Abstract
Traditionally, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike considered the mind as divided into input units (perception), central processing (cognition), and output units (action). In turn, they allowed for little – if any – direct interaction between perception and action. In recent years, theorists challenged the classical view of the mind by arguing that bodily states ground cognition. Even though promising, the notion of grounding is largely underspecified. In this paper, we focus on the debate about the relation between perception and action in order to flesh out the process and in turn clarify the notion of grounding. Given that currently the debate about the relation between perception & action is far from settled, we attempt an assessment of the implications that possible outcomes of this debate would have on Grounding Cognition Theories. Interestingly, some of these possible outcomes seem to threaten the overall program of Grounded Cognition. In an attempt to make this analysis more concrete, we study two closely related speculative hypotheses about possible ways in which perception and action interact. Namely, we focus on Theory of Event Coding and Simulation Theory, and evaluate the levels of compatibility between those two views and Grounded Cognition Theories.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
In this paper, we proceed within a broadly construed computationalist framework and focus our analysis on sensory and motoric representations. However, we do not argue for or commit to neither strong nor modest computationalism. Clarifying this point is crucial given that grounded and embodied cognition views – especially in their stronger versions – are often seen as alternatives to Computational Theory of Mind. At the same time, even though we are sympathetic to the idea of grounded cognition, we do not commit to such views either. Furthermore, we use the notion of representation in a much broader sense than the one used in classical computational views (i.e. symbol), and we do not commit to the claim about all aspects of cognition being representational. To this extent there might well be aspects of cognition that are non-representational and non-computational (a view that modest computationalists would probably accept – see Horst (2009) for a discussion). Our focus here is simply to assess and evaluate the implications that the developments in the debate about the relationship between perception and action have for grounded cognition theories.
- 2.
See Gangopadhyay et al. (2010) for a detailed discussion about the nature of the relation between P&A.
- 3.
Further elaboration on the relation between ‘constitution’ and ‘grounding’ extends beyond the scope of the present paper. See Weber and Vosgerau (2012) for a detailed discussion.
- 4.
Mechanisms that also contribute in solving the binding problem for the representation of perceptual objects coordinate different feature codes. That is, these mechanisms bind together sensory representations of a given object’s aspects/parts/features that a subject has selectively attended to and thus represents in a fragmented fashion.
- 5.
However, recall that there are other ways to understand the relation between P&A; for instance that the two are functionally distinct and that one could operate without the other, as shown below.
- 6.
Note here that there is evidence (Catmur et al. 2007) that mirror neurons could be associationistically trained.
References
Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–609.
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645.
Brandt, S. A., & Stark, L. W. (1997). Spontaneous eye movements during visual imagery reflect the content of the visual scene. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 27–38.
Catmur, C., Walsh, V., & Heyes, C. (2007). Sensorimotor learning configures the human mirror system. Current Biology, 17, 1527–1531.
Chao, L. L., Haxby, J. V., & Martin, A. (1999). Attribute-based neural substrates in temporal cortex for perceiving and knowing about objects. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 913–919.
Damasio, A. R. (1989). Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition. Cognition, 33, 25–62.
Demarais, A. M., & Cohen, B. H. (1998). Evidence for image-scanning eye movements during transitive inference. Biological Psychology, 49(3), 229–247.
Farah, M. J. (1989). The neuropsychology of mental imagery. In F. Boller & J. Grafman (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology (Vol. 2, pp. 239–248). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Farah, M. J. (1995). Current issues in the neuropsychology of image generation. Neuropsychologia, 33, 1455–1471.
Findlay, J. M., & Gilchrist, I. D. (2003). Active vision: The psychology of looking and seeing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finke, R. A. (1989). Principles of mental imagery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gallese, V. (2007). The ‘conscious’ dorsal stream: Embodied simulation and its role in space and action conscious awareness. Psyche, 13(1) (archived electronic journal: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/)
Gangopadhyay, N., Madary, M., & Spicer, F. (2010). Perception, action and consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goodale, M. A., & Milner, A. D. (2004). Sight unseen: An exploration of conscious and unconscious vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hommel, B., Müsseler, J., Aschersleben, G., & Prinz, W. (2001). The theory of event coding (TEC): A framework for perception and action planning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 849–878.
Horst, S. (2009). The computational theory of mind. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/
Hurley, S. (2001). Perception and action: Alternative views. Synthese, 129, 3–40.
Jacob, P., & de Vignemont, F. (2010). Spatial coordinates and phenomenology in the two-visual systems model. In N. Gangopadhyay, M. Madary, & F. Spicer (Eds.), Perception, action and consciousness (pp. 125–144). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacob, P., & Jeannerod, M. (2003). Ways of seeing, the scope and limits of visual cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kiverstein, J. (2010). Sensorimotor knowledge and the contents of experience. In N. Gangopdhay, M. Madary, & F. Spicer (Eds.), Perception, action and consciousness: Sensorimotor dynamics and dual vision (pp. 257–275). New York: Oxford University Press.
Kosslyn, S. M., Thompson, W. L., Kim, I. J., & Alpert, N. M. (1995). Topographical representations of mental images in primary visual cortex. Nature, 378, 496–498.
Milner, A. D., & Goodale, M. A. (1995). The visual brain in action. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Milner, A. D., & Goodale, M. A. (2010). Cortical visual systems for perception and action. In N. Gangopadhyay, M. Madary, & F. Spicer (Eds.), Perception, action and consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Noë, A. (2005). Action in perception (pp. 71–94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Norton, D., & Stark, L. W. (1971). Scanpaths in saccadic eye movements while viewing and recognizing patterns. Vision Research, 11, 929–942.
O’Regan, K., & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 883–917.
Prinz, W. (1997). Perception and action planning. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 9, 129–154.
Prinz, J. (2002). Furnishing the mind: Concepts and their perceptual basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shapiro, L. (2007). The embodied cognition research programme. Philosophy Compass. Article first published online 2 feb 2007. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00064.x.
Spivey, M. J., & Geng, J. J. (2001). Oculomotor mechanisms activated by imagery and memory: Eye movements to absent objects. Psychological Research/Psychologische Forschung, 65(4), 235–241.
Tillas, A. (2010). Back to out senses: An empiricist on concept acquisition. Ph.D. thesis. University of Bristol.
Tucker, M., & Ellis, R. (1998). On the relations between seen objects and components of potential actions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 24(3), 830–846.
Tucker, M., & Ellis, R. (2004). Action priming by briefly presented objects. Acta Psychologica, 116, 185–203.
Ungerleider, L. G., & Mishkin, M. (1982). Two cortical visual systems. In D. J. Ingle, M. A. Goodale, & R. W. A. Mansfield (Eds.), Analysis of visual behavior (pp. 549–586). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Weber, A., & Vosgerau, G. (2012). Grounding action representations. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3, 53–69.
Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychological Bulletin and Review, 9, 625–636.
Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., Simmons, W. K., Martin, A., & Barsalou, L. W. (2013). Contextual processing of abstract concepts reveals neural representations of nonlinguistic semantic content. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 25(6), 920–935. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00361.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Patrice Soom, James Trafford, and Uwe Peters for their help and comments on earlier drafts.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tillas, A., Vosgerau, G. (2016). Perception, Action and the Notion of Grounding. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_27
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26483-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26485-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)