics and organism-environment mutuality. Implications: As a consequence, enactivism remains close to representationalism and entails a form of dualism. Constructivist content: We advance a criticism of the constructivist foundations of the enactive approach to perception. Perception-action mutuality at the heart of enactivism does not require mental construction; indeed, perception-action mutuality obviates construction. (shrink)

This volume will be an essential resource for anyone working in the central areas of philosophy, and the starting point for future research in this fascinating ...

What is the relationship between perception and action, between an organism and its environment, in explaining consciousness? These are issues at the heart of philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. This book explores the relationship between perception and action from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, ranging from theoretical discussion of concepts to findings from recent scientific studies. It incorporates contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and an artificial intelligence theorist. The contributions take a range of (...) positions with respect to the view that perception is an achievement by an agent acting in a complex environment in which sensorimotor dynamics constitute an essential ingredient to perceptual experience. A key focus of the book is on the debate about action-oriented theories of visual perception versus the dual-visual systems hypothesis The former champions the role of sensorimotor dynamics in perceptual awareness while the latter favours a functional dichotomy between perception and action. At least on the surface, these two approaches are in conflict. Where one emphasizes the interdependence of action and perception, the other suggests that action and perception are functionally distinct. The dialogue between these two approaches brings out wider theoretical issues underlying the research paradigm of cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Exploring one of the major debates in the philosophy and psychology, this book is fascinating reading for all those in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

According to Phillips, (1) genuine perception is attributable to the individual (i.e. it is a personal state/event, as opposed to sub-personal states/events in the individual’s brain); (2) since unconscious perceptual representations are ill-suited to guide action, there is no good reason to attribute them to the individual; (3) not being attributable to the individual, they do not instantiate genuine perception, thereby failing to support the hypothesis that genuine perception can occur unconsciously. I argue that this reasoning (...) is flawed and cannot be easily fixed. Phillips contends that unconscious perceptual representations do not guide action because they fail to meet certain conditions that are sufficient for action guidance. But those conditions may not be necessary for action guidance. Consequently, unconscious perceptual representations may guide action even if they do not meet Phillips’ conditions. Furthermore, due to his commitment to the distinction between personal and sub-personal states/events, Phillips is not in a position to argue that his conditions are necessary for action guidance. For the distinction applies to action as well as to perception, and when genuine action is identified by personal-level criteria, Phillips’ conditions turn out unnecessary for action guidance. (shrink)

A perception-action system may underlie the mechanisms by which human speech exchange in social interaction is managed, as well as the evolutionary precursors of these mechanisms in closely related species. Some phenomena of interaction well-studied by sociologists are suggested as a point of departure for further research.

Traditionally, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike considered the mind as divided into input units (perception), central processing (cognition), and output units (action). In turn, they allowed for little – if any – direct interaction between perception and action. In recent years, theorists challenged the classical view of the mind by arguing that bodily states ground cognition. Even though promising, the notion of grounding is largely underspecified. In this paper, we focus on the debate about the relation (...) between perception and action in order to flesh out the process and in turn clarify the notion of grounding. Given that currently the debate about the relation between perception & action is far from settled, we attempt an assessment of the implications that possible outcomes of this debate would have on Grounding Cognition Theories. Interestingly, some of these possible outcomes seem to threaten the overall program of Grounded Cognition. In an attempt to make this analysis more concrete, we study two closely related speculative hypotheses about possible ways in which perception and action interact. Namely, we focus on Theory of Event Coding and Simulation Theory, and evaluate the levels of compatibility between those two views and Grounded Cognition Theories. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: The main goal of this commentary is to make more discriminative the comparison between enactive and ecological theories of perception. Emergence at the level of the animal-environment system might be playing the role attributed to mental construction in basic perceptual processes. If correct, this would render some forms of enactivism compatible with the theoretical tenets of the (...) target article. (shrink)

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they (...) play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events. -/- We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between a perception-action system and a perception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I call where-beliefs and when-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language. (shrink)

My endeavor in this paper is to examine the ways in which exactly the general structure of perception is modified in the case of the reception of theatre performances. First, perception in general is examined and it is argued that a basic characteristic of perception is that it is sometimes interdependent with action. After the analysis of perception in general, I turn to the special case of the perception of a theatre performance (or, theatre- (...) class='Hi'>perception, for short) and examine the role of the perception of the possibility of action in the case of watching a performance. I try to point out that theatre-perception cannot be sufficiently analyzed without taking into consideration the action-oriented character of perception. If we perceive a gun on stage we perceive it as the possibility of an action, that is, as affording certain actions. (shrink)

Dijkerman & de Haan (D&dH) study perception and action as two independent processes. However, in all daily activities the processes are completely intertwined, so it is difficult to separate one from the other. Humans perceive in order to move and also move in order to perceive. Understanding first how perception and action are coordinated, leads us then to determine how each component works independently.

The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) provides a preliminary account of the interaction between perception and action, which is consistent with several recent findings in the area of motor control. Significant issues require integration and elaboration, however; particularly, distractor interference, automatic motor corrections, internal models of action, and neuroanatomical bases for the link between perception and action.

From the perspective of ecological psychology, perception and action are not separate, linear, and mechanistic processes that refer to the immediate present. Rather, they are reciprocal and continuous and refer to the impending future. Therefore, from the perspective of ecological psychology, delays in perception and action are impossible, and delay compensation mechanisms are unnecessary.

Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems is a state-of-the-art collection whose main goal is to explore, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the relationship between action and perception. A second goal of the volume is to investigate how perception and action interact specifically in the production of phenomenal awareness. In presenting and contrasting the major perspectives on the field, this volume marks a good sign of the progress being made on the nature (...) of phenomenally conscious visual experience. By combining theoretical and empirical approaches it also contributes to the debate in key domains of the cognitive sciences .The book contains a useful editorial introduction written by the Editors and six sections further divided into fifteen chapters. In the first part of this review I briefly summarize the content of each section. Having offered an outline of the volume, I then turn my attention to the main theme of the collection, which is the dichotomy between action-oriented theories of perception and the two visual systems hypothesis and look at the dialectic underlying this debate. (shrink)

Cognitive organisms have three rather different techniques for intelligently regulating their intake of environmental information. In order of the time needed to uncover information they are: 1. control of attention: within an image produced by a given sensor certain elements can be selected for additional processing; 2. control of gaze: the orientation and resolution (center of foveation) of the sensor can be regulated to create a new image; 3. control of activity: certain non-perceptual actions can be performed to increase the (...) probability of unearthing salient information that currently is unavailable, hard to detect, or hard to compute. (shrink)

It is argued that Kull’s approach to aesthetics complements a cognitive semiotic approach to culture. The concept of ‘ecological, semiotic fitting’ allows us to connect the three main concepts of beauty we encounter in discussions about the aesthetic, where the term beauty is, firstly, used to refer a positive experience in relation to what is perceived, or, secondly, to a positive experience in relation to an intentional action or, thirdly, to a positive experience in relation to a sense making (...) process. Kull makes a strong case for the ‘ecological, semiotic fitting’ being the common underlying structure of all three manifestations of the aesthetic. (shrink)

profile deforms as we move about it. As perceivers we are masters of the patterns of sensorimotor contingency that shape our perceptual interaction with the world. We expect changes in such things as apparent size, shape and color to occur as we actively explore the environment. In encountering perspective-dependent changes of this sort, we learn how things are quite apart form our particular perspective. Our possession of these skills is constitutive of our ability to see . This is confirmed by (...) the fact that we can disrupt a person. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: In my view, the clash between ecological psychology, enactivism, and constructivism in general has more to do with irreconcilable metaphysical and theoretical incommensurabilities than disagreements about specific mechanisms or processes of perception. Even with mutual enabling of action and perception, some internal process of self-modification is still needed if novel behavior is to be adequately (...) explained. (shrink)

Perceptual learning mechanisms derived from Hebb's theory of cell assemblies can generate prototypic representations capable of extending the representational power of TEC (Theory of Event Coding) event codes. The extended capability includes categorization that accommodates “family resemblances” and problem solving that uses cognitive maps.

The ego is traditionally held to be synonymous with individual identity and autonomy, while the mind is widely held to be a necessary basis of cognition and volition, with responsibility following accordingly. However Buddhist epistemology, existential phenomenology and poststructuralism all hold the notion of an independent, subsisting, self-identical subject to be an illusion. This not only raises problems for our understanding of cognition and volition, as well as for the notion of responsibility. For Buddhism, no-self theory raises serious problems for (...) the doctrine of reincarnation. Arguing for such "no-self" theories, the paper attempts to demonstrate how such difficulties can nevertheless be resolved. (shrink)

I discuss Stoffregen & Bardy's theory from the perspective of the complementary aspect of input conflict, namely, imput coherence - the unity of perception. In a classical approach this leads to the famous The conceptual framework the authors construct leaves no space for a binding problem to arise. A remaining problem of perceptual conflict, arising in cases of inversion of the visual field can be handled by the theory the authors propose.

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...

This paper proposes an empirical hypothesis that in some cases of social interaction we have an immediate perceptual access to others' minds in the perception of their embodied intentionality. Our point of departure is the phenomenological insight that there is an experiential difference in the perception of embodied intentionality and the perception of non-intentionality. The other's embodied intentionality is perceptually given in a way that is different from the givenness of non-intentionality. We claim that the phenomenological difference (...) in the perception of embodied intentionality and non-intentionality translates into an account of how, in some cases of social cognition, we perceive mental properties in the perception of embodied intentionality. The hypothesis derives support from a host of recent empirical studies in social neuroscience which demonstrate the importance of embodied engagements in understanding other minds. These studies reveal that embodied intersubjective interaction often builds on our ability to understand other minds in an immediate perceptual way not adequately investigated by theory-theory (TT) and simulation theories (ST) of mind-reading. We argue that there is a genuine, nontrivial difference in the informational content of the perception of embodied intentionality and the perception of non-intentionality which leads to a further difference in the way information is processed in the case of perception of embodied intentionality as opposed to the perception of non-intentionality. The full significance of such difference is appreciated only within an account of perception which views perception and action as tightly coupled. Thus, we propose an "action-oriented account of social perception" to develop a neurophilosophical account of the perceptual knowledge of other minds. (shrink)

The ecological approach to perception-action is unlike the standard approach in several respects. It takes the animal-in-its-environment as the proper scale for the theory and analysis of perception-action, it eschews symbol based accounts of perception-action, it promotes self-organization as the theory-constitutive metaphor for perception-action, and it employs self-referring, non-predicative definitions in explaining perception-action. The present article details the complexity issues confronted by the ecological approach in terms suggested by Rosen and (...) introduces non-well-founded set theory as a potentially useful tool for expressing them. The issues and the tool are brought to focus in the concept of affordance that is the basis for explanation of prospective control of action in the ecological approach. (shrink)

The concepts of affordance and implied space provide two powerful, complementary lenses for understanding how agents interact with their environments. The first, originating in ecological psychology, describes the potential for action that an environment offers an agent. The second, with roots in architecture and phenomenology, concerns how spaces suggest functions, presences, or narratives beyond their physical boundaries. This paper synthesizes these two concepts, tracing their distinct intellectual genealogies from Aristotelian metaphysics to modern cognitive science. We provide a comparative analysis, (...) clarifying their distinct roles in enabling direct action versus guiding interpretation. We explore their applications in architecture, human-computer interaction, robotics, and narrative design. Finally, we move toward a unified formal description, introducing a category-theoretic framework to model the interplay between embodied action-potentials and symbolic narrative mappings. By bridging the gap between the grammar of action and the poetics of space, this inquiry aims to build a richer, more integrated understanding of perception, cognition, and design. (shrink)

The shared circuits model (SCM) relies on well-regarded theories of perception-action, mirror neurons, and forward models, but the functional/informational level of the model limits its ability to explain complex behavior such as true imitation. Data from our lab and others confirm the more general details of the model, accepted by most, but specify the neural mechanisms involved in perception-action processes.

Although we agree with Hommel et al. that perception and action refer to one another, we disagree that they do so via a code. Gibson (1966; 1979) attempted to frame perception-action as a field phenomenon rather than as a particle phenomenon. From such a perspective, perception and action are adjoint, mutually interacting through an information field, and codes are unnecessary.

Although applauding Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) attempt to ground language use in the ideomotor perception-action link, which provides an of embodied social interaction, we suggest that it needs to be complemented by an additional control mechanism that modulates its operation in the service of the language users' communicative intentions. Implications for intergroup relationships and intercultural communication are discussed.

Stoffregen & Bardy's arguments against separation of the senses fail to consider the functional differences between the kinds of information potentially available in the structured energy arrays that correspond to the traditional senses. Since most perception/action research pursues a strategy of information perturbation presupposing differential contributions from the various ambient arrays, the global array hypothesis can only be extended and tested by analyses that consider the functional aspects along which the senses can, in fact, be separated.

A traditional view of perception and action makestwo assumptions: that the causal flow betweenperception and action is primarily linear or one-way,and that they are merely instrumentally related toeach other, so that each is a means to the other.Either or both of these assumptions can be rejected. Behaviorism rejects the instrumental but not theone-way aspect of the traditional view, thus leavingitself open to charges of verificationism. Ecologicalviews reject the one-way aspect but not theinstrumental aspect of the traditional view, (...) so thatperception and action are seen as instrumentallyinterdependent. It is argued here that a betteralternative is to reject both assumptions, resultingin a two-level interdependence view in whichperception and action co-depend on dynamicallycircular subpersonal relations and as a result may bemore than merely instrumentally interdependent. Thisis illustrated by reference to motor theories ofperception and control theories of action. (shrink)

Action is a means of acquiring perceptual information about the environment. Turning around, for example, alters your spatial relations to surrounding objects and, hence, which of their properties you visually perceive. Moving your hand over an object’s surface enables you to feel its shape, temperature, and texture. Sniffing and walking around a room enables you to track down the source of an unpleasant smell. Active or passive movements of the body can also generate useful sources of perceptual information (Gibson (...) 1966, 1979). The pattern of optic flow in the retinal image produced by forward locomotion, for example, contains information about the direction in which you are heading, while motion parallax is a “cue” used by the visual system to estimate the relative distances of objects in your field of view. In these uncontroversial ways and others, perception is instrumentally dependent on action. According to an explanatory framework that Susan Hurley (1998) dubs the “Input-Output Picture”, the dependence of perception on action is purely instrumental: "Movement can alter sensory inputs and so result in different perceptions… changes in output are merely a means to changes in input, on which perception depends directly" (1998: 342). The action-based theories of perception, reviewed in this entry, challenge the Input-Output Picture. They maintain that perception can also depend in a noninstrumental or constitutive way on action (or, more generally, on capacities for object-directed motor control). This position has taken many different forms in the history of philosophy and psychology. Most action-based theories of perception in the last 300 years, however, have looked to action in order to explain how vision, in particular, acquires either all or some of its spatial representational content. Accordingly, these are the theories on which we shall focus here. We begin in Section 1 by discussing George Berkeley’s Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), the historical locus classicus of action-based theories of perception, and one of the most influential texts on vision ever written. Berkeley argues that the basic or “proper” deliverance of vision is not an arrangement of voluminous objects in three-dimensional space, but rather a two-dimensional manifold of light and color. We then turn to a discussion of Lotze, Helmholtz, and the local sign doctrine. The “local signs” were felt cues for the mind to know what sort of spatial content to imbue visual experience with. For Lotze, these cues were “inflowing” kinaesthetic feelings that result from actually moving the eyes, while, for Helmholtz, they were “outflowing” motor commands sent to move the eyes. In Section 2, we discuss sensorimotor contingency theories, which became prominent in the 20thcentury. These views maintain that an ability to predict the sensory consequences of self-initiated actions is necessary for perception. Among the motivations for this family of theories is the problem of visual direction constancy—why do objects appear to be stationary even though the locations on the retina to which they reflect light change with every eye movement?—as well as experiments on adaptation to optical rearrangement devices (ORDs) and sensory substitution. Section 3 examines two other important 20th century theories. According to what we shall call the motor component theory, efference copies generated in the oculomotor system and/or proprioceptive feedback from eye-movements are used together with incoming sensory inputs to determine the spatial attributes of perceived objects. Efferent readiness theories, by contrast, look to the particular ways in which perceptual states prepare the observer to move and act in relation to the environment. The modest readiness theory, as we shall call it, claims that the way an object’s spatial attributes are represented in visual experience can be modulated by one or another form of covert action planning. The bold readiness theory argues for the stronger claim that perception just is covert readiness for action. In Section 4, we move to the disposition theory, most influentially articulated by Gareth Evans (1982, 1985), but more recently defended by Rick Grush (2000, 2007). Evans’ theory is, at its core, very similar to the bold efferent readiness theory. There are some notable differences, though. Evans’ account is more finely articulated in some philosophical respects. It also does not posit a reduction of perception to behavioral dispositions, but rather posits that certain complicated relations between perceptual input and behavioral provide spatial content. Grush proposes a very specific theory that is like Evans’ in that it does not posit a reduction, but unlike Evans’ view, does not put behavioral dispositions and sensory input on an undifferentiated footing. (shrink)

Summary of recent research on perception, action and what's in between, with the help of a recurring culinary metaphor.

Decety (2011) considers the cognitive neuroscience of empathy and, in particular, his three-component model of empathic responding. His position is highly influential with its emotional awareness/understanding and emotional regulation components representing clear extensions of previous theorizing on empathy. In this brief commentary, I will critically consider the third of his components: affective arousal. In particular, I will consider the implications of the literature to the proposed computations, based on perception—action coupling, that underlie this component of his model. I (...) will suggest that perception—action coupling does not underlie affective arousal but rather that this is mediated by far more simple mechanisms of emotional arousal based on conditioning. (shrink)

Abstract: When I throw a ball at you, do you see it as catch-able? Do we perceive objects as edible, climbable or Q-able in general? One could argue that it is just a manner of speaking to say so: we do not really see an object as edible, we only infer on the basis of its other properties that it is. I argue that whether or not an object is edible or climbable is indeed represented perceptually: we see objects as (...) edible, and do not just believe that they are. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that in order to perform an action Q with respect to an object, we need to represent this object as Q-able and, second, I argue that we represent objects as having these properties perceptually. (shrink)

I offer an explanation of how subjects are able to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects, given that subjects always perceive from a particular location. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that a conception of space is necessary to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects. This conception of space is spelled out by showing that perceiving intrinsic properties requires perceiving objects as the kind of things that are perceivable from other locations. Second, I show that (...) having such a conception of space presupposes that a subject represent her location in relation to perceived objects. More precisely the thesis is that a subject represents her location as the location from which she both perceives objects and would act in relation to objects were she to act. So I argue that perception depends on the capacity to know what it would be to act in relation to objects. (shrink)

What mediates between sensory input and motor output? What makes it possible to act on what you perceive? Bence Nanay argues that pragmatic representations provide the perceptual guidance for performing actions. They play a key role in our mental lives, and help explain why the majority of our mental processes are very similar to those of animals.

Local motion is known to produce strong illusory displacement in the perceived position of globally static objects. For example, if a dot-cloud or grating drifts to the left within a stationary aperture, the perceived position of the whole aperture will also be shifted to the left. Previously, we used a simple tracking task to demonstrate that active control over the global position of an object did not eliminate this form of illusion. Here, we used a new iPad task to directly (...) compare the magnitude of illusory displacement under active and passive conditions. In the active condition, participants guided a drifting Gabor patch along a virtual slalom course by using the tilt control of an iPad. The task was to position the patch so that it entered each gate at the direct center, and we used the left/right deviations from that point as our dependent measure. In the passive condition, participants watched playback of standardized trajectories along the same course. We systematically varied deviation from midpoint at gate entry, and participants made 2AFC left/right judgments. We fitted cumulative normal functions to individual distributions and extracted the point of subjective equality (PSE) as our dependent measure. To our surprise, the magnitude of displacement was consistently larger under active than under passive conditions. Importantly, control conditions ruled out the possibility that such amplification results from lack of motor control or differences in global trajectories as performance estimates were equivalent in the two conditions in the absence of local motion. Our results suggest that the illusion penetrates multiple levels of the perception-action cycle, indicating that one important direction for the future of perceptual illusions may be to more fully explore their influence during active vision. (shrink)

Through advances in production and treatment technologies, transparent glass has become an increasingly versatile material and a global hallmark of modern architecture. In the shape of invisible barriers, it defines spaces while simultaneously shaping their lighting, noise, and climate conditions. Despite these unique architectural qualities, little is known regarding the human experience with glass barriers. Is a material that has been described as being simultaneously there and not there from an architectural perspective, actually there and/or not there from perceptual, behavioral, (...) and social points of view? In this article, we review systematic observations and experimental studies that explore the impact of transparent barriers on human cognition and action. In doing so, the importance of empirical and multidisciplinary approaches to inform the use of glass in contemporary architecture is highlighted and key questions for future inquiry are identified. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to human information processing tend to deal with perception and action planning in isolation, so that an adequate account of the perception-action interface is still missing. On the perceptual side, the dominant cognitive view largely underestimates, and thus fails to account for, the impact of action-related processes on both the processing of perceptual information and on perceptual learning. On the action side, most approaches conceive of action planning as a mere continuation (...) of stimulus processing, thus failing to account for the goal-directedness of even the simplest reaction in an experimental task. We propose a new framework for a more adequate theoretical treatment of perception and action planning, in which perceptual contents and action plans are coded in a common representational medium by feature codes with distal reference. Perceived events (perceptions) and to-be-produced events (actions) are equally represented by integrated, task-tuned networks of feature codes – cognitive structures we call event codes. We give an overview of evidence from a wide variety of empirical domains, such as spatial stimulus-response compatibility, sensorimotor synchronization, and ideomotor action, showing that our main assumptions are well supported by the data. Key Words: action planning; binding; common coding; event coding; feature integration; perception; perception-action interface. (shrink)

Philosophy of perception is guilty of focusing on the perception of far space, neglecting the possibility that the perception of the space immediately surrounding the body, which is known as peripersonal space, displays different properties. Peripersonal space is the space in which the world is literally at hand for interaction. It is also the space in which the world can become threatening and dangerous, requiring protective behaviours. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience has yielded a vast array of (...) discoveries on the multisensory and sensorimotor specificities of the processing of peripersonal space. Yet very little has been done on their philosophical implications. Here I will raise the following question: in what manner does the visual experience of a big rock close to my foot differ from the visual experience of the moon in the sky? (shrink)