Two very fundamental aspects of phenomenal experiences underline the fact that they seem to have "something it's like." One aspect is the fact that experiences have a locus: they Can seem "external" ...(perceptual), "internal" (interoceptive, bodily or emotional) or "mental." A second fundamental aspect is the imposingness of experiences. They can seem "present" to us in different ways, sometimes seeming displayed before us with "spatio-temporal presence." Both these aspects of "what it's like" can be identified with the degree to which we can voluntarily control what we are doing when we engage in an experience. The external/internal/mental dimension is determined by how our voluntary bodily actions can influence the sensorimotor flow of information. The degree of imposingness of experiences and their "spatio-temporal presence" Is determined by how our voluntary actions are impeded or assisted by innate, attention-grabbing mechanisms. By elucidating these two most fundamental aspects of "what it's like," and taken together with prior work on inter- and intra-modal differences in experiences, this article suggests a path toward a scientific theory of the "hard problem" of phenomenal consciousness, explaining why experiences feel like something rather than feeling like nothing.
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.
Millions of Internet users around the world challenged science by asking why a certain photo of a dress led different observers to have surprisingly different judgments about the color of the dress. ...The reason this particular photo produces so diverse a variety of judgments presumably is that the photo allows a variety of interpretations about the illumination of the dress. The most obvious explanation from color science should be that observers have different implicit assumptions about the illumination in the photo. We show that the perceived color of the dress is negatively correlated with the assumed illumination along the daylight locus. Moreover, by manipulating the observers' assumptions prior to seeing the photo, we can steer how observers will see the colors of the dress. These findings confirm the idea that the perceived colors of the dress depend on the assumptions about the illumination. The phenomenon illustrates the power of unconscious inferences and implicit assumptions in perception.
Display omitted
•A relationship between individual differences in #theDress and colour constancy.•Different kinds of individual differences in the perception of surface properties.•A simple and ...reliable method to measure the continuous perception of #theDress.
This study investigates systematic individual differences in the way observers perceive different kinds of surface properties and their relationship to the dress, which shows striking individual differences in colour perception. We tested whether these individual differences have a common source, namely differences in perceptual strategies according to which observers attribute features in two-dimensional images to surfaces or to their illumination. First, we reanalysed data from two previous experiments on the dress and colour constancy. The comparison of the two experiments revealed that the colour perception of the dress is strongly related to individual differences in colour constancy. Second, two online surveys measured individual differences in the perception of colour-ambiguous images including the dress, in colour constancy, in gloss perception, in the subjective grey-point, in colour naming, and in the perception of an image with ambiguous shading. The results of the surveys replicated and extended previous findings according to which individual differences in the colour perception of the dress are due to implicit assumptions about the illumination. However, results also showed that the individual differences for other phenomena were independent of the dress and of each other. Overall, these results suggest that the striking individual differences in dress colour perception are due to individual differences in the interpretation of illumination cues to achieve colour constancy. At the same time, they undermine the idea of an overall perceptual strategy that encompasses other phenomena more generally related to the interpretation of illumination and surface properties.
Know Your Body Through Intrinsic Goals Mannella, Francesco; Santucci, Vieri G; Somogyi, Eszter ...
Frontiers in neurorobotics,
07/2018, Letnik:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The first "object" that newborn children play with is their own body. This activity allows them to autonomously form a sensorimotor map of their own body and a repertoire of actions supporting future ...cognitive and motor development. Here we propose the theoretical hypothesis, operationalized as a computational model, that this acquisition of body knowledge is not guided by random motor-babbling, but rather by autonomously generated goals formed on the basis of intrinsic motivations. Motor exploration leads the agent to discover and form representations of the possible sensory events it can cause with its own actions. When the agent realizes the possibility of improving the competence to re-activate those representations, it is intrinsically motivated to select and pursue them as goals. The model is based on four components: (1) a self-organizing neural network, modulated by competence-based intrinsic motivations, that acquires abstract representations of experienced sensory (touch) changes; (2) a selector that selects the goal to pursue, and the motor resources to train to pursue it, on the basis of competence improvement; (3) an echo-state neural network that controls and learns, through goal-accomplishment and competence, the agent's motor skills; (4) a predictor of the accomplishment of the selected goals generating the competence-based intrinsic motivation signals. The model is tested as the controller of a simulated simple planar robot composed of a torso and two kinematic 3-DoF 2D arms. The robot explores its body covered by touch sensors by moving its arms. The results, which might be used to guide future empirical experiments, show how the system converges to goals and motor skills allowing it to touch the different parts of own body and how the morphology of the body affects the formed goals. The convergence is strongly dependent on competence-based intrinsic motivations affecting not only skill learning and the selection of formed goals, but also the formation of the goal representations themselves.
Developmental psychology experiments on tool use show that infants' capacity to use a rake-like tool to retrieve a toy arises quite suddenly around 18 months. We use a developmental-robotics model to ...propose and test two alternative hypotheses to explain this conundrum. Both hypotheses rely on the assumptions that tool use involves goal-directed behavior processes guided by the goal of retrieving the toy, and that "understanding how to use a tool" means acquiring the capacity to assemble a sequence of actions to accomplish the goal (e.g., to "hook" and then "retrieve" the toy). The first hypothesis is that the tool-use ability emerges when the infant develops enough planning capabilities. The second hypothesis is that the ability emerges when the infant's intrinsic motivation system develops and makes playing with a couple of objects interesting enough so that the infant plays with objects similar to the tool at home and thus acquires the actions needed to retrieve the toy in the lab. These hypotheses are tested through a neural-network architecture controlling a simulated humanoid robot tested with the tool-rake task. Given the assumptions made in the model, the results show that both hypotheses can reproduce the average behavior of infants but only the intrinsic-motivation hypothesis can reproduce the sudden tool-use improvement.
Bio-mimetic approaches to restoring sensory function show great promise in that they rapidly produce perceptual experience, but have the disadvantage of being invasive. In contrast, sensory ...substitution approaches are non-invasive, but may lead to cognitive rather than perceptual experience. Here we introduce a new non-invasive approach that leads to fast and truly perceptual experience like bio-mimetic techniques. Instead of building on existing circuits at the neural level as done in bio-mimetics, we piggy-back on sensorimotor contingencies at the stimulus level. We convey head orientation to geomagnetic North, a reliable spatial relation not normally sensed by humans, by mimicking sensorimotor contingencies of distal sounds via head-related transfer functions. We demonstrate rapid and long-lasting integration into the perception of self-rotation. Short training with amplified or reduced rotation gain in the magnetic signal can expand or compress the perceived extent of vestibular self-rotation, even with the magnetic signal absent in the test. We argue that it is the reliability of the magnetic signal that allows vestibular spatial recalibration, and the coding scheme mimicking sensorimotor contingencies of distal sounds that permits fast integration. Hence we propose that contingency-mimetic feedback has great potential for creating sensory augmentation devices that achieve fast and genuinely perceptual experiences.
Doerig et al. evaluate how current empirical theories approach access consciousness, but they neglect how they approach phenomenal consciousness - probably because most theories don't deal with ...phenomenal consciousness at all. One exception is the sensorimotor theory, but Doerig et al. did not evaluate it as being directed to phenomenal consciousness.
The relationship between the sensory signal of the photoreceptors on one hand and color appearance and language on the other hand is completely unclear. A recent finding established a surprisingly ...accurate correlation between focal colors, unique hues, and so-called singularities in the laws governing how sensory signals for different surfaces change across illuminations. This article examines how this correlation with singularities depends on reflectances, illuminants, and cone sensitivities. Results show that this correlation holds for a large range of illuminants and for a large range of sensors, including sensors that are fundamentally different from human photoreceptors. In contrast, the spectral characteristics of the reflectance spectra turned out to be the key factor that determines the correlation between focal colors, unique hues, and sensory singularities. These findings suggest that the origins of color appearance and color language may be found in particular characteristics of the reflectance spectra that correspond to focal colors and unique hues.
PDF
