J. Scott Jordan

Learned patterns of action-effect anticipation contribute to the spatial displacement of continuously moving stimuli.

When participants control the horizontal movements of a stimulus and indicate its vanishing point after it unexpectedly vanishes, the perceived vanishing point is displaced beyond the actual vanishing point, and the size of the displacement is directly related to the action-effect anticipation one has to generate to successfully control the stimulus. The present experiments examined whether learning a pattern of action-effect anticipation would later impact ones perception of moving stimuli. While 1 participant (the controller) controlled a dots movements across a computer screen, another (the observer), who could neither see nor hear the controller, watched the dots movements on a separate monitor. When the dot unexpectedly vanished, the observer indicated the vanishing point. After 40 trials, participants switched roles. While serving as observers, all participants generated forward displacements, but those who did so after acquiring control experience produced larger displacement. Subsequent experiments indicated the larger displacement was due to action-effect anticipation the participants learned while either controlling the dot or observing another do so.

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.

False Memory in a Short-Term Memory Task

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) paradigm reliably elicits false memories for critical nonpresented words in recognition tasks. The present studies used a Sternberg (1966) task with DRM lists to determine whether false memories occur in short-term memory tasks and to assess the contribution of latency data in the measurement of false memories. Subjects studied three, five, or seven items from DRM lists and responded to a single probe (studied or nonstudied). In both experiments, critical lures were falsely recognized more often than nonpresented weak associates. Latency data indicated that correct rejections of critical lures were slower than correct rejections of weakly related items at all set sizes. False alarms to critical lures were slower than hits to list items. Latency data can distinguish veridical and false memories in a short-term memory task. Results are discussed in terms of activation-monitoring models of false memory.

Embodied anticipation: A neurodevelopmental interpretation.

This article proposes an approach to the brains role in communication that treats the brain as the vehicle of a multi-scale embodiment of anticipation. Instead of conceptualizing anticipation as something a brain is able to do when circumstances seem to require it, this study proposes that anticipation is continuous and ongoing because to anticipate is an inherent design characteristic of the brain. Correspondingly, there is no anticipation module in the brain, and no focal lesion selectively abolishes the brains propensity to anticipate. Anticipation is a wager based on previous experience. It readies a response to an event that has yet to occur. First, the anticipation is “embrained” in terms of covert neural representations, and then it is embodied in terms of rudiments of the embrained actions and expressions of feeling. This study applies this concept to conversation and shows that nested anticipations precede the dynamics of the actual encounter and continue at each turn as long as the conversation lasts.

Recasting Dewey’s critique of the reflex-arc concept via a theory of anticipatory consciousness: implications for theories of perception

Abstract Dewey (1896) claimed that the word stimulus, if it is to be used in descriptions of organism–environment coordinations at all, should be used to refer, not to environmental events, but rather, to that aspect of the coordination specifying the state of affairs the coordination is striving to maintain. The present paper recasts Dewey’s critique by claiming that this specifying aspect of the coordination resides within a continuously generated, anticipatory body-in-the-environment “feel” that is not the result of afference. This theory of anticipatory consciousness is based primarily upon a synthesis of (1) Vandervert’s (1995) neuropositivistic integration of Lotka’s (1945) theoretical arguments regarding the prey-predator scenario, and Melzack’s (1992) empirical work on phantom limbs, and (2) research on a recently reported perceptual phenomenon known as the Phantom Array ( Hershberger, 1987 ), the existence of which supports the theory of anticipatory consciousness. This recasting of Dewey’s coordination-specifying “stimulus” is then used to reveal conceptual inadequacies that arise within representationalist theories of perception, for such theories tend to ignore Dewey’s critique and theorize perception to be a response to environmental stimuli. Such theorizing leads to the following inappropriate conclusions: (1) perception lags behind the world, (2) the perceiver’s view of the world is inherently inaccurate and incomplete, and (3) their exists a “physical” world of which we experience but appearances. The presented theory of anticipatory consciousness reveals that (1) the sequencing of perception is determined more by the control of body–environment relationships than by the moment of information transduction (i.e., transfer delays), (2) perceptual accuracy should be measured in terms of sensory-motor success versus the degree of correspondence between mental representations and the material world, and (3) the “objects” found in the world beyond the organism are not ontological, a priori “givens” in need of representation prior to entering phenomenology, but rather, are invariant thermodynamic “information structures” that find themselves “realized” within an organism’s field of control. Based on these arguments, it is then concluded that it is the material world, not perception, which qualifies as inference, and J. J. Gibson’s theory of direct perception, which does not demand the inference of a “material” world is, thus, the more parsimonious.

Wild agency: nested intentionalities in cognitive neuroscience and archaeology

The present paper addresses the tensions between internalist and radical-interactionist approaches to cognitive neuroscience, and the conflicting conclusions these positions lead to as regards the issue of whether archaeological artefacts constitute ‘results’ or ‘components’ of cognition. Wild systems theory (WST) and the notion of wild agency are presented as a potential resolution. Specifically, WST conceptualizes organisms (i.e. wild agents) as open, multi-scale self-sustaining systems. It is thus able to address the causal properties of wild systems in a manner that is consistent with radical-interactionist concerns regarding multi-scale contingent interactions. Furthermore, by conceptualizing wild agents as self-sustaining embodiments of the persistent, multi-scale contexts that afforded their emergence and in which they sustain themselves, WST is able to address the semantic properties of wild agents in a way that acknowledges the internalist concerns regarding meaningful (i.e. semantic) internal states (i.e. causal content). In conclusion, WST agrees with radical interactionism and asserts that archaeological artefacts constitute components of cognition. In addition, given its ability to resolve tensions between the internalist and the radical interactionist approaches to cognition, WST is presented as potentially integrative for cognitive science in general.

Projection and Anticipation: The Forward-Looking Nature of Embodied Communication

Like other animals, human beings possess an uncanny ability to coordinate their actions with those of others: Human beings shift posture together, take turns at talk without delay or overlap, and sometimes complete sentences in unison. Researchers who study interaction under the microscope have long been fascinated by phenomena such as behavioral synchrony, entrainment, and choral speaking. Such researchers represent a diverse array of disciplines. As a result, conceptual schemes and research methodologies have evolved that are, likewise, rather diverse.

Visual Direction Constancy: Perceiving the Visual Direction of Perisaccadic Flashes

Publisher Summary This chapter is concerned with the perceptual phenomenon known as visual direction constancy, particularly as it relates to saccadic movements of the eyes. It begins with the analysis of the visual perception of direction, conducted with a view to identifying the role that the oculomotor system must play in the constancy of visual direction. The chapter attempts to show how all three of these paradoxes may be resolved parsimoniously on the basis of a single coherent theoretical account. This theoretical account involves an elaboration of a pair of hypotheses advanced earlier as adjuncts to a theoretical model of the saccadic oculomotor system. The chapter illustrates that Robinsons closed-loop model controls eye orientation and utilizes two separate indices of the variable being controlled: a reference signal and a feedback signal. The chapter also explores that saccadic eye movements depend upon both neural copies whereas psychophysical judgments of visual direction depend only upon the afference copy. The hypothesis is called the sum-of- errors hypothesis, for reasons addressed in the chapter.

Forward-looking aspects of perception-action coupling as a basis for embodied communication.

Recent research on perception–action coupling indicates the following: (a) Actions are planned in terms of the distal effects they are to produce and, (b) planning and perception share common neural resources. An immediate implication of such dual functionality is that perception entails forward-looking (i.e., intentional) content. This article presents research that indicates that this anticipatory aspect of perception–action coupling contextualizes the perceptual space of an individual. Further research indicates this anticipation-laden, effect-relative (vs. effector-relative) context is a medium that affords cooperative actions among multiple agents. Developing such intentional contexts, however, requires that both individuals and groups have access to the spatiotemporal relations between actions and their effects. For individuals acting alone, knowledge about action–effect relations can be internal because the effectors generating the effects belong to 1 agent. For groups acting cooperatively, however, action options are distributed across different agents. Thus, action–effect information must be externalized. The article concludes with a discussion regarding the extent to which this externalized aspect of cooperative group action constitutes a rudimentary, yet fundamental, basis for embodied communication.

Visualizing the perisaccadic shift of spatiotopic coordinates

A point light source flickering on and off during a horizontal saccade projects a horizontal array onto the retina. The apparent visual direction of the tail end of the perceived (phantom) array reflects the amount of perisaccadic shift of spatiotopic coordinates that has been completed by the end of the saccade. Four men, saccading 8° to the right across a flashing light, judged the horizontal visual direction of the left (tail) end of the phantom array relative to the left end of a standard 8° array that had projected an image onto the retina before the saccade began. On average, the left ends appeared to be aligned when the last flash in the phantom array was imaged on the retina 7.4° to the right of the image of the left end of the standard array. This result implies that the shift of spatiotopic coordinates is virtually complete by the end of the saccade.