ARE THE SENSES SEPARATE? BBS Call for Commentary

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article. ON SPECIFICATION AND THE SENSES by Thomas A. Stoffregen and Benoit G. Bardy http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.stoffregen.html ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/bbs.stoffregen.html *** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS policies and address change at the bottom of this message) *** 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 by March 7th to: bbs(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk or write to: Behavioral and Brain Sciences ECS: New Zepler Building University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/ http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. 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. An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection with a WWW browser according to the instructions that follow after the abstract. _____________________________________________________________ ON SPECIFICATION AND THE SENSES Thomas A. Stoffregen Department of Psychology P. O. Box 210376 University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH 45221-0376 USA stoffrta(a)email.uc.edu Benoit G. Bardy Universite de Paris Sud-XI Division of Sport Sciences (STAPS) Batiment 335, 91405 Orsay Cedex FRANCE benoit.bardy(a)staps.u-psud.fr KEYWORDS: epistemology, information, intersensory, perception, perceptual learning, sensory neurophysiology, sensory systems, specification. ABSTRACT: In this target article we question the assumption that perception is divided into separate domains of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. We review implications of this assumption for theories of perception, and for our understanding of ambient energy arrays (e.g., the optic and acoustic arrays) that are available to perceptual systems. We analyze three hypotheses about relations between ambient arrays and physical reality; (1) that there is an ambiguous relation between ambient energy arrays and physical reality; (2) that there is a unique relation between individual energy arrays and physical reality; (3) that there is a redundant but unambiguous relation, within or across arrays, between energy arrays and physical reality. This is followed by a review of the physics of motion, focusing on the existence and status of referents for physical motion. Our review indicates that it is not possible, in principle, for there to be a unique relation between physical motion and the structure of individual energy arrays. We argue that physical motion relative to different referents is specified only in the global array, which consists of higher-order relations across different forms of energy. The existence of specificity in the global array is consistent with the idea of direct perception, and so poses a challenge to traditional, inference-based theories of perception and cognition. However, it also presents a challenge to much work within the ecological approach to perception and action, which has accepted the assumption of separate senses. ___________________________________________________________ To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide Web or by anonymous ftp from the US or UK BBS Archive. Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.stoffregen.html http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ ____________________________________________________________ *** FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS *** ------------------------------------------------------------------ (1) There have been some very important developments in the area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently. Please see: Science: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html Nature: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html American Scientist: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html Chronicle of Higher Education: http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone. --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically. Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive. Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the public BBS Archive: ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- (4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit papers to: Email: bbs(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk Web: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/ INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal 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!).