Although the mechanics of how the eye works are well understood, debate still exists as to how the complex machinery of the brain interprets neural impulses...

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.

Seeing, Doing, and Knowing is an original and comprehensive philosophical treatment of sense perception as it is currently investigated by cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. Sensory systems are automatic sorting machines; they engage in a process of classification. Human vision sorts and orders external objects in terms of a specialized, proprietary scheme of categories - colours, shapes, speeds and directions of movement, etc. This 'Sensory Classification Thesis' implies that sensation (...) is not a naturally caused image from which an organism must infer the state of the world beyond; it is more like an internal communication, a signal concerning the state of the world issued by a sensory system, in accordance with internal conventions, for the use of an organism's other systems. This is why sensory states are both easily understood and persuasive.Sensory classification schemes are purpose-built to serve the knowledge-gathering and pragmatic needs of particular types of organisms. They are specialized: a bee or a bird does not see exactly what a human does. The Sensory Classification Thesis helps clarify this specialization in perceptual content and supports a new form of realism about the deliverances of sensation: 'Pluralistic Realism' is based on the idea that sensory systems coevolve with an organism's other systems; they are not simply moulded to the external world. The last part of the book deals with reference in vision. Cognitive scientists now believe that vision guides the limbs by means of a subsystem that links up with the objects of physical manipulation in ways that bypass sensory categories. In a novel extension of this theory, Matthen argues that 'motion-guiding vision' is integrated with sensory classification in conscious vision. This accounts for the quasi-demonstrative form of visual states: 'This particular object is red', and so on. He uses this idea to cast new light on the nature of perceptual objects, pictorial representation, and the visual representation of space. (shrink)

Our ability to acknowledge and recognise our own identity - our 'self' - is a characteristic doubtless unique to humans. Where does this feeling come from? How does the combination of neurophysiological processes coupled with our interaction with the outside world construct this coherent identity? We know that our social interactions contribute via the eyes, ears etc. However, our self is not only influenced by our senses. It is also influenced by the actions we perform and those we see others (...) perform. Our brain anticipates the effects of our own actions and simulates the actions of others. In this way, we become able to understand ourselves and to understand the actions and emotions of others. -/- This book is the first to describe the new field of 'Motor Cognition' - one to which the author's contribution has been seminal. Though motor actions have long been studied by neuroscientists and physiologists, it is only recently that scientists have considered the role of actions in building the self. How consciousness of action is part of self-consciousness, how one's own actions determine the sense of being an agent, how actions performed by others impact on ourselves for understanding others, differentiating ourselves from them and learning from them: these questions are raised and discussed throughout the book, drawing on experimental, clinical, and theoretical bases. -/- The advent of new neuroscience techniques, like neuroimaging and direct electrical brain stimulation, together with a renewal of behavioral methods in cognitive psychology, provide new insights into this area. Mental imagery of action, self-recognition, consciousness of actions, imitation can be objectively studied using these new tools. The results of these investigations shed light on clinical disorders in neurology, psychiatry and in neuro-development. -/- This is a major new work that will lay down the foundations for the field of motor cognition. (shrink)

I aim to give a new account of picture perception: of the way our visual system functions when we see something in a picture. My argument relies on the functional distinction between the ventral and dorsal visual subsystems. I propose that it is constitutive of picture perception that our ventral subsystem attributes properties to the depicted scene, whereas our dorsal subsystem attributes properties to the picture surface. This duality elucidates Richard Wollheim’s concept of the “twofoldness” of our experience of pictures: (...) the “visual awareness not only of what is represented but also of the surface qualities of the representation.” I argue for the following four claims: (a) the depicted scene is represented by ventral perception, (b) the depicted scene is not represented by dorsal perception, (c) the picture surface is represented by dorsal perception, and (d) the picture surface is not necessarily represented by ventral perception. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by Alva Noë (2004). I argue inter alia that the enactive account falsely identifies an object’s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object’s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements—an (...) act of what I call ‘make‐perceive’. (shrink)

Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the "two visual systems" hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in conscious visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver's bodily actions. In this paper, I review and assess three main sources (...) of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis. I argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency. (shrink)

While there has been a lot of discussion of picture perception both in perceptual psychology and in philosophy, these discussions are driven by very different background assumptions. Nonetheless, it would be mutually beneficial to arrive at an understanding of picture perception that is informed by both the philosophers’ and the psychologists’ story. The aim of this paper is exactly this: to give an account of picture perception that is valid both as a philosophical and as a psychological account. I argue (...) that seeing trompe l’oeil paintings is, just as some philosophers suggested, different from other cases of picture perception. Further, the way our perceptual system functions when seeing trompe l’oeil paintings could be an important piece of the psychological explanation of perceiving pictures. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, one’s own location can be among the things that visual experience represents, even when one’s body is entirely out of view. By contrast, the Minimal View denies this, and says that visual experience represents things only as "to the right", etc., and never as "to the right of me". But the Minimal View is phenomenologically inadequate: it cannot explain the difference between a visual experience of self-motion and one of an oppositely moving world. To show (...) this, I argue (i) that these experiences are different in an important respect, (ii) that this difference is genuinely experiential, (iii) that it is visual, (iv) that it is not purely phenomenal, and (v) that it cannot be identified with anything other than the apparent motion of the self. So the Self-Location Thesis is upheld: reports of one’s own motion can correspond to aspects of visual experiences every bit as basic to their contents as the apparent motion or rest of the things one has in view. (shrink)

It has been widely assumed that we do not perceive dispositional properties. I argue that there are two ways of interpreting this assumption. On the first, extensional, interpretation whether we perceive dispositions depends on a complex set of metaphysical commitments. But if we interpret the claim in the second, intensional, way, then we have no reason to suppose that we do not perceive dispositional properties. The two most important and influential arguments to the contrary fail.

It has been argued that picture perception is sometimes, but not always, ‘inflected’. Sometimes the picture’s design ‘inflects’, or is ‘recruited’ into the depicted scene. The aim of this paper is to cash out what is meant by these metaphors. Our perceptual state is different when we see an object fact to face or when we see it in a picture. But there is also a further distinction: our perceptual state is very different if we perceive objects in pictures in (...) an inflected or uninflected manner. The question is what this difference amounts to. My answer is that it is a difference of attention. In the case of inflected, but not uninflected, picture perception, we are consciously attending to certain properties: to relational property that cannot be fully characterized without reference to both the picture’s design and to the depicted object. I defend this way of interpreting inflected picture perception from some important objections and emphasize the importance of this, inflected, way of perceiving pictures. (shrink)

b>: The problem of how physical systems, such as brains, come to represent themselves as subjects in an objective world is addressed. I develop an account of the requirements for this ability that draws on and refines work in a philosophical tradition that runs from Kant through Peter Strawson to Gareth Evans. The basic idea is that the ability to represent oneself as a subject in a world whose existence is independent of oneself involves the ability to represent space, and (...) in particular, to represent oneself as one object among others in an objective spatial realm. In parallel, I provide an account of how this ability, and the mechanisms that support it, are realized neurobiologically. This aspect of the article draws on, and refines, work done in the neurobiology and psychology of egocentric and allocentric spatial representation. (shrink)

Discusses the possibility of reconciling different articulations of intentionality from a neurobiological perspective. The author analyzes the relationship between agency and representation and how representation is intrinsically related to action control. The author also presents a new account of action, arguing against what is still commonly held as its proper definition, namely the final outcome of a cascade-like process that starts from the analysis of sensory data, incorporates the result of decision processes, and ends up with responses (actions) to externally-or (...) internally-generated stimuli. The author discusses recent findings from the investigation of neural mechanisms that are at the basis of sensorimotor integration. (shrink)

An attempt is made to defend a general approach to the spatial content of perception, an approach according to which perception is imbued with spatial content in virtue of certain kinds of connections between perceiving organism's sensory input and its behavioral output. The most important aspect of the defense involves clearly distinguishing two kinds of perceptuo-behavioral skills—the formation of dispositions, and a capacity for emulation. The former, the formation of dispositions, is argued to by the central pivot of spatial content. (...) I provide a neural information processing interpretation of what these dispositions amount to, and describe how dispositions, so understood, are an obvious implementation of Gareth Evans' proposal on the topic. Furthermore, I describe what sorts of contribution are made by emulation mechanisms, and I also describe exactly how the emulation framework differs from similar but distinct notions with which it is often unhelpfully confused, such as sensorimotor contingencies and forward models. (shrink)

Two experiments, one on school-aged children and one on adults, explored the mechanisms underlying responses to an image prime followed by graspable objects that were, in certain cases, dangerous. Participants were presented with different primes and objects representing two risk levels . The task required that a natural/artifact categorization task be performed by pressing different keys. In both adults and children graspable objects activated a facilitating motor response, while dangerous objects evoked aversive affordances, generating an interference-effect. Both children and adults (...) were sensitive to the distinction between biological and non-biological hands, however detailed resonant mechanisms related to the hand-prime gender emerged only in adults. Implications for how the concept of “dangerous object” develops and the relationship between resonant mechanisms and perception of danger are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to argue for two main and related points. First, I want to defend Richard Wollheim’s well-known thesis that the twofold mental state of seeing-in is the distinctive pictorial experience that marks figurativity. Figurativity is what makes a representation pictorial, a depiction of its subject. Moreover, I want to show that insofar as it is a mark of figurativity, all seeing-in is inflected. That is to say, every mental state of seeing-in is such that the characterisation (...) of the properties by which a certain subject is seen in a given picture as having refers to the design properties of the picture’s vehicle, i.e., to the visible surface properties of that vehicle that are responsible for the fact that one such subject is seen in it, precisely taken in such a design role. Finally, I will try to show that seeing-in is qualified by inflection independently of whether it is conscious or unconscious seeing-in. (shrink)

Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuity between strands of empirical and theoretical research, the (...) time is ripe for addressing the question of whether the dispositional interpretation of affordance is in accordance with some recent evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. Following this line, I clarify that there are some cases of affordance-related effects that neither require the actualization of an action, nor the presence of an action-related property bearer in the environment, and that the identification of affordance with physical properties provides only a partial explanation of the wide range of affordance-related effects. Accordingly, I argue in favor of a more general account of affordance perception based on the ability to directly detect perceptual patterns in the environment. (shrink)

[1] It is well-known that Evans laid the groundwork for a truly radical and fruitful theory of _content_ -- a theory according to which content is a genus with at least conceptual and nonconceptual varieties as species, and in which nonconceptual content plays a very significant role. It is less well-recognized that Evans was also in the process of working out the details of a truly radical and groundbreaking theory of _representation_, a task he was unfortunately unable to bring to (...) any satisfactory stage of fruition. I am here drawing the distinction between a theory of. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that action-guiding vision is not cognitively impenetrable and arguments that suggest otherwise rely on an unjustified identification between actionguiding vision and dorsal vision – a functional and an anatomical way of describing the mind. The examination of these arguments show the importance of making a distinction between the functional and the anatomical level when addressing the problem of cognitive penetrability.

The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode (...) the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology. (shrink)

The aim of the present article is three-fold. First, it aims to show that perception requires action. This is most evident for some types of visual percept. Second, it aims to show that the distinction of the cortical visual processing into two streams is insufficient and leads to possible misunderstandings on the true nature of perceptual processes. Third, it aims to show that the dorsal stream is not only responsible for the unconscious control of action, but also for the conscious (...) awareness of space and action. (shrink)