Michael Beaton

Learning to perceive in the sensorimotor approach: Piaget’s theory of equilibration interpreted dynamically

Learning to perceive is faced with a classical paradox: if understanding is required for perception, how can we learn to perceive something new, something we do not yet understand? According to the sensorimotor approach, perception involves mastery of regular sensorimotor co-variations that depend on the agent and the environment, also known as the “laws” of sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs). In this sense, perception involves enacting relevant sensorimotor skills in each situation. It is important for this proposal that such skills can be learned and refined with experience and yet up to this date, the sensorimotor approach has had no explicit theory of perceptual learning. The situation is made more complex if we acknowledge the open-ended nature of human learning. In this paper we propose Piaget’s theory of equilibration as a potential candidate to fulfill this role. This theory highlights the importance of intrinsic sensorimotor norms, in terms of the closure of sensorimotor schemes. It also explains how the equilibration of a sensorimotor organization faced with novelty or breakdowns proceeds by re-shaping pre-existing structures in coupling with dynamical regularities of the world. This way learning to perceive is guided by the equilibration of emerging forms of skillful coping with the world. We demonstrate the compatibility between Piaget’s theory and the sensorimotor approach by providing a dynamical formalization of equilibration to give an explicit micro-genetic account of sensorimotor learning and, by extension, of how we learn to perceive. This allows us to draw important lessons in the form of general principles for open-ended sensorimotor learning, including the need for an intrinsic normative evaluation by the agent itself. We also explore implications of our micro-genetic account at the personal level.

Learning to Perceive What We Do Not Yet Understand: Letting the World Guide Us

This chapter aims to defend the thesis that we can only perceive what we understand. Such a theory would seem to be unable to account for our learning to perceive what we do not yet understand. To address this objection, the paper presents a non-representationalist, direct realist theory of perception. In this, the sensorimotor theory of Noe and O’Regan plays a crucial role (although one important modification to the interpretation of that theory is proposed). The result is an account of how we are in contact with the world itself during perceptual experi- ence; and this leads to an account of how the world itself guides our understanding, as we move from non-sense to sense.