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      Where Is the Action in Perception? An Exploratory Study With a Haptic Sensory Substitution Device

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          Abstract

          Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role. We refer to these two hypotheses as instrumental agency and constitutive agency, respectively. Evidence comes from a variety of fields, including neural, behavioral, and phenomenological research, but so far with confounds that prevent an experimental distinction between these hypotheses. Here we advance the debate by proposing a novel double-participant setup that aims to isolate agency as the key variable that distinguishes bodily movement in active and passive conditions of perception. We pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. There was no evidence favoring the stronger hypothesis of constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, we caution that during debriefing several participants reported using cognitive strategies that did not rely on spatial perception. We conclude that this approach is a viable direction for future research, but that greater care is required to establish and confirm the desired modality of first-person experience.

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          Most cited references40

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          A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness.

          Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual "filling in," visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception.
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            MOVEMENT-PRODUCED STIMULATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUALLY GUIDED BEHAVIOR.

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              Vision Substitution by Tactile Image Projection

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                28 April 2020
                2020
                : 11
                : 809
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University , Okinawa, Japan
                [2] 2Laboratory 25, Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, National Autonomous University of Mexico , Mexico City, Mexico
                Author notes

                Edited by: Anthony Chemero, University of Cincinnati, United States

                Reviewed by: Luis H. Favela, University of Central Florida, United States; Dobromir G. Dotov, University of Montpellier 1, France

                *Correspondence: Tom Froese, tom.froese@ 123456oist.jp

                This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00809
                7198821
                32411061
                5ed81ef6-b6d1-44b0-8318-9b21d290a6cc
                Copyright © 2020 Froese and Ortiz-Garin.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 20 January 2020
                : 01 April 2020
                Page count
                Figures: 3, Tables: 1, Equations: 0, References: 52, Pages: 8, Words: 0
                Categories
                Psychology
                Brief Research Report

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                active perception,embodied cognition,agency,perceptual discrimination,enactive perception,enactive torch,volition,active touch

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