A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness

Abstract

In this commentary we review evidence concerning the true sensitivity of viewers to visual changes in scene images. We argue that the data strongly suggest that "change blindness" experiments, while revealing of a variety of important constraints on encoding and retrieval processes in visual memory, do not demonstrate the lack of scene representations assumed by O&N. Instead, the data suggest that detailed scene representations can be generated and survive relatively intact across views (e.g., across saccades) and over extended periods of time. Of course, as we have known at least since the seminal work of Sperling (1960) and Averbach and Coriell (1961), these representations are not "iconic" in nature. CommentaryIn the target article, O'Regan and Nöe (O&N) reject the assumption prevalent in computational vision and visual cognition that the visual system generates an accurate, detailed, and stable scene representation. Instead, O&N propose that the experience of visual coherence is an illusion brought about by the fact that visual information can be sampled from the world when needed via sensory motor interaction, i.e., via shifts of attention and fixation. In this view, there is no need for an internal scene representation because the world can serve as its own external memory, and it is the ability of the system to sample this outside memory at will in the service of ongoing perceptual and cognitive processing that produces perceptual experience.O&N suggest that an important prediction of their theory is that viewers should be insensitive to what appear to be relatively large and obvious changes when detecting the change depends on visual memory rather than on the perception of image transients; that is, the theory predicts "change blindness". Aside from the issue of whether the theory motivated the experiments or vice versa (in fact, change blindness as a phenomenon has been known at least since the mid-1970s, and the most recent demonstrations of these phenomena in images of real-world scenes were produced by McConkie and

Natural world physical, brain operational, and mind phenomenal space–time

“…Others relate consciousness to a coherent activity of large neuronal populations [112,309] or to particular neuronal pathways [310]. Finally, some researchers associate consciousness with the whole organism-environment interaction [311,312]. However, none of these interpretations takes a subjective (phenomenal) experience seriously in its own terms.…”

Orienting of attention in left unilateral neglect

“…Drawing on change blindness and other similar phenomena, O'Regan and Noe È [169] have recently proposed that visual consciousness is not the result of having built a detailed mental representation of the visual environment, but is nothing over and above the mastery of the laws which govern the sensorimotor contingencies associated with visual exploration. For example, our consciousness of the presence of an object on our left would principally result from our capacity to direct a saccade toward that object.…”

“…This disorder might impair the patients' knowledge of the sensorimotor contingencies associated with leftward orienting. In the terms of the proposal advanced by O'Regan and Noe È [169], it is thus not surprising that such an asymmetry in exogenous orienting may entail a dramatic lack of awareness for left-sided events when a concurrent right-sided event grabs patients' attention. Importantly, neglect patients may bene®t from maneuvers, such as active movements of their left limbs [172], or active adaptation to optical prisms that displace the visual scene rightward [173], which might be understood as temporarily restoring patients' mastery of sensorimotor contingencies associated with leftward orienting.…”

Cortical basis of communication: Local computation, coordination, attention

“…Opposite to intellectualist symbolic approaches and their abstract, complex and hierarchical representations, the situatedness of cognition proposes to minimize representational contents [25] and privileges simple strategies, more directly coupling perception and action [7] and more efficient to react quickly in the changing environment.…”