The experience of force: The role of haptic experience of forces in visual perception of object motion and interactions, mental simulation, and motion-related judgments.

Abstract

Forces are experienced in actions on objects. The mechanoreceptor system is stimulated by proximal forces in interactions with objects, and experiences of force occur in a context of information yielded by other sensory modalities, principally vision. These experiences are registered and stored as episodic traces in the brain. These stored representations are involved in generating visual impressions of forces and causality in object motion and interactions. Kinematic information provided by vision is matched to kinematic features of stored representations, and the information about forces and causality in those representations then forms part of the perceptual interpretation. I apply this account to the perception of interactions between objects and to motions of objects that do not have perceived external causes, in which motion tends to be perceptually interpreted as biological or internally caused. I also apply it to internal simulations of events involving mental imagery, such as mental rotation, trajectory extrapolation and judgment, visual memory for the location of moving objects, and the learning of perceptual judgments and motor skills. Simulations support more accurate judgments when they represent the underlying dynamics of the event simulated. Mechanoreception gives us whatever limited ability we have to perceive interactions and object motions in terms of forces and resistances; it supports our practical interventions on objects by enabling us to generate simulations that are guided by inferences about forces and resistances, and it helps us learn novel, visually based judgments about object behavior.

What you feel is what you see: inverse dynamics estimation underlies the resistive sensation of a delayed cursor

“…The extent to which our central nervous system (CNS) internally represents and further exploits this relationship has long been a central issue in computational neuroscience (see [1][2][3][4] for reviews). A series of results has supported the idea that the CNS computes forward dynamics to predict motion from applied force for motor control [5][6][7][8] and sensory perception [9][10][11].…”

The impetus theory in judgments about object motion: A new perspective

“…The property transmission heuristic, in turn, needs to be understood as a consequence of the origin of causal understanding in actions on objects, a theoretical approach that is also relevant to a full understanding of beliefs about object motion (White, 2012). I therefore start with a brief summary of the actions-on-objects approach and then discuss the property transmission heuristic.…”

“…What follows is a nontechnical sketch of the account in White (2012). That article presents a general account of the perception and understanding of object motion and its causes, whether internal or external.…”

“…In this article, I propose a different interpretation for the results in question. The new interpretation draws on two related antecedents: the proposal that understanding of forces and causality originates in our own experiences of acting on objects (White, 2009a(White, , 2012 and the proposal that salient properties of causes are often judged to be transmitted to their outcomes, which is here called the property transmission heuristic (White, 2009b). I shall first summarize the impetus theory.…”

Technology and Early Science Education: Examining Generalist Primary School Teachers’ Views on Tacit Knowledge Assessment Tools

“…It is a ubiquitous concept which we engage with from birth onwards and witness on a daily basis in multiple situations. It has implications for development of motor skills and using these to judge events and plan actions (White, 2012). Within more formal contexts it represents a basis for many higher-level elements of physics, such as force, energy and relativity (Shankar, 2014).…”