J Scott Jordan | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Spatial perception and control.

We investigated whether the perceived vanishing point of a moving stimulus becomes more accurate as one's degree of control over the stimulus increases. Either alone or as a member of a pair, participants controlled the progression of a dot stimulus back and forth across a computer monitor. They did so via right and left buttonpresses that incremented the dot's velocity rightward and leftward, respectively. The participants in the individual condition had control of both buttons. Those in the group condition had control of only one. As the participants slowed the dot to change its direction of travel, it unexpectedly disappeared. Localizations of the vanishing point became more accurate as the participants' control over the dot increased. The data bridge a gap between accounts of localization error that rely solely on stimulus and cognitive factors, and accounts derived from research on action and spatial perception, which tend to rely on action-planning factors.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Emergence of self and other in perception and action: an event-control approach.

The present paper analyzes the regularities referred to via the concept 'self.' This is important, for cognitive science traditionally models the self as a cognitive mediator between perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs. This leads to the assertion that the self causes action. Recent findings in social psychology indicate this is not the case and, as a consequence, certain cognitive scientists model the self as being epiphenomenal. In contrast, the present paper proposes an alternative approach (i.e., the event-control approach) that is based on recently discovered regularities between perception and action. Specifically, these regularities indicate that perception and action planning utilize common neural resources. This leads to a coupling of perception, planning, and action in which the first two constitute aspects of a single system (i.e., the distal-event system) that is able to pre-specify and detect distal events. This distal-event system is then coupled with action (i.e., effector-control systems) in a constraining, as opposed to 'causal' manner. This model has implications for how we conceptualize the manner in which one infers the intentions of another, anticipates the intentions of another, and possibly even experiences another. In conclusion, it is argued that it may be possible to map the concept 'self' onto the regularities referred to in the event-control model, not in order to reify 'the self' as a causal mechanism, but to demonstrate its status as a useful concept that refers to regularities that are part of the natural order.

Awareness↗