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

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.

How systemic cognition enables epistemic engineering

“…Hence, we begin with how neural flexibility enables a person to adapt to what we call a minimal engineered system . Similar vicariant effects occur with, say, sensory substitution (Froese and Ortiz-Garin, 2020 ) or “thought” control of a prothesis (e.g., Edelman et al, 2019 ). While evoneered technology is often studied as of value in itself, less weight has hitherto been placed on the biotech interface or how a living brain adapts to a device.…”

An Interaction Theory Account of (Mediated) Social Touch

“…The enactive torch, a haptic navigation device, is an example of an ‘enactive interface' that enables augmented sense-making (Froese et al, 2011b ). With these types of ‘active touch devices' the focus is less on the sensation of touch, but more on the use of touch to actively explore, where a user's actions and perceptions mediated through the device are tightly coupled (see Froese et al, 2011b ; Froese and Ortiz-Garin, 2020 ). MST research and the design of MST devices should focus on this active touch component through approaches such as augmented sense-making, because it aligns with the interactive dynamic nature of (social) touch.…”