BBS Call for Commentators: VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article [Please note that this paper was accepted and archived to the web in October 2000 but the recent move of BBS to New York delayed the Call until now.] A SENSORIMOTOR ACCOUNT OF VISION AND VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS by J. Kevin O'Regan Alva Noe http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/ORegan/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 8000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _____________________________________________________________ A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness J. Kevin O'Regan Laboratoire de Psychologie Expirimentale Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Universiti Reni Descartes, 92774 Boulogne Billancourt, France oregan(a)ext.jussieu.fr http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr Alva Noe Department of Philosophy University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 anoe(a)cats.ucsc.edu http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/anoe/ KEYWORDS: Sensation, Perception, Action, Consciousness, Experience, Qualia, Sensorimotor, Vision, Change blindness 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 the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual "filling in", visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/ORegan/ ___________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the potential research impact of their findings. Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away research literature. There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature, for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research papers in them. Please see: http://www.eprints.org http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone, forever. Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!).