Abstract
Traditionally, the “Imagery Debate” has opposed two main camps: depictivism and descriptivism. This debate has essentially focused on the nature of the internal representations thought to be involved in imagery, without addressing at all the question of action. More recently, a third, “embodied” view is moving the debate into a new phase. The embodied approach focuses on the interdependence of perception, cognition and action, and in its more radical line this approach promotes the idea that perception is not a process involving internal world-models (representations). The anti-representationalist version of the embodied paradigm covers, among others that we shall not discuss here, two quite different positions, namely the enactive approach and sensorimotor theory. Up to now these two anti-representationalist accounts have generally been confounded. In this paper we will argue that despite some important commonalities, enactive and sensorimotor accounts come with distinctive theoretical traits with regard to their approach to imagery. These become manifest when critically examining the role they assign to sensorimotor engagements with the world. We shall argue that enactive and sensorimotor approaches are different in their understanding of the role of embodied action, and these different notions of embodiment lead to different explanatory accounts of perception and imagery. We propose that, due to existing ambiguities in enactivism, the sensorimotor theory is a better framework for a skill-based approach to imagery.
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Notes
We skip a discussion of other anti-representationalist approaches, such as Gibsonian ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory and bahaviour-based artificial intelligence, because they go beyond the scope of the present paper.
One more caveat: although one may be under the impression that imagery and imagination refer to the same mental phenomenon, or that imagery is a subtype of imagination, the link between the two is an open issue. Some (for example White 1990) have stressed their differences, basing their argument on the fact that various mental processes, such as memories, hallucinations, dreams, imagistic beliefs, involve imagery without involving imagination, and that whereas in imagery a subject has minimal control, imagination is under voluntary control. Though we acknowledge the relevance of the topic, it lies beyond the scope of the present paper to discuss the link and differences between the notions of mental imagery and imagination (we refer to Kind 2001 for a thoughtful investigation).
It should be noted that the present-day version of the theory includes reference to oculomotor activity (saccades, fixations and eye scanpaths) as being necessary and functional to the build-up of a depictive image (Mast and Kosslyn 2002), and accommodates a conceptual framework where mental imagery is regarded as a simulation of perceptual behavior (Moulton and Kosslyn 2009).
Alva Noë in his 2004 single-authored book adopts an « enactive » approach and specifies that perception is enactive in that it is constituted by sensorimotor knowledge, namely, practical grasp of the way sensory stimulation changes as a function of movement. What he calls « enactive » approach here is no more and no less than the sensorimotor contingency theory. He borrows the term from Varela et al. (1991), but rightly acknowledges that he may not use it in exactly the same way (see p. 233).
Boundary extension is an instance of false memory, whereby people report having seen parts of a scene that fall outside a picture’s boundaries. For example, when asked to draw from memory a previously displayed picture, people report not only what was actually contained in it, but tend to include details as if the picture had been taken from farther away, thus including more parts of a given object. These ‘errors’ in boundary judgment actually display a very good prediction of how the world really is, and the rapidity and spontaneity with which they occur suggest that sensory information processing embodies spatial expectations resulting from viewpoint shifts.
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The authors acknowledge the support of Advanced grant ERC FEEL number 323674. The Authors also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Foglia, L., O’Regan, J.K. A New Imagery Debate: Enactive and Sensorimotor Accounts. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 181–196 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0269-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0269-9