BBS Call for Commentators A SENSORIMOTOR ACCOUNT OF VISION AND VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Mon May 7 17:22:58 EDT 2001

        Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article

          [Please note that this paper was in fact 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 at 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 Exprimentale
Centre National de Recherche Scientifique,
Universit Ren Descartes,
92774 Boulogne Billancourt, France
oregan at ext.jussieu.fr
http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr

Alva Noe
Department of Philosophy
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
anoe at 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.

_______________________________________________________________________

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(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
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(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
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