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1.Introduction
1.1.The puzzle of visual experienc
 What is visual experience and where does it occur?It is generally thought that somewhere in the brain an in-ternal representation of the outside world must be set up which, when it is activated, gives us the experience that weall share of the rich, three-dimensional, colorful world. Cor-tical maps –those cortical areas where visual informationseems to be retinotopically organized –might appear to begood candidates for the locus of perception.Cortical maps undoubtedly exist, and they contain infor-mation about the visual world. But the presence of thesemaps and the retinotopic nature of their organization can-not
 in itself 
explain the metric quality of visual phenome-nology. Nor can it explain why activation of cortical mapsshould produce visual experience. Something extra wouldappear to be needed in order to make excitation in corticalmaps provide, in addition, the subjective impression of see-ing.A number of proposals have come forth in recent yearsto suggest how this might come about. For example, it hasbeen suggested, from work with blindsight patients, thatconsciousness in vision may derive from a “commentary”system situated somewhere in the fronto-limbic complex(taken to include the prefrontal cortex, insula and claus-trum; cf. Weiskrantz 1997, p.226). Crick and Koch (1990),BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES(2001)
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A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness
J. Kevin O’Regan
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Université René Descartes, 92774 Boulogne Billancourt, France 
oregan@ext.jussieu.frhttp://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr
Alva Noë
Department of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Cruz,Santa Cruz, CA95064 
anoe@cats.ucsc.eduhttp://www2.ucsc.edu/people/anoe/
 Abstract:
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 theexperience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internalrepresentation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. Itis a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The out-side world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the gov-erning laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accountingfor visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Sev-eral lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotoradaptation, visual “filling in,” visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception.
Keywords:
action; change blindness; consciousness; experience; perception; qualia; sensation; sensorimotor
Kevin O’Regan
moved to Paris in 1975 after studyingtheoretical physics in England, to work in experimentalpsychology at the Centre National de Recherche Scien-tifique. After his Ph.D. on eye movements in reading heshowed the existence of an optimal position for the eyeto fixate in words. His interest in the problem of the per-ceived stability of the visual world led him to questionestablished notions of the nature of visual perception,and to recently discover, with collaborators, the phe-nomenon of “change blindness.” His current work in- volves exploring the empirical consequences of the newapproach to vision.
Alva Noë
is a philosopher at the University of Califor-nia, Santa Cruz. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy fromHarvard University and a B. Phil. from Oxford Univer-sity, and he has been a Research Associate of the Cen-ter for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He haspublished articles on topics in the philosophy of per-ception, philosophy of mind, and other areas, includinga previous
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
target articleon perceptual completion. He is currently at work on abook on the relation between perception and action,and he is a co-editor of 
Vision and Mind: Selected Read- ings in the Philosophy of Perception
(MIT Press, forth-coming).
 
Llinas and Ribary (1993), Singer (1993), and Singer andGray (1995) suggest that consciousness might be correlated with particular states of the brain involving coherent oscil-lations in the 40–70 Hz range, which would serve to bindtogether the percepts pertaining to a particular consciousmoment.
1
Penrose (1994) and Hameroff (1994) suggestthat the locus of consciousness might be a quantum processin neurons’ microtubules. Edelman (1989) holds that re-entrant signaling between cortical maps might give rise toconsciousness. A variety of other possibilities that mightconstitute the “neural correlate of consciousness” has beencompiled by Chalmers (1996b).A problem with proposals of this kind is that they do lit-tle to elucidate the mystery of visual consciousness (aspointed out by, for example, Chalmers 1996b). For even if one particular mechanism –for example, coherent oscilla-tions in a particular brain area –were proven to correlateperfectly with behavioral measures of consciousness, theproblem of consciousness would simply be pushed backinto a deeper hiding place: the question would now be-come, why and how should coherent oscillations ever gen-erate consciousness? After all, coherent oscillations are ob-served in many other branches of science, where they donot generate consciousness. And even if consciousness is as-sumed to arise from some new, previously unknown mech-anism, such as quantum-gravity processes in tubules, thepuzzle still remains as to what exactly it is about tubules thatallows them to generate consciousness, when other physi-cal mechanisms do not.
1.2.What are sensory modalities? 
In addition to the problem of the
origin
of experience dis-cussed in the preceding paragraphs, there is the problem of 
differences
in the felt quality of visual experience. Why isthe experience of red more like the experience of pink thanit is like that of black? And, more generally, why is seeingred very different from hearing a sound or smelling a smell?It is tempting to think that seeing red is like seeing pinkbecause the neural stimulation going on when we see some-thing red is similar to that underlying our perception of pink:almost the same ratios of long, medium and short wave-length photoreceptors will be stimulated by red and pink.But note that though this seems reasonable, it does not suf-fice: there is no
a priori
reason why similar neural processesshould generate similar percepts.
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If neural activity is justan arbitrary code, then an explanation is needed for the par-ticular sensory experience that will be associated with eachelement of the code. Why, for example, should more in-tense neural activity provoke more intense experiences?And what exactly is the mapping function: is it linear, loga-rithmic, or a power function? And why is it one of theserather than another? Even these questions leave open themore fundamental question of how a neural code couldever give rise to experience at all.Not very much scientific investigation has addressed thiskind of question. Most scientists seem satisfied with some variant of Müller’s (1838) classic concept of “specific nerveenergy.” Müller’s idea, in its modern form,
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amounts to theclaim that what determines the particularly visual aspect of  visual sensations is the fact that these sensations are trans-mitted by specific nerve pathways (namely, those originat-ing in the retina and not in the cochlea) that project to par-ticular cerebral regions (essentially, cortical area V1). It iscertainly true that retinal influx comes together in relatively circumscribed areas of the brain, and that this may providean architectural advantage in the neural implementation of the calculations necessary to generate visual-type sensa-tions. But what is it about these pathways that generates thedifferent sensations? Surely the choice of a particular sub-set of neurons or particular cortical regions cannot,
 in itself,
explain why we attribute visual rather than auditory qua-lities to this influx. We could suppose that the neuronsinvolved are of a different kind, with, say, different neuro-transmitters, but then why and how do different neuro-transmitters give rise to different experiences? We couldsay that the type of calculation done in the different corti-cal areas is different, but then we must ask, how could cal-culations ever give rise to experience? The hard work is leftundone. Much still needs to be explained.
1.3.An alternative approach: The sensorimotor contingency theory 
The present paper seeks to overcome the difficulties de-scribed above by adopting a different approach to the prob-lem of visual experience. Instead of assuming that visionconsists in the creation of an internal representation of theoutside world whose activation somehow generates visualexperience, we propose to treat vision as an
exploratory ac- tivity.
 We then examine what this activity actually consistsin. The central idea of our new approach is that
 vision is a mode of exploration of the world that is mediated by knowl-edge of what we call sensorimotor contingencies.
 We showthat problems about the nature of visual consciousness, thequalitative character of visual experience, and the differ-ence between vision and other sensory modalities, can now,from the new standpoint, all be approached in a natural way, without appealing to mysterious or arcane explanatory devices.
2.The structure of vision
As stated above, we propose that
 vision is a mode of explo-ration of the world that is mediated by knowledge, on the part of the perceiver, of what we call sensorimotor contin- gencies.
 We now explore this claim in detail.
2.1.Sensorimotor contingencies induced by the visual apparatus 
Imagine a team of engineers operating a remote-controlledunderwater vessel exploring the remains of the Titanic, andimagine a villainous aquatic monster that has interfered with the control cable by mixing up the connections to andfrom the underwater cameras, sonar equipment, robot arms,actuators, and sensors. What appears on the many screens,lights, and dials, no longer makes any sense, and the actua-tors no longer have their usual functions. What can the en-gineers do to save the situation? By observing the
 structureof the changes
on the control panel that occur when they press various buttons and levers, the engineers should beable to deduce which buttons control which kind of motionof the vehicle, and which lights correspond to informationderiving from the sensors mounted outside the vessel, which indicators correspond to sensors on the vessel’s ten-tacles, and so on.O’Regan & Noë: A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness940
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2001) 24:5
 
There is an analogy to be drawn between this exampleand the situation faced by the brain. From the point of viewof the brain, there is nothing that in itself differentiates ner- vous influx coming from retinal, haptic, proprioceptive, ol-factory, and other senses, and there is nothing to discrimi-nate motor neurons that are connected to extraocularmuscles, skeletal muscles, or any other structures. Even if the size, the shape, the firing patterns, or the places wherethe neurons are localized in the cortex differ, this does notin itself confer them with any particular visual, olfactory,motor or other perceptual quality.On the other hand, what
does
differentiate vision from,say, audition or touch, is the
 structure of the rules
govern-ing the sensory changes produced by various motor actions,that is, what we call the
 sensorimotor contingencies
govern-ingvisual exploration. Because the sensorimotor contin-gencies within different sensory domains (vision, audition,smell, etc.) are subject to different (in)variance properties,the structure of the rules that govern perception in thesedifferent modalities will be different in each modality.A first law distinguishing visual percepts from perceptionin other modalities is the fact that when the eyes rotate, thesensory stimulation on the retina shifts and distorts in a very particular way, determined by the size of the eye move-ment, the spherical shape of the retina, and the nature of the ocular optics. In particular, as the eye moves, contoursshift and the curvature of lines changes. For example, asshown in Figure 1, if you are looking at the midpoint of ahorizontal line, the line will trace out a great arc on the in-side of your eyeball. If you now switch your fixation pointupwards, the curvature of the line will change; representedon a flattened-out retina, the line would now be curved. Ingeneral, straight lines on the retina distort dramatically as the eyes move, somewhat like an image in a distortingmirror.Similarly, because of the difference in sampling density of the retinal photoreceptors in central and in peripheral vi-sion, the distribution of information sensed by the retinachanges drastically, but in a lawful way, as the eye moves. When the line is looked at directly, the cortical representa-tion of the straight line is fat in the middle and tapers off tothe ends. But when the eye moves off the line, the corti-cal representation peters out into a meager, banana-likeshape, and the information about color is radically under-sampled, as shown in the bottom right hand panel of Fig-ure 1. Another law that characterizes the sensorimotor con-tingencies that are particular to visual percepts is the factthat the flow pattern on the retina is an expanding flow when the body moves forwards, and contracting when thebody moves backwards. Visual percepts also share the factthat when the eyes close during blinks, the stimulationchanges drastically, becoming uniform (i.e., the retinal im-age goes blank).In contrast to all these typically 
 visual
sensorimotor con-tingencies,
auditory
sensorimotor contingencies have a dif-ferent structure They are not, for example, affected by eyemovements or blinks. They are affected in special ways by head movements: rotations of the head generally changethe temporal asynchrony between left and right ears. Move-ment of the head in the direction of the sound sourcemainly affects the amplitude but not the frequency of thesensory input. We therefore suggest that a crucial fact about vision isthat visual exploration obeys certain laws of sensorimotorcontingency. These laws are determined by the fact that theexploration is being done by the visual apparatus.In summary: the sensorimotor contingencies discussedin this section are related to the visual apparatus and to the way three-dimensional objects present themselves to the visual apparatus. These sensorimotor contingencies are dis-tinctive of the visual sense modality, and differ from thesensorimotor contingencies associated with other senses.
2.2.Sensorimotor contingencies determined by visual attributes 
Real objects have properties such as size, shape, texture,and color, and they can be positioned in the three-dimen-sional world at different distances and angles with respectto an observer. Visual exploration provides ways of samplingO’Regan & Noë: A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2001) 24:5
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Figure1.
Top:
The eye fixates the middle of a straight line andthen moves to a point above the line. The retinal stimulationmoves from a great arc on the equator of the eye to a different,smaller great arc.
Bottom left
: Flattened out retina showing greatarc corresponding to equator (straight line) and off-equator greatarc (curved line). Triangles symbolize color-sensitive cone pho-toreceptors, discs represent rod photoreceptors. Size of photore-ceptors increases with eccentricity from the center of the retina.
Bottom right
: Cortical activation corresponding to stimulation by the two lines, showing how activation corresponding to a directly fixated straight line (large central oblong packet tapering off to- wards its ends) distorts into a thinner, banana shaped region, sam-pled mainly by rods, when the eye moves upwards. As explainedin Section 2.2, if the eye moves
along
the straight line instead of upwards, there would be virtually 
 no change at all
in the corticalrepresentation. This would be true even if the cortical represen-tation were completely scrambled. This is the idea underlying thetheory that shape in the world can be sensed by the laws obeyedby sensorimotor contingencies.
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