Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

to perception. Gibson (1966, p. 49) noted that “when the ‘senses’ are considered as
active systems they are classified by modes of activity not by modes of conscious
quality.” Gibson’s emphasis on action and the world caused his theory to be criticized
by classical cognitive science (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1981). Perhaps it is not surprising
that the embodied reaction to classical cognitive science has been accompanied by
a modern theory of perception that has descended from Gibson’s work: the enactive
approach to perception (Noë, 2004).
Enactive perception reacts against the traditional view that perception is constructing
internal representations of the external world. Enactive perception argues
instead that the role of perception is to access information in the world when it is
needed. That is, perception is not a representational process, but is instead a sensorimotor
skill (Noë, 2004). “Perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something
that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do” (p. 1).
Action plays multiple central roles in the theory of enactive perception
(Noë, 2004). First, the purpose of perception is not viewed as building internal representations
of the world, but instead as controlling action on the world. Second,
and related to the importance of controlling action, our perceptual understanding
of objects is sensorimotor, much like Gibson’s (1979) notion of affordance. That is,
we obtain an understanding of the external world that is related to its changes in
appearance that would result by changing our position—by acting on an object,
or by moving to a new position. Third, perception is to be an intrinsically exploratory
process. As a result, we do not construct complete visual representations of the
world. Instead, perceptual objects are virtual—we have access to properties in the
world when needed, and only through action.
Our sense of the perceptual presence of the cat as a whole now does not require
us to be committed to the idea that we represent the whole cat in consciousness at
once. What it requires, rather, is that we take ourselves to have access, now, to the
whole cat. The cat, the tomato, the bottle, the detailed scene, all are present perceptually
in the sense that they are perceptually accessible to us. (Noë, 2004, p. 63)
Empirical support for the virtual presence of objects is provided by the phenomenon
of change blindness. Change blindness occurs when a visual change occurs in
plain sight of a viewer, but the viewer does not notice the change. For instance, in
one experiment (O’Regan et al., 2000), subjects inspect an image of a Paris street
scene. During this inspection, the colour of a car in the foreground of the image
changes, but a subject does not notice this change! Change blindness supports the
view that representations of the world are not constructed. “The upshot of this is
that all detail is present in experience not as represented, but rather as accessible”
(Noë, 2004, p. 193). Accessibility depends on action, and action also depends on
embodiment. “To perceive like us, it follows, you must have a body like ours” (p. 25).
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